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An Auckland bakery's horse meat pies have been going down well with customers, but some people don't like the idea.

An Auckland bakery's horse meat pies have been going down well with customers, but some people don't like the idea.

Lunch bar Eighty8's lo'i hoosi (horse meat) pies have been proving popular in Auckland and Hamilton, but some members of the public are expressing discontent on social media.

Owner Kim Sok said there'd been customer demand for the pies since last year. Once they secured the horse meat from a registered supplier, sales had taken off, she said.

Although horse meat is popular among New Zealand's Tongan community, Sok said she understood people felt strongly about horses, and that it was a relatively new concept for some.

University of Auckland academic Sione Taufa told First Up lo'i hoosi, which can be looslely translated to horse cooked with coconut cream, originated after Europeans brought horses to Tonga in the 1700s.

They were used as work animals, but pragmatism saw them added to the food chain, Taufa said.

"Somehow it stuck throughout the years," he said. "And I think because other Pacific Island countries do not eat lo'i hoosi, or horse, we've sort of claimed it as our own and it's tied into what makes us unique."

Cultural norms linked with food were often influenced by necessity and availability, Taufa said.

"We are much more flexible in not putting a certain animal in a certain category, that we are able to, let's say, take a horse and be part of our diet."

Chef Al Brown told First Up he once served horse during a stint as chef at the New Zealand Embassy in Belgium.

He said he didn't know of any New Zealand restaurants offering horse meat now, but Kiwis were getting more adventurous with their tastes.

"We had duck tongues for a long time when we could get those. We have veal tongue on at the moment. We do pig's head croquettes. So we love the bits and pieces and the slightly unusual."

The changing culinary habits can be seen in Kiwis' fish consumption too. Fish species that were once seen as bait are now prized.

"When I used to go fishing as a kid with my father, he'd pick up two packets of B&H and a box of frozen trevally (bait) to go fishing."

Now when Brown takes clients out fishing, trevally is one of the top targets.

Amir Sayadabdi, a senior lecturer in anthropology at Victoria University of Wellington who specialises in food studies, said our idea of what's edible has been influenced by cultural, historical, economical and environmental factors as much as biological.

One theory on how animals are deemed to be fit or unfit for eating is about maintaining a society's natural order, Sayadabdi said.

"For example horses in some societies are closely associated with riding. They're associated with work, with status. So in that context, eating them feels like violating the animal's social category rather than just choosing a meat."

The second theory is focused on an animal's economic value, and suitability to the environment, such as pigs being a poor fit for the environment in the Middle East.

"So from this perspective, pig avoidance can be understood as a simply a sensible adaptation to local conditions, which may or may not get later wrapped in sacred or religious rules," Sayadabdi said.

Urbanisation had also created a clearer distinction between which are deemed as pets and livestock. The economic prosperity of a society and an abundance of animals also plays a role, he said.

But the decision to eat animals at all can involve a degree of mental gymnastics. Brock Bastian, a psychology professor at the University of Melbourne, calls this the meat paradox - the inner conflict of continuing to eat meat despite not being comfortable with the way the meat made it on the plate.

Bastian said one of the ways people got around that discomfort was to downplay the intelligence of the animals that end up on their plates.

"Most people probably don't see pigs as intelligent as dogs, and yet we know they probably are. So people tend to not want to think about those sorts of mind-based capabilities when thinking about their food."

Bastian said in the end though, it's not the animal's qualities or capabilities that leads to it being treated one way or another, but the relationship that we have with that animal ourselves.