Trying to look up “pink slime” (lean meat separated via centrifuge) that’s in the news, I came upon this tidbit in Wiki:
FSIS(Food Safety and Inspection Service) issued a directive to its inspectors instructing them to ensure that spinal cord tissue was removed from bones before the AMR (Advanced meat recovery) process.
So what’s the problem with spinal cord? Don’t they appear in various large chops, ribs, etc.?
I know the spinal “vein” is also removed from lobster but not shrimp.
Is it toxic or bitter, or just taboo out of habit?
You don’t see much in the news any more about Mad Cow Disease. Has it sort of died down after all those entire herds they incinerated? Or just died down in the news after too much overhyped panic? Or just become a fact of life?
In the heyday of the Mad Cow Panic, I only saw a very few articles describing how Mad Cow victims suffer before they die. Apparently it’s gruesome to the max. If you ever get this, you really need to commit suicide as fast as you can, while you still can! (That is, if it’s not already too late.)
This is one of those cases where, ya’ know, Science (and regulations) really worked. It was determined that feeding ground up sheep to cows was a pretty bad idea, and the US didn’t permit it. That successfully kept the incidence of BSE to a tiny number of cases. Then, for extra protection, the USDA prohibited the introduction of bovine nervous system tissue into the human food supply, which has pretty successfully prevented vCJD in the US.
I recently read a pretty good book called The Family that Couldn’t Sleep, by D.T. Max. It’s about the discovery of the cause of prion diseases, including mad cow disease and the fatal familial insomnia referred to by the title. The author discusses the epidemic in Britain, and among the scariest things was his claim that it could have been much worse if the British population had had a different genetic makeup. He says the general population of Japan, for instance, would be much more susceptible to mad cow disease.
Also scary is the fact that it’s so hard to kill prions - you can’t make infected meat safe by cooking it or irradiating it, and you can’t remove prions from surgical tools using normal sterilization methods.
The weirdest thing is that prion diseases can be both inherited and infectious.
Well just to expand on this vCJD is an exceedingly rare disease. Wikipedia lists told cases at under 300 known cases. Oh, and total number of cases attributable to American beef? It’s 0. (Before anybody says it’s 3 if you look at the actual links although 3 people in the US have gotten the disease all 3 got it while they were living in either Europe or Saudia Arabia.) Actually if I remember correctly there has never been a case attributable to American, Canadian, Australian, or New Zealand beef. (Like I say, it’s a really rare disease. Worry more dying from e-coli in your spinach since that does happen on occasion.)
The likelihood of picking up some non-trivial bug from eating vegetables and fruit (let alone dairy products) is many orders of magnitude greater than the risk of contracting “Mad Cow Disease”.
Plus there’s nothing like a good burger (unless it’s a rare filet)!
Better than kuru. That just gives me the walking creeps.
Not that I want to eat grandma or anything, mind, but that a religious practice supposedly honoring your ancestors could go so completely pearshaped. Brrr.
Just to summarize what others have said. Sheep suffer from a prion disease called scrapie. Scrapie apparently does not infect humans. In England, they started feeding ground up and cooked remains of slaughtered sheep to cattle. It sounded good. Lots of protein and fats, cheap. It was unpredictable, but not only do the cattle catch the prion disease but they modify in some way that it becomes infectious to humans. So both cattle farmers in England (mainly) and some people who eat it become infected and soon die. The practice of feeding the sheep remains to cattle is banned and the disease disappears.
Since the prions are found mainly in the brains and spinal cord of the infected animals, a regulation was put in to ban the use of those. They are presumably unnecessary now.
Prions cannot be destroyed by temperatures below about 300 deg C.
The risks of prion diseases in food are low in part because we did worry about them. Had we not done so, the risk would probably have increased significantly (feeding the affected tissues back to other animals is a feedback loop that could easily amplify the risk really fast)