Comments on: Brains for Dinner, Anyone?

By: deborah

deborah — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 13:21:54 +0000

Maybe or no you hav watched bit of Anthony Bourdain who admits to having a hygene isue to a extinct, Iamsuume you t juornalist and must conforts these isues. I came to your site while sufing and Iam doing the cyber ecvalint to drunk dialing mauh

By: Don

Don — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 17:41:07 +0000

It’s not a slam dunk, thus why I was careful to say "leading thinking" not fact. Personally I’ve decided just to put aside eating all prion-carrying meats because I have completely lost faith in the food industry keeping me safe. Plus they’ve spent a lot of years feeding bits of different animals (and even the same species if animals) to each other, increasing the odds of this kind of thing spreading.

At the risk of sounding too tin-foil-hat, I also have 0 faith in their implied conclusion that "sporadic" cases are unrelated. The onset of symptoms is somewhat slower, though they’re also mostly talking about young people still in puberty so who knows how that impacts a wasting disease?

*shrug* Everyone has their own metrics for what risk is worth what reward and this is a highly uncertain risk. Personally I’m just going to go without.

By: Jenn L

Jenn L — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 16:26:45 +0000

Ok, thanks for freaking me out, Don! What, no osso bucco either?!

According to the CJD Foundation, there is no evidence that scrapie (the prion disease in sheep that is their equivalent of BSE, in existence for hundreds of years) "has ever jumped the species barrier" and infected humans with CJD. So my lamb brains are fine, and no one needs to picket poor Bistro d’Oc for serving them.

Cattle brain is off menus due to BSE, yes, and I haven’t seen it anywhere.

Also, the Foundation outlines several ways of CJD transmittal, noting three ways of getting it – sporadic, genetic, acquired (the last includes BSE, medical contamination, etc.). 85% of cases are sporadic.

So not quite as cut and dry as "CJD is human BSE", but then this was just my initial research dive. Feel free to hit me with tons of medical rebuttal.

By: Don

Don — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 15:27:01 +0000

Enjoy the offal but skip the brains. The leading thinking is that the wasting disease Crutchfield-Jakobs is a human-acquired form of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (mad cow disease) and that the transmission is from prions, a protein that isn’t altered by high-temperature cooking or even radiation (which has been proposed to cope with e coli issues).

And prions appear in the brain and other nerve tissue such as ox tail.

Organ meats are not an issue, however.

By: Mike Licht

Mike Licht — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 00:33:23 +0000

Bistro d’Oc certainly deserves a post of its own. What a great place; what great food. If you like a spirited, boisterous place, try to get there when it’s full of French-speaking hockey players (see Capitals schedule). If you like a quiet meal and get there during an NHL invasion, get a table upstairs. Don’t know about Languedoc food? Ask — they’re friendly.