A New York chef planned to serve raw horse meat. It would have been a disaster—but not for the reason you think.

Horse meat is, in essence, an industrial byproduct, and eating it poses a hazard to public health

Photograph by Sean Gallup/Getty Images.

At Brooklyn’s Great GoogaMooga food festival last May, Hugue Dufour, the noted chef who’d co-founded the acclaimed M. Wells Diner, sold 5,000 grilled-cheese sandwiches that created quite a buzz among New York foodies. That’s because Dufour’s creation was stuffed with foie gras, pork fat, and—the rogue ingredient that titillated adventurous eaters—horse meat (mixed with pork to make bologna).

Last month, Dufour sought to capitalize on his food-festival fame by announcing that the reincarnation of his restaurant—M. Wells Dinette, now open in Queens at MoMA PS1—would serve horse tartare: raw horse meat. This time the reaction wasn’t so enthusiastic. Public opposition was widespread: People flooded the restaurant with calls, bombarded Dufour with emails, and amassed an outraged scroll of signatures on aChange.org petition demanding that Dufour drop the equine delicacy. Chastened, Dufour, who ate horse meat while training to be a chef in Canada, removed the item from the menu, judiciously noting in a statement from the restaurant that “scandalizing animal lovers is not what we want to be famous for. Read MORE...