We British—as I was back then—had no such excuse. When the story broke in 1987 that our cows were dying of a brain disease that might conceivably kill us, too, if we ate their meat, the news came with a thick sheaf of scientific data.
It seemed that our farmers (who had, in fairness, never presented themselves as particular sticklers for hygiene or decorum) had been nourishing their cattle on feed made in part from dead sheep. It further seemed that some of the sheep in question had died of an appalling disease by the schlock-horror name of scrapie, which ate away their brains and made them itch so badly they scraped off their own wool. The human analogue—variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease—would probably be less itchy, scientists reassured a nervous British public, but, yes, it would eat away one’s brain, and be incurable, and had a long but indeterminate incubation period that meant we could all already be infected. I remember watching a scientist being grilled on TV as to the numerical upper limit of our potential casualties. He ducked the question as long as he could and then was cornered into an ashen, “Well . . . everyone.”
Oh, and in case we were hoping for a cure, we shouldn’t. Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob, like mad cow, scrapie, kuru, and so on, was caused by something called a prion, a “rogue protein” that scientists knew little about beyond its surreal indestructibility. It turned out that you could grind a prion to bits, shoot it with electrons, boil it interminably, or give it a month in the freezer without it even batting an eye. And that was when it wasn’t quietly replicating itself in the brain of an effete British sophisticate.
In other words, you might have thought we’d stop eating beef. You know, just to be on the safe side. And we did for a while. British beef consumption dropped dramatically in the first years of the epidemic. But by the mid-1990s—when British people actually started dying of the disease, erasing all remaining hope that the whole thing was just some sort of premillennial doom rumor—beef consumption was roughly back where it had been all along.
And the question, after two decades of worry and fear about mad cow disease, is why?
Personally, as a British person, I’d like to think that we British have just been characteristically Churchillian about the whole thing. We heard what the scientists had to say, responded—by cleaning up our farms, acquiring a fetish for organic foods, and even developing our own pretentious restaurant culture, with tablecloths and everything—and returned to what we were doing.
Dr. Klitzman’s theory is that for the British, like the Fore with kuru, the mad cow nightmare scenario is simply “too bad to be true.” We can’t all be going to die, he thinks we think.
British deaths from beef-related Creutzfeld-Jakob reached a peak of 28 in 2000, then started to taper off, but Klitzman tells me not to get too relieved. He thinks the odds are against a mass, beef-related extinction of the British, but the jury, agonizingly, is still out.
Que será será, in other words, is as close as we British can come to emotional closure on the mad cow issue. We may all, indeed, be going to die. And die badly, losing speech and sanity as our celebrated brains implode into blobs of roguish protein.
And perhaps, if it happens, we’ll have enough mind left in those final fading moments of twilight to see the deep, cosmic sense that it all makes. Just as the Romans were ultimately brought low by their Romanness (i.e., the challenge of repelling a barbarian invasion when you’re wearing a bedsheet and you’ve spent all evening being fed grapes on a chaise longue), perhaps it’s only fitting that the British should be ended by their Britishness. After all, for what two qualities were we chiefly known at this stage? Liking beef—as immortalized on gin bottle labels and in the cryptic insults of the French—and having no idea how to prepare it. You don’t need a Marx or Hegel to detect the heavy hand of History on the tiller.
Millennia after the British are dead and buried—or burned, perhaps, just to be safe—schoolkids will be called to the front of the class and have no trouble reciting the outlines of our tragedy.
“The British ate lots of beef and conquered the world, but they didn’t care whether the beef tasted nice or where it came from and so they died.”
Walk stiffly back to seat. Turn and sit. Exchange eye roll of triumph with robotic best friend.
