Snippets from the Italian Scene
Mad Cow: An Unwelcome Return
Returning to Cosa Bolle, this has been a sad week: a 20-something Sicilian woman who had begun to suffer from degenerative neurological symptoms this fall has been diagnosed with New Variant CJD, the human variant of mad Cow Disease. She's the first Italian to get it, and the initial news reports hopefully mentioned that she had taken a trip to an area of France that subsequently suffered an outbreak of mad cow disease. However, now the experts are saying that she may instead have been exposed to the disease in Sicily, and the Minister of the Interior has called for a crackdown against the illegal, mafia-run slaughterhouses that supply a significant portion of the region's beef, because they apparently ask no questions about the animals they butcher, and are also willing to slip animals that simply drop dead into the human food supply. All it takes is for an unscrupulous farmer to contact one of these slaughterhouses to dispose of a carcass, rather than have it tested and risk an unpleasant surprise (if an animal tests positive the whole heard is destroyed), and the damage is done. The problem is especially insidious because once the meat has left one of these slaughterhouses and gone through an unscrupulous middleman or two, it could end up anywhere on the island -- school cafeterias, restaurants, or at the butcher's or a supermarket, with a false certification (all EEU beef is now sold with certifications that say where the animal was born, where it was raised, and where it met its demise; we've got some German beef in the fridge right now).
The Minister of health says we can expect more cases, and there will likely be a drop in beef consumption as a result of this, with people preferring pork, poultry, or lamb, assuming they don't simply turn to fish, or become vegetarian, like a friend's daughter did when the first Mad Cow scare swept the country. The bottom line: If you visit sections of Italy where the Mob has a hand in the meat industry (Campania and on south) it's probably a good idea to avoid beef for now, unless you are buying or ordering meats from prized breeds (alas, I do not know the Sicilian equivalent of Tuscany's Chianina breed). Free-range lamb will be a perfect option, as will free-range poultry, and Southern fish is glorious.
In a somewhat lighter vein, a recent study has shown that the average European child watches 4 1/4 hours of TV per day, while 25% spend more than 5 1/4 hours glued to the tube; the study warns that there's a serious risk that all this TV will result in standardized kids. Not that one really needs a study to reach this conclusion.
A presto,
Kyle Phillips
Webweaver, About Italian Cuisine
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