The move threatens to derail a new offensive from the Prince of Wales to bring about a renaissance in mutton eating.
"The Prince of Wales is such a keen supporter for the revival in mutton I am sure he will be among the first to put out the message that people should keep potential risks in proportion and keep eating mutton."
Why do I know about all this weird shit?
Poor Tongans.
But, hey, they have a big party and eat crazydelicious worms things that only appear on their shore once a year and do not keep for even 24 hours...
I wish Swift's "A Modest Proposal" would get Prince Charles' attention and support. Mmmmm, Irish babies.....:)
I ate a lot of mutton when I lived on the Navajo Nation. When I was out there I wondered why we don't eat mutton.
I think the answer is that it's pretty hard to digest. Lamb is easier on the stomach.
That's why you boil it, silly.
You and your mutton fat fetish...
I might be able to shed some light on that.
In the states I believe you eat a lot of beef but very little sheep of any kind.
In the UK and Australia we eat a lot of "lamb", which is of course young sheep, but not much "mutton", which is older sheep. The reason for this is that originally lamb was a special luxury, and with rising social afluence the demand always outstrip that for mutton, seen as lower class and coursely flavoured. Mutton is much stronger tasting than lamb, but when you realise most lamb dishes involve inserting tons of garlic and rosemary and other strong spices into the meat to try and give it some flavour you have to ask, why not eat mutton? It's hard to find mutton anywhere nowadays, and it's usually much cheaper than lamb, and lower in fat. Roast mutton used to be a staple dish in both countries. Tastes like goat, cheaper than chicken!
Tastes like goat, cheaper than chicken!
I'm sold, and happy that our grim meathook future might include mutton.
I want to be a de'Medici of the mutton renaissance.
You'll be needing this then.
I did need that and I didn't even know it.
Also it's traditional to boil your vegetables into a paste. Especially the peas. Just thought I'd mention it.
Man, I really want some mutton now. Goat is delicious, but a complete pain in the ass to find out here normally. Since the local college has a very strong agricultural program and they sell meat on campus they actually had some goat for sale a while back except it was unreasonably expensive, at least in my opinion. I think they wanted something like $6/lb.
The lack of lamb in the US is something that has often bothered me. I don't think it has anything to do with lack of demand, but more with the fact that lamb is often relatively expensive over here due to (presumably) fewer sheep being raised.
Then again I'm also pissed that we have so many damn chickens, but duck is so expensive when I seems to me that raising ducks wouldn't be that big of a difference.
It's not really a problem if you avoid eating the spinal and brain tissues.
Maybe sheep are different, but that's certainly not the case for cows. Apparently part of the process of slaughtering cows involves cutting them down the middle, which means leaking the spine all over everything.
Well, butchering any animal of sheep or larger size, the advent of power tools and modern saws has made it easy to cut vertically down the spine for dividing the animal in bits. (I use a hacksaw for sheep, or a bandsaw, but a chainsaw for cattle, red deer, wapiti, etc - clean carefully afterwards.) There's not that much spinal fluid, most of it drains downwards after severing the head and ends up on the abatoir floor, well before the beast is split. When splitting, it's not a case of splatterage, as it's pretty well drained by the time I cut. Your saw produces minced bone/marrow/spinal cord paste, but most of that goes on your cutting instrument, and on the cut surfaces of bone, not on the meat. May be a risk if you obsessively suck on the cut spinal surface of a mutton chop, but few do this.
I'm lucky enough to live in a scrapie-free country, but grew up farming sheep and understanding all their pathologies, including the ones they didn't have, just in case. I've not heard of scrapie, standard or otherwise, being transmissable to humans, and I'd suspect any risk is from highly processed, mechancially recovered meat products (because that's where a lot of the nervous tissue ends up), not from most muscle or organ meats.
Currently, humans have their own spongiform encephalopathy, CJD or Kuru (if you're a Papuan ritual cannibal), plus BSE-derived CJD. Unless you're regularly into eating nervous tissues, brains, eyes, etc, you've got more chance of being run down by a number nine bus.
Well, that's their problem for using overly vigorous equipment - I cut dry, without a water-lubricated saw, so I have a finicky saw cleaning job later, but I don't get splatter more than a few centimetres from the cut, and it's not a wet/slurry type of splatter. Of those Australasian abbatoirs I've been in, I've not seen that big a saw with that much splatter in use, but then, I've mostly been in small operations.
Maybe a good reason for you all to support local hobbyist butchers, or to kill your own meat :-)
I was leaning more towards "go vegetarian"... *shudder*
An ex-girlfriend of mine worked in the office of a slaughterhouse in Kitchener-Waterloo. The smell...
May be a risk if you obsessively suck on the cut spinal surface of a mutton chop, but few do this.
I guess I'll have to quit sucking out the sweet, sweet marrow. <sigh>
I could be wrong (it's been a while since I took virology), but don't humans also have to worry about CWD from deer and elk? I'd assume off-hand that hunters improperly butchering infected animals at home would be one of the larger (although admittedly still small as you correctly state) problem areas.
It depends on their butchery style. As I understand, the prions can turn up through a)random mutation in the animal concerned, and b) Consumption of processed bone meal containing nervous tissue of infected animals that has been insufficiently sterilised.
Wild animals are not likely to be infected via b), so you've only to worry about a) - so your wild animal SE/CJD risk is based on how often the mutation crops up, combined with how likely it is that when you eat it, it finds a protein in your biochemistry that it can fold into copies of itself (Scrapie hasn't done this yet, but this newvariant scrapie might - nobody knows). It's only going to be common in the spinal/brain tissue, as SE type prions operate on the proteins in the spinal fluid/cord and brain. When I'm butchering an animal in the bush, I don't have any need to break into the brain or spinal column - I take the haunches, the back steaks, and some of the internal organs (liver/kidneys), so my risk of taking prions is lower, because they concentrate in spinal/brain tissue.
I still reckon I need to be more scared of a number nine bus.
I definitely agree that the bus is clearly the greater danger to all concerned, but CWD seems to be getting a good degree of concern among scientists (I personally interviewed a few times at a lab doing prion research that was primarily focuses on CWD). I'm not certain what the levels of infection are thought to be in wild animals, but it has seeemed, in my admittedly anecdotal experience, that it is both potentially more dangerous and far more commonly ignored by the mainstream.
I can't see any of it impacting my enjoyment of a delicious bit of venison one bit. At least, not at the moment.
What? No more mutton-neck soup? Lamb chops with fatty little rounds of cord in the bone? Sheeps brains poached in milk? Oh fie!
I wonder if pressure cooking would destroy the prions?
"The TSE agents are extremely resistant to heat, ultraviolet light, ionizing radiation, normal sterilization processes, and common disinfectants that normally inactivate viruses and bacteria." Scary shit. If the prion theory is right, you'd have to break every single protein molecule back down to amino acids; this might still be indistinguishable from magic (or a blowtorch).
Scary as fuck indeed. Although speaking of scary things learned from virology classes the worst was probably that an incredibly large portion of the population currently have type I herpes (i.e. cold sores) and since the method of the virus acting is to hide in the nerve and travel each time for outbreaks it can sometimes go the other way and travel up into your brain. This is typically fatal in most cases and there's more or less nothing you can do to prevent it. Wikipedia has a short blurb about it that more or less says the same things, but they have more numbers and bigger, more scientific words.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herpes_simplex_virus
Really? I thought the big deal from the whole "Mad Cow" thing was the fact that they had been feeding ground up dead cows to other cows.
Yeah. However, the concern here is a new variant scrapie in sheep, and they're no longer using much bone meal. There's always a background level of scrapie/bse in animals that develop the mutation naturally, so if you avoid making hamburgers and salami out of mechanically recovered meat (lips, hooves, ears and arseholes, essentially), you lower the possibility of including nervous tissue containing prions getting into our foodchain.
Seeing as I've confined my beef-eating to animals raised in the southern hemisphere where we were not dumb enough to use the stupidly obvious disease vector of feeding cows to other cows, I'm probably fine. There is a slight possibility that BSE got down here with bovine semen imports from europe for artificial insemination, but we haven't seen it yet - this would still be only a few animals, and without the re-feeding of their bonemeal to further animals, it's growth within the cattle population would be limited.
I really don't want to think about Prince Charles' mutton-eating habits.
Luckily, Prince Charles is immune from brain-wasting diseases, having been born without a discernable brain. The monarchy is safe!