Amsterdam Food Truck Serves Horse Burgers
Yes, you heard it right. Horse meat from retired race horses is now served by the My Little Pony Burger food truck, allied company of the Unwanted Animal Kitchen food truck in Amsterdam.
Back in 2011 the Unwanted Animal Kitchen truck was founded as part of a West Amsterdam urban art project. The kitchen servers typical Dutch food like croquettes, but then made from a variety of non-traditional meats like goose, deer, crow and now horse. It all began with goose. Since 2005 Amsterdam’s airport has had difficulties protecting planes from the large birds, so it licensed hunters to kill hundreds of them. The idea behind the food truck was to process the goose meat instead of throwing it away. So the entrepreneurs established relationships with the hunters and put geese on the menu.
The new My Little Pony Burger food truck maintains a similar idea about curbing food waste. The economic crisis made it quite expensive to have a horse in Holland so prices went down and a lot of the animals were sold to other European countries in order to be turned into sausages. Founder Rob Hagenouw wanted to do something about this and that’s why he started to sell meat from retired race horses as well.
Since eating horse meat is not the norm in the Netherlands, special dinner parties were held to bring hunters, chefs and eaters together to share their stories and learn about locally sourced food. Needless to say, the My Little Pony Burger food truck doesn’t sell ‘exotic’ meats to create a billion dollar industry, but to change the consumer’s perception of ‘the norm’, as well as to promote the idea of sustainability and conscientious farming.
