every now and then... this kind of thing makes me reconsider vegetarianism. at the very least it's a good reminder to be sensible about meat choices.
I would argue that if you can't tell the difference between horse and beef in your lasagna, the choice of meat might not matter that much. I love chorizo. I made the mistake of reading the ingredients once. It's, like, pituitary glands and chile powder.
No meat is sacrosanct. It's all meat. What's really the difference between a horse and a cow? One is food just because and one isn't because of our relationship to the animal. It actually makes a lot of sense to eat dog. Dogs are economical to feed and of limited utility to certain cultures. Cat more so. Cats are useless. If this happened in India with cows there'd be riots in the streets but we basically torture cows and few people seem to care. I'm not going to eat my dog or start looking at the haunches of cats down at the pound to assess tenderness, but the death of one animal or another doesn't bother me too much. I watched Earthlings and was only disturbed once or twice. I'm committed to my vices in spite of being fully aware of the risks and reality of their horrors.
This is more of a supply issue than anything else, not a meat issue. This can happen to really any product. It might be an argument for raw food diets, where you can visibly see the product every time like peas and corn, and generally yes vegetarian/vegan diets will have more of these types of food in them, but sometimes even if it's not meat you have no idea. Like the one time I ordered loose leaf tea and ended up with a bag a quarter full of tobacco. I guess steeping tobacco doesn't get you nicotine because I didn't realize it until half way through the small bag. Then again, I might not have hit the tobacco yet, a large portion of it was definitely black tea.
If it was all tobacco you would have gotten sick. I tried to dye paper with tobacco and handling the mixture made me nauseous and I smoke a lot. I also filtered a cigarette out of a glass of whiskey and threw up immediately when I drank it. That last one probably doesn't count for much. I just rarely find myself in a situation where I want to admit doing that.
Girlfriend's dad once read that you could keep bugs off your plants with a tobacco tea spray. So he boiled a can of Skoal wintergreen in a pot of water and misted the apple tree. It was years before the tree bore fruit again... And the kitchen never smelled the same.
I don't know how much of it was, but I saw a decent amount of loose tobacco at the bottom of the bag and a smoked cigarette with chinese lettering on it. I think I mostly drank the real tea on the top and probably didn't even get to the tobacco. The company said they had a disgruntled employee that did it. They aren't in business anymore.