“Despite all the new ‘healthy’ foods, the supermarket is an additive minefield, processors are consolidating rapidly, the farm belt is a disaster area, pesticides are out of control, and we reek with contradictions like everyone else. Later in my narrative, I will blame much of the present mess on the quasi-organized food establishment. But part of the failure stems from the counterculture’s original weaknesses: the druggy vagueness, the lack of follow-through, the new-convert insensitivity to ‘straight’ culture, the overestimation of our power and the underestimation of the establishment’s. Worst of all, we did not study our case clearly enough so that we’d have our facts straight at the family dinner table. When the inevitable questioning, skepticism, and ridicule came, we were unprepared. Removed from its supportive bohemian enclaves, the countercuisine was highly vulnerable to counterattack by the patriarchal powers who controlled — and still control — the nation’s food supply.”

“While the presence of undeclared meat was not a health issue, the [2013 horse meat] scandal revealed a major breakdown in the traceability of the food supply chain, and the risk that harmful ingredients could have been included as well. Sports horses, for example, could have entered the food supply chain, and with them the veterinary drug phenylbutazone which is banned in food animals.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_horse_meat_scandal

“At the siege of Alexandria [Aug. 17–Sept. 2, 1801, during the French Revolutionary Wars], the meat of young Arab horses relieved an epidemic of scurvy.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horse_meat