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I did a bunch of research (googling) back in the late 90's or 2000s when the mad cow disease outbreak first happened mainly in England. I thought it was pretty
by touchofevil 9y ago
I did a bunch of research (googling) back in the late 90's or 2000s when the mad cow disease outbreak first happened mainly in England. I thought it was pretty terrifying and I wanted to know what the hell was going on. I read about Kuru all the way back then and the take away was that people shouldn't eat the brain and nervous tissue of other people or Kuru could result. But also it seemed that mad cow disease was occurring because cows were being fed the ground up remains of other cows and that included cow brain and cow nervous tissue. So basically what was happening with cows was the same as what was happening with people getting Kuru.
I also recall learning that in order to get mad cow disease you would need to eat cow brain or cow nervous tissue. Of course, you would probably assume, as I did, that you are safe because you don't eat cow brains or nervous tissue. Well, you could be wrong about that. There is something called AMR (advanced meat recovery). As I understand it, when the meat processing plant removes the spine and skull from the cow there is still some meat stuck to the spine and skull. The AMR process entails blasting off that meat stuck to the spine and skull with some kind of high pressure for use in ground meat. But the result is that some nervous tissue from the cow can get mixed up in ground meat created with the AMR technique and that is one way that you could end up eating cow nervous tissue. After I did that research, I swore off ground meat.
- thinkmassive 9y agoA workaround for people who would like to eat ground meat but avoid this issue is to grind it yourself, or to buy steak and have the butcher grind it for you.
- metamet 9y agoOr purchase directly from a local farmer, where you can have an open dialogue about their meat raising and processing techniques. Farmers markets can be great for finding these relationships.
- kevinmchugh 9y agoPlus, your meat will be more freshly ground this way. More freshly ground meat is superior in almost every way: http://aht.seriouseats.com/archives/2011/04/the-burger-lab-whats-the-best-way-to-grind-beef.html http://aht.seriouseats.com/archives/2011/04/the-burger-lab-w...
- igivanov 9y agoProbably - if you are sure about how he processes his meat, the provenance of his cattle etc. But the probability of getting the disease is so small that I would rather pay more attention to safely crossing streets than worrying about it.
- jfroma 9y agoIn Argentina the meat should be grind in front of the customer by law and every butchery exposes a sign explaining this. Big chains are not exempt. But you can still buy frozen burguers for instance.
- hdhzy 9y agoNo-meat diet is not 100% prion-proof according to Wikipedia: > When researchers fed hamsters grass that grew on ground where a deer that died with chronic wasting disease (CWD) was buried, the hamsters became ill with CWD, suggesting that prions can bind to plants, which then take them up into the leaf and stem structure, where they can be eaten by herbivores, thus completing the cycle. It is thus possible that there is a progressively accumulating number of prions in the environment. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion
- dnautics 9y agoof course, you can still get CJD/kuru genetically, sporadically, from bone marrow transplants, etc. Also: fatal familial insomnia, but that is a dramatically different pathology and we don't know why it's different from CJD.
- adrianN 9y agoPrions are nature's grey goo.
- maxerickson 9y agoI would put bacteria in that role and call them green goo. One thing I find interesting is that gray goo would have to compete with bacteria for resources. I'm not sure that it would necessarily be easy.
- jcoffland 9y agoPrions are not alive and therefore do not need to compete for resources to further their existence.
- computerphage 9y agoIf "not alive" => "doesn't need resources", then "needs resources" => "alive". That doesn't seem right to me.
- Shivetya 9y agoAMR and such, is that our famous pink slime that became all the rage/outrage awhile back? To the point we have quite a few establishments making it well known they never used such products. industrialization did not do any favors towards animals, especially in regards to processing and such for food
- maxerickson 9y agoWhen indigenous peoples work to make use of all of an animal we call it respect. Do it in a factory and all of the sudden it is gross. There's pet foods that advertise on the TV that they don't contain any chicken byproduct meal. The horror of feeding a dog stuff it would be happy to eat.
- grzm 9y agomake use of all of an animal This does not imply eating the entire animal.
- maxerickson 9y agoWhat's your point? There's not actually any real problem with eating mechanically separated meat, it just makes for good TV to say that it isn't real food. For style points, make a show of how bad it is the week before doing an episode on pâté.
- grzm 9y agoYour inclusion of the statement regarding "mak[ing] use of all of an animal" is to show hypocrisy between respect for efficient use of animals by indigenous people and distaste for some industrial food processing practices. This is sloppy or disingenuous as they're different domains: one is efficient use of the animal for any purpose and the other is efficient use of the animal for food. Similarly here you bring up mechanically separated meat, and in the comment I responded to, chicken byproduct meal in pet food. These are all food production, which is different from making efficient use of all of an animal for any purpose. Editted to correct my confusing pâté and foie gras.
- justboxing 9y ago> The AMR process entails blasting off that meat stuck to the spine and skull with some kind of high pressure for use in ground meat. This is true. A while back, I read stories of how (Mostly low-wage Mexican) Workers at Meat Plants were getting a strange neurological disease that confounded their doctors. The cause was then traced to them inhaling the aerosol of the Animals' brains being blown out, mostly Pigs. Related News / Source: - The Spam Factory's Dirty Secret => http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/06/hormel-spam-pig-brains-disease http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/06/hormel-spam-pig-... - Vaporized Pig Brains Are Torturing Austin's Migrant Meatpackers => http://www.citypages.com/news/book-vaporized-pig-brains-are-torturing-austins-migrant-meatpackers-6544422 http://www.citypages.com/news/book-vaporized-pig-brains-are-...
- touchofevil 9y agoThat's really scary. I hadn't heard about it affecting slaughterhouse workers, but that totally makes sense. I hope the slaughterhouses will stop these sorts of AMR practices.
- wnevets 9y ago>I hope the slaughterhouses will stop these sorts of AMR practices good luck with that
- Clownshoesms 9y agoHere I am teetering on the edge of vegetarianism, and people are talking about blowing meat chunks off spines to extract that last bit of cash, and workers inhaling aerosolized pig brains. Might be the push I needed!
- mrits 9y agoMe too. But then I think about beef fajitas.
- venture_lol 9y agoJust stick to honest to earth filet mignon
- sbilstein 9y ago"Beef brains and veal (juvenile beef) or calf's brains are used in the cuisines of France; Italy; Spain; El Salvador; Mexico, etc. where they are called sesos in Spanish and are eaten in tacos and quesadillas; Pakistan, where they are known in Urdu as Maghaz; Portugal; Indonesia; and in the United States, especially in St. Louis, Missouri, and the Ohio River valley." People do eat cow brains...I have at regular ol' restaurants in the USA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beef_brain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beef_brain
- ekianjo 9y agoThis is true in France, but the practice of doing so is decreasing and considered "old fashioned" especially after CWD.
- ronjouch 9y agoYup, it's called "tête de veau" ("veal head"), https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C3%AAte_de_veau https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C3%AAte_de_veau
- LordKano 9y agoWhen I was a kid my great-grandmother used to occasionally make and eat calf's brains. I was never willing to even consider trying it.
- hfsktr 9y agoPork as well (unless I am misunderstanding the entry). My mom said that her grandmother would often make them Head Cheese[0] (before she learned what it was). I am happy to never have had that experience. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_cheese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_cheese
- cat199 9y agoAs I understand it the biggest thing with mad-cow was not so much eating cow brains itself, but that these cows were also fed meal containing beef nervous tissue.. So, from an uninformed opinion, it could be that the disease develops or builds more rapidly in cases of 'cannibalism' (e.g. humans eating human as here, cow eating cow as in UK, etc), and then once developed can spread more easily across species.. side note: Having lived >6mo in the UK during a certain period of time, I'm ineligible to be a blood donor in the USA to this day due to the mad-cow outbreak.
- literallycancer 9y agoThe Wikipedia article on Kuru mentions some people developing immunity to it in the most affected areas. Very interesting. In 2009, researchers at the Medical Research Council discovered a naturally occurring variant of a prion protein in a population from Papua New Guinea that confers strong resistance to kuru. In the study, which began in 1996,[21] researchers assessed over 3,000 people from the affected and surrounding Eastern Highland populations, and identified a variation in the prion protein G127.[22] G127 polymorphism is the result of a missense mutation, and is highly geographically restricted to regions where the kuru epidemic was the most widespread. Researchers believe that the PrnP variant occurred very recently, estimating that the most recent common ancestor lived 10 generations ago.[22][23] Of the discovery, Professor John Collinge, director of the MRC’s Prion Unit at University College London, has stated that: It's absolutely fascinating to see Darwinian principles at work here. This community of people has developed their own biologically unique response to a truly terrible epidemic. The fact that this genetic evolution has happened in a matter of decades is remarkable. — John Collinge, Medical Research Council The findings of the study could help researchers better understand and develop treatments for other related prion diseases, such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease[21] and Alzheimer’s disease.[24]
- areyousure 9y ago> I did a bunch of research (googling) back in the late 90's or 2000s when the mad cow disease outbreak first happened mainly in England. This is not directly related to the main thrust of your comment, but I thought it was interesting that more than 80% of the BCE cases in England occurred in the years 1990--1995, when Google did not exist in any form. Only 6--7% of the BCE cases in England occurred after google.com was registered.