AR-News: Cow Brains on the Menu in Montana

[Pat Wolff]

Brains and Eggs Remain Menu Mainstay

By MATT GOURAS ASSOCIATED PRESS

MISSOULA, Mont. (AP) -

Short-order cook Dianna Keeland looks a little
disgusted as she takes a cow brain from the fridge and
tosses the grayish, softball-sized organ onto the
grill.

"They look like something a human being shouldn't
eat," Keeland said.

She chops the sizzling mass into bite-size bits,
scrambles in some eggs, onion and peppers and serves
the steaming plate to a waiting customer at the Oxford
restaurant bar.

Even with hashbrowns, toast and a beverage chaser, two
chewy bites are enough to confirm it is an acquired
taste.

Across the West and South, brains and eggs are still a
menu mainstay. Southerners consider pork brains a
delicacy, but here, in the heart of beef country,
Keeland fries up cow brains - and the orders haven't
stopped despite mad-cow disease scares.

"That's the trademark dish here," said manager Ralph
Baker, who eventually volunteers he's a vegetarian and
has never tried brains and eggs himself.

"Frankly, if I was even eating steak every day," Baker
said, "I wouldn't eat 'em."

At Big Ed's City Market in Raleigh, N.C., owner
Richard Watkins serves up pork brains. He gets about a
half-dozen orders a week, mostly from older customers
who remember eating it growing up.

"Back in the Depression, you didn't waste anything on
a hog," he said.

Watkins said his dish, served at the family
owned-restaurant for 40 years, tastes similar to ham
and eggs.

"It's very tasty," he said. "I love it."

At the Oxford in Missoula, a landmark bar and grill
for a half century, the dish has been on the menu from
the beginning - and it has always been cow brains.

Even news this spring that five bulls linked to a
Canadian cow infected with the disease were traced to
Montana didn't slow orders - about a dozen or so a
week, often from drunken college students. Livestock
officials eventually found no evidence any of the
animals - all of them already sent to slaughter - were
infected.

The human form of mad-cow disease is known as variant
Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease. Scientists say people get
the fatal illness by eating meat products containing
brain or spinal tissue from infected animals.

"I think you're just as likely to get West Nile virus
as the mad-cow disease," Baker says. "Nobody worries
about it."

There have been no confirmed cases of mad-cow disease
in the United States, nor have there been any
confirmed cases of anyone contracting the human
variant in the United States
from eating infected meat products.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention, the risk of getting the human variant of
the disease even in the United Kingdom - where most
cases occur - is perhaps about 1 case per 10 billion
servings.

Unlike other illnesses that can be found in meat
products, such as E. coli, the agent that carries mad
cow cannot be killed by cooking it at high
temperatures. But health officials have not developed
a specific recommendation about eating cow brains,
mostly because there have been no cases
of mad-cow disease in the United States, said Jim
Murphy of the state health department in Montana.

"At this point, we don't have a reason to say, don't
do this," he said.

But Murphy also noted that the incubation period of
the human form can be decades, meaning health
officials won't know about any outbreak until long
after someone is infected.

"If people want to go the extra mile to make
themselves safe, they could avoid these things," he
said of cow brains and other spinal tissue.

The brains Baker gets come frozen and complete. They
are mostly round and still have the brain stem
connected.

Earlier this spring, Baker had to find a new supplier
after his old brain source found better money selling
to people using them to cure leather.

At the Ox, a plate of brains and eggs costs $6 and
comes with hash browns and toast. For some, it helps
to douse them in Tabasco sauce or lots of gravy. Some
chase it down with a shot of whiskey.

Keeland, the short-order cook, said some orders are
placed by college freshman going through an initiation
of some sort.

"I've had to write actual notes verifying that
so-and-so ate the brains and eggs," she said.

And, of course, the Oxford crowd has never seemed
overly concerned about minuscule health or safety
risks. Open 24 hours a day, the Ox was for years known
as a tough bar, where fights were common and police
visits frequent.

It's in that venue that brains and eggs stayed at the
top of the menu.

"I liken it to a roller coaster," Baker observed.
"There's the illusion of danger - but actually no real
danger."

---

On the Net:

CDC on Mad Cow:
<http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/diseases/cjd/cjd.htm>



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