Food for Thought

One of my favorite little adages about life is that it's easy to get weird. This occurred to me the other day as I was cutting up a block of human brain and wondering what it would taste like. Perverse? Well, yes, but think about it this way: the brain is full of white matter; white matter is fat; fat tastes good.

Aristotelian syllogisms notwithstanding, cannibalism is that line in the sand which I will not cross. Same goes for eating monkeys. I also sectioned a lot of monkey brains this summer (this was in a neuroscience lab, by the way, not my basement), and was reminded of that scene in "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" where the boy maharaja banquets Dr. Jones with a severed monkey head and a spoon. I debated this longer than I should have and finally decided that eating monkeys is kind of like sleeping with your cousin-make a Venn diagram of the genetic pool, and there's just too much overlap. Also, I couldn't find a place that sells severed monkey heads.

A reasonable substitute, like the brain of a calf or lamb, is hard enough to come by. My calls to Dean & Deluca, Whole Foods, Fairway, West Side Market, and Citarella were all met with a mixture of confusion and disgust usually reserved for people who sleep with their cousins. Luckily, you can get just about anything in New York, and I finally wised up and started calling specialty butchers. You'll find a brain source and recipes for those sweet organs of consciousness in the following article.

But first, a word on bovine spongiform encephalopathy. BSE, also known by the tabloid-worthy name "mad cow disease", is a long-incubating, progressive, invariably fatal neurological disorder of cattle. Eating tissue from a BSE-positive ruminant seems to cause variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), a human malaise with similar symptoms and consequences. This scares people. My sister, for one, won't eat anything that a cow has looked at. On the other hand, she also worries about monkeypox.

What are the facts? First, the bad news:

1. It's pretty clear that BSE causes vCJD; it's also pretty clear that's bad.

2. Whether muscle meats from infected cattle are safe to eat remains unknown. However, bioassays have identified the presence of BSE in the brains of cattle, which, for our purposes, is also bad.

3. And to kick the brain-loving gourmands while they're down, it turns out that experimentally, sheep are also susceptible to infection with orally administered BSE. Dammit. This means there's a theoretical possibility that sheep given contaminated feed have also been infected, and we have to think twice before cooking up a little lamb's brain.

Now for words of comfort:

1. It appears that a substantial species barrier protects humans from easily acquiring vCJD after consuming BSE-contaminated tissue. Through the end of November 2003, more than 183,000 cases of BSE were reported worldwide, as compared with 153 cases of vCJD.

2. From 1995 through June 2002, a grand total of one case of vCJD was reported in the United States. This unlucky person had lived for more than five years in the United Kingdom, where, between 1986 and 2001, over 98% of the world's cases of BSE were reported.

3. Even in the United Kingdom, that haven for mad cow, the risk of acquiring vCJD from eating cows appears to be really slim. The National Center for Infectious Diseases estimates it at about one case in 10 billion servings of beef. So in the United States, where a single case of BSE was reported between 1995 and 2002, the risk of acquiring vCJD is vanishingly small.

So, in treating cows like plague-rats, is my sister being prudent or paranoid? Based on the available information, I'd say paranoid as hell--but, as the saying goes, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you. Eat at your own risk.