Happy
Holiday Meals
Europe is not facing a Happy Christmas. The traditional holiday meal might
be missing a few trappings.
One reason for this is that mad cow disease, once thought to confined to
the UK, has been found in France, Germany and Spain. Beef sales in France
and Germany are off 50%.
Consumers who have flocked to fish have found that choice not much better
than meat. Experts from the Scientific Committee for Food reports that both
fish from fish farms and the sea have unacceptable levels of toxins.
Dioxins are higher in carnivore fish, such as salmon, eel, and trout, than
in herbivores such as cod, fish sticks, and oysters.
Fish oil and fish meal are also contaminated. Fish oil is a good source of
vitamin E, a popular anti-oxidant. Experts fear that people who consumer
fish 4-5 a week or drink large quantities of cod liver oil could develop
fatty fish heart, a condition that can lead to the development of scales on
the lower back and abdomen.
Health experts fear a cross-over effect as fish meal is regularly used in
the diet of chickens and pigs. For some time consumers have complained that
the other white meats tasted “fishy.” Autopsies on pigs from The Hague
slaughterhouse indicate that 4 out of every 10 pigs had fatty fish hearts
that allowed the pigs to stay under their regular meal of watery slop for
hours.
Chickens have not fared much better. Reports from Warsaw, Poland suggest
that hens are frequently laying fish eggs. So pervasive is this occurrence
that the Polish Poultry Association has been marketing these eggs as
Polish caviar, which is apparently selling well in Moscow and Kiev.
Europe produces 500,000 tons of fish meal a year and is reluctant to give
up the pork and poultry markets. Fish meal producers have experimented with
adding the product to hamburger helper, pet food, and certain French
dishes. While consumers are yet to complain, reports from finicky pets have
skyrocketed.
There is some evidence that passing fish meal through the multiple stomachs
of cows can render harmless the effects of dioxins. The fertilizer produced
is fed to chickens and pigs. No negative effects have been reported except
that the white meat harvested has a slightly beefy taste.
No Christmas lament is louder that that uttered by German consumers looking
for delicate holiday sausage. German sausage is a very big deal and is
filled with enough by-products to start a trade war. Germany claims to
produce more than 1,500 kinds of sausage, including zwiebelmettwurst
(onion, beef and pork), schinkenknacker( smoked pork, beef, and beet
extracts), knickerknackerknicker(beef, pork, and animal droppings),and
kalbsleberwurst(cobbled calf liver, pig snout, and stable straw),
With the average German consuming 200 pounds of sausage a year (washed down
with hundreds of liters of wheat beer), the mad cow scare is very
unsettling. Betting establishments are taking odds on what sausage is most
likely to affect humans. At 100 to 1, meaning very good odds, is nurmberger
wursten, a white meat that is actually crushed and bleached chicken wings.
At the high end of the risk scale is bockwurst, a most popular dish, which
contains beef brains, spine scrapings, and a touch of thymus.
Germans, who have been understandably proud of their rich sausage history,
apparently have never bothered to look closely at the ingredients that make
up this delicacy. Bild, the nation’s largest tabloid, sent a reporter into
slaughterhouses in Berlin, Hamburg, and Heidelberg. He reported that German
slaughterhouses are very efficient killing machines. Nothing, absolutely
nothing is wasted, from cattle ears to tails to hangnails. And everything
ends up, one way or the other, in a specialty sausage.
The stampede to Christmas chicken and turkey has already begun. Now German
authorities are concerned that the hundreds of millions of tons of unsold
sausage will find their way into the black market. Ethicists are debating
whether it is appropriate to send potentially harmful meat to Third World
countries in the form of food assistance. Meat exporters have decried the
mass hysteria that has griped Germany. The Burundi Beef Council has
welcomed all contributions, stating how can the meat from a sacred animal
be dangerous.
The annual sausage feast held on Christmas Eve in many German households
will likely be a casualty of the mad cow scare. But entrepreneurs are
already finding other uses for sausage. One Berliner has freeze-dried
sausages and handpainted on them Nativity scenes. He claims they make ideal
Christmas ornaments. More ominously, the same sausages are being used as
weapons by skinheads against immigrant minorities, especially in the former
East Germany.
No one doubts Germany’s ability to bring the mad cow threat to heel. Unlike
Britain which slaughtered hundreds of thousands of cows, German scientists
have found a more efficient method of detection. Two Bonn researchers have
developed a test that will detect cattle most likely to carry the disease.
Early indications are that color of eyes and body hair, height at the
shoulder, and whiteness of the milk can be very useful screens. Starting
immediately cattle will be inspected enroute to the slaughterhouse and
those that don’t measure up will be culled.
Authorities hope that the early detection system will instill confidence in
consumers about the purity of the beef and sausage products. Promised
Chancellor Gehard Schroder, “In the future German sausage will be as pure
as mother’s milk.”
The baby formula industry is already making plans to introduce milk sausage
to the German and Europeans markets.
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