‘Mad Cow’ Ban Strikes at Heart of British Identity

‘I am a great eater of beef, and I believe that does harm to my wit.’

--William Shakespeare “Twelfth Night,” Act I, Scene 3

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For centuries, proud Englishmen have willingly risked their wit for a hearty round of beef. Today, their heirs angrily recoil from international assault on a dish that is a cornerstone here of the national psyche.

“Since the 15th century, beef has been a symbol emphasizing the wealth of ordinary English people and of their robust, prosperous, common-sense culture and democracy,” said David R. Starkey, a historian at the London School of Economics.

Furor zigzags across Europe six weeks after British beef was identified as the suspected source of an incurable human brain disease.

Bovine spongiform encephalopathy is the “mad cow” disease that may have leaped the species barrier in the past decade to infect almost a dozen people in Britain with a new strain of killer Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

But now it is the people here who are mad. English dander is up.

The international ban against the export of British beef, reaffirmed by the European Union at talks in Luxembourg this week, has weakened an already precarious British government and soured Britain’s relations with its European partners.

German Chancellor Helmut Kohl came to lunch at 10 Downing St. one day this week, and Prime Minister John Major served him medallions of British beef. A reporter asked: Was it safe to have eaten? Replied a testy Kohl: “I am not a marketing manager. You honestly don’t expect me to say something like an advertising slogan?”

What BSE really stands for, taunts British opposition leader Paddy Ashdown, is “Blame Somebody Else.” Major is hard pressed by political opponents, and even by some allies, over his government’s failure to control the crisis.

Britain has ricocheted from appeal to bluster in seeking to get a skeptical Europe to drop its beefs.

“My aim remains total lifting of this unjustified and unjust ban. I am determined to continue this fight,” British Agriculture Minister Douglas Hogg said as he left the Luxembourg meeting, once again without good news to take home.

Britain on Friday began to incinerate older cows to keep them out of the food chain and has offered a selective slaughter of animals judged to be particularly at risk.

But Europe wants tougher measures.

At home, consumers, butchers, farmers, veterinarians, beef processors and exporters all snap at the Major government. Farmers are in court against Major’s administration, which threatens to take legal action against the European Union, which is angry at Britain for not effectively confronting BSE.

For their part, European governments face ire from their own farmers: The French kill an entire herd in which there is a single case of BSE. Despite farmer protests, the Dutch government ordered the slaughter of 64,000 British-born calves.

In Britain, beef consumption, which slumped after the ministers of health and agriculture reported possible danger to humans in late March, has rebounded to about 85% of what it was, and slaughterhouses are working normally, according to Sue Fisher at Britain’s Meat and Livestock Commission.

But figures compiled by the Irish Food Board in Dublin show drops in beef consumption of as much as 55% in Germany, 40% in France and 30% in Italy and Spain.

“If someone would have said that two ministers could stand up in the House of Commons and destroy my business overnight, I would never have believed them. But that’s what happened,” said Morris Bond, director of a beef company in Lincolnshire. Exports fell from 30% of company business to zero one day to the next, forcing layoffs of hundreds of employees.

“Even once the ban is lifted, I think it will take 10 years to recover. Nobody in Europe is going to buy from us,” Bond said. “The saddest thing is that we are now importing beef from European countries whose cattle-raising and slaughterhouse standards are lower than ours.”

Last year, Britain exported almost $1 billion worth of beef and beef products worldwide. Overall industry losses already exceed that amount by some estimates. Despite major layoffs, thousands more agricultural, meat-processing and trucking jobs remain in peril in Britain and across Europe.

More than 150 farmers and meat industry workers in the heart of Scotland’s Aberdeen Angus beef country, taking note of McDonald’s decision here to stop using domestic supplies, picketed the opening of a new McDonald’s in Tayside this week.

Virtually all fast-food restaurants in Britain now exclusively serve foreign beef.

Some shops and restaurants make a defiant point of selling British beef, though, and neither the “mad cow” scare nor the return of Irish Republican Army attacks to London has stayed the spring flood of tourists.

“Our impression is that business is as good or even better than last year,” said Robert Chinery of the London Tourist Board.

BSE, first classified in 1986, has by now killed about 160,000 British cows, with about 15,000 new cases reported in the past year, according to the Ministry of Agriculture.

The disease, which takes years to incubate, is believed to have entered cows through parts of infected sheep ground up for high-protein feed. The use of sheep and other animal remains in cattle feed has been forbidden since 1988.

“I would not hesitate to eat beef in England. I see no medical reason not to,” said European Union Farm Commissioner Franz Fischler in an incautious remark that firmly stuck in the British craw, in light of the EU ban.

There is a particular irony in Britain’s squabble with the rest of Europe over beef because for so many generations, it was beef that distinguished England from the rest of Europe, historian Starkey said.

“Observers as far back as the 15th and 16th centuries emphasized the wealth of the ordinary people in England, not Wales, not Scotland--England. They had pewter, even silverware, and their diet was heavily meat-based. Well into the 20th century, country dwellers in France or Italy rarely ate meat,” Starkey said.

Britain’s moist climate, its relatively small population (2.5 million compared with France’s 15 million in the 16th century) and the system of primogeniture, in which land was inherited by the eldest son rather than divided among many heirs, all contributed to the growth of a beef culture.

Steep a joint of beef in claret wine and vinegar. Coat it with pepper, nutmeg and salt, let it sit a day or two and cook it on a spit, instructed one 18th century recipe.

There were kings in continental Europe who never ate a dish as good as what the English consumed for breakfast and dinner.

Whether the fiercely uniformed beefeaters once waited on tables or were yeomen paid in beef is lost to history, but they still guard the Tower of London.

Across town at the Tate Gallery hangs painter William Hogarth’s xenophobic squelch to French gendarmes who arrested him as a spy in 1748 for sketching Calais’ city gates. The centerpiece of Hogarth’s work is a succulent side of British beef bound for a tavern for British wayfarers. A scrawny French chef can hardly carry it; a covetous French friar would clearly kill for a taste.

Thus did John Bull thumb his nose at backward foreigners when Britain and France jousted for European supremacy.

In this trying Age of the Mad Cow, advertisers urge the English to try ostrich, alligator, horse, emu, bison or kangaroo as an alternative.

It was casks of salt beef--often rancid--on which Britannia’s sailors ruled the waves to build a global empire where the sun never set. And it is the weekly roast beef and crusty Yorkshire pudding on which the English will march into the 21st century. Europe or no.

Under new British restrictions--the toughest in Europe--all cows more than 30 months old, which used to wind up as the cheapest cuts of beef for chopped meat, sausage and soup, are banned from the food chain.

That means that once owners decide that the animals have completed their working lives, about 15,000 cows and bulls will be slaughtered and rendered each week and the remains incinerated.

The government also proposes the selective cull of 42,000 animals in BSE-prone herds. European agriculture specialists demand a more massive slaughter.

“We must have an eradication plan and not just a reduction plan for BSE,” Spanish Agriculture Minister Luis Atienza said at the Luxembourg talks this week.

As the eradication program gathers speed next week, thousands of animals will be destroyed. But European officials say an even more dramatic cull is needed principally as a means of restoring consumer confidence. Britain resists this, saying it has no scientific justification.

“It’s been proven by scientists that this disease is not spread laterally from animal to animal or from mother to offspring,” said David Naish, president of the National Farmers Union. “Consumers must be prepared to accept that beef is safe. Just to demand more and more culling of animals if there is no scientific background is not the way forward.”

Slaughtering thousands of animals simply to satisfy the marketplace is repugnant in a nation where animal rights is a way of life for many people.

The British Veterinary Assn. says killing healthy animals is like burning witches--it lacks moral or scientific justification.

Britain insists that the risk of BSE to public health is minuscule and that maintaining the export ban is unjustified.

Behind closed doors, Major, whose beleaguered Conservative Party suffered the latest in a long line of voter rebuffs in municipal elections this week, apparently says a great deal more. The Economist magazine quoted him using the profanity for manure to describe the “bloody bunch” of European farm ministers.

“Most governments, when facing a crisis that is widely viewed to be of their own making, suffer from the temptation to blame somebody else. Usually it is opposition political parties or newspapers. But the best targets are foreigners,” commentator Tony Barber said.

Overcoming historical suspicions toward continental Europe, the British agreed in a 1975 referendum to join a common market, but Europe remains the most explosive issue of British politics.

“We are in Europe, and we all know we are staying in Europe,” Major told business leaders this week. Like many entrepreneurs, he sees a weighty difference between short-term beef problems and long-term economic self-interest.

Whatever the official policy, though, the beef crisis is strengthening “Euroskeptics” who believe that Britain has already surrendered too much precious sovereignty to haughty bureaucrats in Brussels.

“Our ministers have no power any longer, our laws have no power,” disgruntled beef dealer Bond said. “Europe plays by a different set of rules than they demand from us. U.K. taxpayer money is now being spent to subsidize beef exports by our partners to markets outside Europe that we are no longer allowed to supply.”

That the European Union has agreed to pay 70% of the hundreds of millions of pounds it will take to clean up Britain’s BSE mess carries less weight than a popular conviction that beef, a nation’s historical pride, is being used by conniving Europeans to undermine England.

“They’re treating us with contempt. If the British people are willing to eat this kind of humble pie, they’ve lost their right to be a proud nation. Europe is yesterday’s story. It’s past its ‘sell by’ date. We’d be much better off without it,” Conservative Parliament member Theresa Gorman said.

Britain is committed to joining a single European currency by century’s end.

But Major acknowledged publicly this week--single-currency champion Kohl at his side--that voters would reject that next key step toward European union if a referendum were held now.

“Time to return fire,” the Daily Telegraph exhorted patriots in an editorial lamenting continental perfidy over beef. The newspaper sent reporters to Brussels to talk with European commissioners; most said they’d eat British beef if it was served to them.

“They will eat our beef but refuse to eat their words,” the newspaper thundered in a salvo defending baron beef--as ever, that center cut of national identity and the marrow of English patriotism.