Kazakhstan: Where Horses Are Revered And Eaten
Story and Photographs by Ryan T. Bell
Out of respect for horses, Americans don’t eat them. Out of respect for their horses, Kazakhs do.
The yurt smelled of horse. Not in a way I was familiar with–like the nutty odor of a wet saddle pad, which makes me pine for a mountain trail. This eau de equino was the smell of cooked horse meat. And it wafted from a platter being passed in my direction.
This was my first encounter with Kazakhstan’s popular dish beshbarmak. It’s made of boiled horse meat, served on a bed of noodles. Under the light of a bulb strung from the yurt’s rafters (powered by a bank of solar panels outside), the boiled noodles glistened and the fatty meat sparkled. It looked slippery, giving me hope that I could choke it down without making a scene.
Out of respect for horses, Americans don’t eat them. Out of respect for their horses, Kazakhs do.
My hosts were a family of herdsmen living in the Altai Mountains, along the border with China. They were modern-day incarnations of the steppe nomads who domesticated the horse 6,000 years ago. As an American cowboy, I’ve always been curious about these cultural antecedents. Traveling to Kazakhstan felt like the journey of a salmon spawning upstream to his natal gravel bed. I did not realize that, upon arrival, my diet would be the very animal linking me to these people.
