Singer Henk Westbroek praised the sausages of Wim van Beek in his column in De Pers yesterday. Van Beek was one of the last horse butchers of the Netherlands, and died last year. After a hiatus of three months, his son ewopened the business, and the man who is one of the founders of the 1980s Nederpop movement thinks the son’s sausages are as good as those of the father.

But there is a problem. According to Westbroek, the butcher only has a limited supply of horses. He only buys horses that are two year olds or younger, which usually are hobby horses with which the owner got bored. Nowadays, owners think it is “sad” that horses are killed for their meat, so they have the horses put to sleep (and presumably have the horses buried). And so the famous sausages of Van Beek in Utrecht are never on sale for long.

Update 12-3: the text of the column is now available in Dutch on Westbroek’s site.