now currently consumed in Iceland, and many horses are raised for this purpose. The culturally close people of Sweden still have an ambivalent attitude to horse meat, said to stem from this edict. Henry Mayhew describes the difference in the acceptability and use of the horse carcass between London and Paris in London Labour and the London Poor (1851). Horse meat was rejected by the British, but continued to be eaten in other European countries such as France and Germany, where knackers often sold horse carcasses despite the papal ban. Even the hunting of wild horses for meat continued in the area of Westphalia. Londoners also suspected that horse meat was finding its way into sausages and that offal sold as that of oxen was, in fact, equine. While no taboo on eating horse meat exists per se, it is generally considered by ethnic Russians to be a low-quality meat with poor taste, and it is rarely found in stores. It is popular among such historically nomadic peoples as the Tatars, Kyrgyz, and Kazakhs. Taboos In 732 AD, Pope Gregory III began a concerted effort to stop the ritual consumption of horse meat in pagan practice. In some countries, the effects of this prohibition by the Catholic Church have lingered, and horse meat prejudices have progressed from taboos to avoidance to abhorrence. In a study conducted by Fred Simoons, the avoidance of horse meat in American culture is less likely due to lingering feelings from Gregory's prohibition, but instead due to an unfamiliarity with the meat compared to more mainstream offerings. In other parts of the world, horse meat has the stigma of being something poor people eat and is seen as a cheap substitute for other meats, such as pork and beef. According to the anthropologist Marvin Harris, some cultures class horse meat as taboo because the horse converts grass into meat less efficiently than ruminants. Totemistic taboo is also a possible reason for refusal to eat horse meat as an everyday food, but did not necessarily preclude ritual slaughter and consumption. Roman sources state that the goddess Epona was widely worshipped in Gaul and southern Britain. Epona, a triple-aspect goddess, was the protectress of the horse and horse keepers, and horses were sacrificed to her; she was paralleled by the Irish Macha and Welsh Rhiannon. In The White Goddess, Robert Graves argued that the taboo among Britons and