The OFFICIAL Unofficial Achewood Message Board
Achewood => Achewood => Topic started by: wombat on September 15, 2004, 09:57:43 am
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I think we need to hear from our man in public health on this one, Dawg. Wouldn't this be a dangerous dish, never mind its legal and ethical problems?
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OMG. This was my first laugh out loud moment in a couple weeks now. It was the title that done me in.
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Awesome.
I always got a kick out of reading my father's wine guides for the esotericness of some of their suggestions. This is kind of what I was always expecting to read.
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I think we need to hear from our man in public health on this one, Dawg. Wouldn't this be a dangerous dish, never mind its legal and ethical problems?
From what little I know of this: the closer you get to your own species in your eating habits, the greater risk you have of your food carrying a microorganism or prion that will fuck your shit up. I haven't specifically seen any literature about eating apes, but I have to imagine it's not that much less risky than eating people.
Then again, we're talking about a cat and an alive stuffed bear. They'd probably be fine.
As for the alt text: I dunno, I still feel like I know Ray Smuckles. This strip is very Ray -- of course he can talk about food and beer with fluency, and this kind of weird pseudo-useful underworld connection seems very Ray.
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I dunno. When my dad was in the army he had to eat monkey.
Apparently Ray really does have a worldwide network that can get him anything any time.
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"Ape?"
Bwah!
$600 million can buy a lot of crazy crap.
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The Chinese have been eating monkeys for thousands of years - I don't know about eating apes, though, and there is probably a difference.
As for the whole Mad Cow thing, there have been cases of cannibalistic cultures (tribes in New Guinea practicing eating rituals on their dead) having outbreaks of Kuru (last seen in 1960). The women and children exhibited the disease, which was similar to Crutzfeld-Jakob disease (a prion disease thought to be genetic and more commonly found in elderly people of Jewish descent).
The women and children generally were the only ones infected by Kuru because they generally were given the brain to eat; the higher social status males of the tribe were given flesh organs (the heart being principal) and did not get the disease.
The practice was stopped in the late 50s and the 'outbreak' in New Guinea ended by 1960; there have been no resurgent cases that I'm aware of.
Even mad-cow disease (originally called New-Variant Crutzfeld-Jakob Disease, a prion disease humans have exhibited from consuming meat from a relatively distant species) is usually thought to be a result of the feeding of ground up cow matter back to cows and, specifically, neural tissue - brain and spinal cord.
The feeding of ground cow/sheep matter back to cows built protein in the cows faster then feeding grain. It also deposited 'rogue proteins' or prions in the meat. It is thought that perhaps sheep infected with a disease called "Scrapie" (this disease has been observed and documented for at least 250 years) were fed to cows. "Mad Cow" had not been observed in the past. When relatively young, non-Jewish descended people began developing C-J disease symptoms, their autopsies showed differences between the classic presentation and their disease, hence the 'Variant'.
So what I would presume is that if you were to be forced for whatever reason into a situation where you had to kill and eat an ape, I would not eat the brain or spinal cord. Better yet if you can be certain that the ape did not eat any brains or spinal cords.
I would be foraging for berries at that point; I don't think I could eat a Chimp, or a Gorilla, Orangutan, Siamang or Gibbon. Maybe a nice juicy lemur though...
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Another source of Cruetzfeld-Jacobs Disease is the direct injection of Human Growth Hormone -- something that freaked me out once when I went to give blood because I took injections of growth hormone for a year and a half. I found out, thankfully, that the hormone I had injected into myself daily was a synthetic reproduction of HGH, and therefore I had no chance of contracting CJD from that. QED.
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But isn't it also relevant that it is ceviche? Which is normally uncooked, as I recall? Don't try to fool me with that talk of the vinegar doing whatchamawhosis to the proteins. That's not the same as heating up all the germs till they die.
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But isn't it also relevant that it is ceviche? Which is normally uncooked, as I recall? Don't try to fool me with that talk of the vinegar doing whatchamawhosis to the proteins. That's not the same as heating up all the germs till they die.
Er, wombat? I hate to give you the screaming whim-whams, but heat generally doesn't "kill" prions anyway. (On those quotes -- one of the deeply scary things about prions is that they're not actually alive, so antibiotic-based medicine does nothing. It's like trying to spray pesticide on falling rocks.) A big part of the problem with Kreutzfeld-Jakob/Mad Cow/etc. is that we basically have no idea how to destroy the prions in cow corpses (burying the corpses of cows killed for Mad Cow gets the prions into the soil, and burning them gets them into the atmosphere) or in hamburger (as far as I'm aware, although Captain Public Health AD should probably help me here, incidents of K-J contracted from beef have had nothing whatsoever to do with the heat at which the meat was cooked and couldn't have been prevented via more thorough cooking).
I'm not saying that uncooked ape meat isn't more hazardous than cooked ape meat -- indeed, were I ordering ape, I would certainly have them cook the living fuck out of it -- but cooking is a secondary concern.
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Dang! How do you guys know all this stuff? I mean, the way you're talking doesn't sound like you just Googled it or something. Dang.
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But isn't it also relevant that it is ceviche? Which is normally uncooked, as I recall? Don't try to fool me with that talk of the vinegar doing whatchamawhosis to the proteins. That's not the same as heating up all the germs till they die.
This is the best definition of "cooking" ever. It makes me happy inside.
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I'm just impressed with the image of spraying pesticides on falling rocks. It evokes Wile E. Coyote for me somehow.
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Eric S.'s real job is a meat inspector so he's talked about this stuff in his columns a few times (http://www.google.com/search?q=Eric+Szulczewski+%22Mad+Cow%22&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&filter=0). The history of the disease at 1RyderFakin is pretty interesting.
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True: Prions are not alive and therefore you can't kill them.
I think, though, that we don't have any good idea on who is susceptible to mad cow, or at least who is more susceptible. And there is no good way to do a dose-response study on a disease that seems to only affect humans. I have a untested and unproven theory that in carcasses of such animals, using some kind of solvent to denature the proteins should destroy also the 'rogue proteins'. The problem would be the environmental impact of using denaturing agents on such a large scale.
This is the NIH laying down the SCIENCE on y'all.
BTW, for those of you who actually watched that silly "medical investigations" show, the NIH has no field staff. That's us at CDC. And we don't really work the way the clowns on the show do, either.
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Adapted from Prions: Puzzling Infectious Proteins (http://science-education.nih.gov/nihHTML/ose/snapshots/multimedia/ritn/prions/prions1.html) by Ruth Levy Guyer, PhD
Prions have changed scientists' understanding of the ground rules for infectious diseases. Prions cause diseases, but they aren't viruses or bacteria or fungi or parasites. They are simply proteins, and proteins were never thought to be infectious on their own. Organisms are infectious, proteins are not. Or, at least, they never used to be.
Prions (pronounced pree-ahns) enter cells and apparently convert normal proteins found within the cells into prions just like themselves. The normal cell proteins have all the same "parts" as the prions--specifically the same amino acid building blocks--but they fold differently.
Prions enter brain cells and there convert the normal cell protein PrPC to the prion form of the protein, called PrPSC. When normal cell proteins transform into prions, amino acids that are folded tightly into alpha helical structures relax into looser beta sheets. More and more PrPC molecules transform into PrPSC molecules, until eventually prions completely clog the infected brain cells. The cells misfire, work poorly, or don't work at all.
Ultimately, infected prion-bloated brain cells die and release prions into the tissue. These prions then enter, infect, and destroy other brain cells. And, as clusters of cells die, the brain stops looking like a brain and starts looking more like Swiss cheese. The medical term for the prion diseases is "spongiform encephalopathies," in acknowledgement that the sick brains (encephalo is Greek for brain; pathy is Greek for disease) are riddled with holes and have taken the form of sponges.
Shepherds and farmers whose sheep had scrapie never seemed to get scrapie themselves. So, for a long time, scientists assumed that the prions of animals did not cause infections in humans. But, between 1994 and 1996, 12 people in England came down with Creutzfeld-Jakob disease (CJD), a human prion disease whose symptoms are not unlike those of the mad cows, and all the victims had eaten beef from cows suspected of having mad cow disease. In October, 1996, scientists in England reported that the prions from ten of the British patients were remarkably like those of the mad cows and not like those of people who died of "classical" CJD.
Scientists quickly realized that the occurrence of CJD in a dozen people 19 to 39 years old was cause for alarm, because CJD had always been rare--typically one new case might be diagnosed per million people each year--and seldom occurred in people younger than 55. This epidemic was something new, something extraordinary. Scientists now speculate that the prions that started out in sheep suffering from scrapie made their way into cows and then moved more recently into humans.
Cattle are fed meal made from sheep "offal," the bones and other waste parts of sheep carcasses. Standard procedures for grinding up carcasses were altered in the 1970s, and the new processing methods seem not to have been adequate for destroying scrapie prions. The cattle were exposed, through the offal, to sheep prions, and the prions eventually established themselves in their cow hosts. Later, they adapted further, infecting cells of people who had eaten hamburgers from prion-bearing cows.
At the moment, CJD and only a handful of other human diseases have clear links to prions. But it is likely that prions will turn out to be the agents of a variety of currently enigmatic diseases in which brain cells are destroyed and the nervous system deteriorates. Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease are two prime candidates.
So, a couple new ground rules now seem to govern infectious diseases. The first is that naked proteins--prions--can be infectious and can cause infectious diseases. The second and potentially more troubling is that, like other infectious agents, prions can jump species' barriers and cause deadly diseases in humans. Recently, and for the first time known, two farmers with mad cows in their herds died of CJD.
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BTW, for those of you who actually watched that silly "medical investigations" show, the NIH has no field staff. That's us at CDC.
Isn't that stupid? How hard would it have been to get that right?
But aside from mad cow disease, what about things that you get from regular germy things? Aren't you more likely to catch them from a closely related species? Especially a closely related, undercooked species?
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True: Prions are not alive and therefore you can't kill them.
I think, though, that we don't have any good idea on who is susceptible to mad cow, or at least who is more susceptible. And there is no good way to do a dose-response study on a disease that seems to only affect humans. I have a untested and unproven theory that in carcasses of such animals, using some kind of solvent to denature the proteins should destroy also the 'rogue proteins'. The problem would be the environmental impact of using denaturing agents on such a large scale.
So are prions just particularly hardy proteins or what? Because I know that some get denatured just looking at them, others from heat or acid. What's it take to denature a prion? Silver bullets? Kryptonite? Buffy?
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That's not the same as heating up all the germs till they die.
This is the best definition of "cooking" ever. It makes me happy inside.
Choop - this is what is missing from your business's website: We heat up germs till they die, so you don't have to.
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But aside from mad cow disease, what about things that you get from regular germy things? Aren't you more likely to catch them from a closely related species? Especially a closely related, undercooked species?
My best guess here would be yes, which is why I fully advise cooking your ape thoroughly before eating. If nothing else, presumably undercooked ape would be exactly as susceptible to plain ol' food-poisoning bacteria as more mundane, further-related meats.
As for denaturing proteins as a solution to prion problems: hmm. It makes sense in theory, but it took a Google (great is my shame) to realize that this has actually been done successfully in practice. The main impetus appears to be that you need some heavy-duty, food-unsafe things to break prions up, which is fine for cow corpses and other quarantine measures but runs into problems once you consider the problem of sanitizing hamburger meat.
(I am running off my mouth because I'm a biology major and, like most cocky young underclassthings, like showing that off. Also I have nothing of any interest to say in the baby thread, and so I feel the need to compensate elsewhere.)
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So what, Chimp-Tar-Tar is off the menu?
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So what, Chimp-Tar-Tar is off the menu?
Well, it depends how much you want to take your own life in your hands. If the sheer risk of Chimp Tartar Avec Nerve Tissue appeals to your thrillseeking lifestyle, by all means do what you must, man.
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BTW, for those of you who actually watched that silly "medical investigations" show, the NIH has no field staff. That's us at CDC.
Isn't that stupid? How hard would it have been to get that right?
But aside from mad cow disease, what about things that you get from regular germy things? Aren't you more likely to catch them from a closely related species?
I would say that you are most likely to catch something directly from another person. That's the most regular, and most germy thing you come into contact with every day.
Especially a closely related, undercooked species?
That's true when you consider that a close species is more like us - so the conditions for the germ to fluorish would be similar. HIV is thought to have made a species jump from another primate species to man. Flu also often comes from pigs, through fowl and into man. (Pigs could be argued to be 'somewhat closely related'; we have used pig skin, heart valves and insulin in humans for years.) However, we don't generally cook and eat 'closely related' species so this question, is happily, relatively spurious.
Another example I can think of is Tubeculosis in the late 1800s passed to children through unpasteurized milk products. In this case, it was often the species of TB known as M. bovis. I would not call cows 'closely related' to man.
I am concerned, Ms. Wombat, about your obsession with cooking and eating closely related species. Something you want to tell us about?
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As for denaturing proteins as a solution to prion problems: hmm. It makes sense in theory, but it took a Google (great is my shame) to realize that this has actually been done successfully in practice. The main impetus appears to be that you need some heavy-duty, food-unsafe things to break prions up, which is fine for cow corpses and other quarantine measures but runs into problems once you consider the problem of sanitizing hamburger meat.
Once you identify a case in a herd, you would never, ever work to make the meat safe - you would work to destroy both the herd and the prions.
The only reason to find a way to sanitize 'prion infected meat' would be if we were in a position where prions became ubiquitously present in beef.
Which I would hope never happens.
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As for denaturing proteins as a solution to prion problems: hmm. It makes sense in theory, but it took a Google (great is my shame) to realize that this has actually been done successfully in practice. The main impetus appears to be that you need some heavy-duty, food-unsafe things to break prions up, which is fine for cow corpses and other quarantine measures but runs into problems once you consider the problem of sanitizing hamburger meat.
Once you identify a case in a herd, you would never, ever work to make the meat safe - you would work to destroy both the herd and the prions.
The only reason to find a way to sanitize 'prion infected meat' would be if we were in a position where prions became ubiquitously present in beef.
Which I would hope never happens.
Well, yes -- presumably early-stage destruction/quarantine of affected animals before they even have a chance of infecting the actual food supply is the only way of doing this. But I have this sinking feeling that, if only because of consumer demand, some kind of treatment of meat for theoretical prions is going to be suggested.
(This is the time when I mention that "Theoretical Prions" would be a good band name.)
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You have a better chance marketing 'prion-free' meat then you will 'previously infected and now cleaned' meat.
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(This is the time when I mention that "Theoretical Prions" would be a good band name.)
Pleasantly reminescent of the Theoretical Girls (http://www.carparkrecords.com/theoretical.html)... I like it.
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So what, Chimp-Tar-Tar is off the menu?
Well, it depends how much you want to take your own life in your hands. If the sheer risk of Chimp Tartar Avec Nerve Tissue appeals to your thrillseeking lifestyle, by all means do what you must, man.
Why not just have a side of blowgiraffe with that? And wash it all down with a raw pork and egg smoothie?
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I am concerned, Ms. Wombat, about your obsession with cooking and eating closely related species. Something you want to tell us about?
Eeeuw, no. I'd never eat a monkey. Precisely because they seem like the dangerously germiest animals.
Working with primates you have to worry about sharing diseases. But no one ever tells me to wear a mask when I have a cold when I'm volunteering at the Reptile House. It's very relaxing.
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You have a better chance marketing 'prion-free' meat then you will 'previously infected and now cleaned' meat.
I read this first as "pron-free meat" and thought, "Gee, those Republicans all have that Meece-Ashcroft anti-pron thing going on."
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Ya want boring? Try Meat-free pr0n.
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Ya want boring? Try Meat-free pr0n.
What, like Where the Boys Aren't?
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I could really go for a lambic ale right now. Ah, relative poverty. :king:
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Ya want boring? Try Meat-free pr0n.
What, like Where the Boys Aren't?
They are up to #78. I wouldn't say that's truly meat free, though. There are definitely 'meat alternatives' being served up, but I'm thinking along the lines of Maui Tacos.
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PRION UPDATE
Apparent blood transfusion risk (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/3676224.stm)