At the Smithsonian’s Smart News blog, a fun post looking at historic debates in America’s science media about whether it’s okay to eat horse meat, with links to some Scientific American articles from the 1860s and 1870s.
One such article published in 1875, “Shall We Eat The Horse?,” argues that “in not utilizing horse flesh as food, we are throwing away a valuable and palatable meat, of which there is sufficient quantity largely to augment our existing aggregate food supply. Supposing that the horse came into use here as food, it can be easily shown that the absolute wealth in the country would thereby be materially increased.”
A decade later, SciAm published this piece screengrabbed above, on the shifting cultural norms that made eating horse totally not cool.