Darkmistress's Full Review: Richard Rhodes - Deadly Feasts: Tracking the Secre...
I wish I would have read Deadly Feasts before I went to England. I might have been more careful. But then, it probably wouldn't have helped if I'd been more careful in England.
By now just about everybody has heard about Mad Cow disease. It's been all over the news lately because of fears that it might have gotten into the US beef supply. (The 'might' is required by the Beef Counsel. I'd have said 'is.') This book is very accessible to the layman. You will not need a degree in biology to get completely creeped out here. And if you find yourself too horrified by the implications of what you're reading to even understand it, the author provides a nice chart that he adds to over the course of the book so that you don’t miss a thing.
Deadly Feasts starts safely enough with a tribe of primitives on an island. Primitives are always doing stupid things that get them killed right? That’s why they’re primitive. We are too intelligent, too clever, too civilized to do anything so stupid.
Then we move on to a disease that appears in sheep called scrapie. When a sheep has scrapie it gets ornery, it starts to stumble around (thus scraping itself) and then it dies. Poof. It takes a while to figure out why this is happening and how it is spreading, but we’re along for the whole ride. And it still seems pretty safe. Americans aren’t known for their lamb consumption.
Then it gets to the cows. This is where you’re going to learn more about the production of beef than you ever wanted to know. If you were thinking about becoming a vegetarian, this is the book for you. It put me off beef for months. (It might even make you think twice about bone meal for your roses.) And that wasn’t even the scary part.
Not too long ago I was watching the 70’s TV drama Emergency with my husband and a doctor on the show proposed starting a child on human growth hormone. I was screaming at the TV "Don’t do that. You’ll kill him!" This is something I learned in the book. The way the hormone was extracted concentrated the agent responsible for the human version of Mad Cow, Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease. Poor kid, he died about 10 years ago (if the show was real) but he died tall.
So far we have a disease in savages, in sheep, and in cows. So what? Why is this so scary that it threatens to tear apart the European Union?
Rhodes goes on to talk about how the British government mishandled this problem when it cropped up. Debacle is such a good word. Read the book for details.
This book will scare the bejeezus out of you, but it’s probably for the best. I mean, do you really want to feel dizzy one day 10 years from now and be dead 6 months later all because of a McDonald's burger you ate this week? It's also great if you just read Fast Food Nation (http://www.epinions.com/content_27169296004) and want more information.
(And before anybody jumps on me for scare mongering, keep in mind that I'm living in South Korea just a few miles from the DMZ without all the CDC recommended shots for this country and eating the beef.)
PS- Isn't it funny how this was a VH review for 3 years, but when I pulled it down because Epinions shuffled it under the wrong title and added info it became only H? Curious, isn't it?
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