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this week
sacred
cows
How now mad cow
John
O'Dea on the future of the food supply. Will we ever eat animal
protein again?
Is it just me or do people seem to be paying a lot of attention
to cows lately? What is the fascination? A cow is a four-legged
bag of milk that moos a lot, passes wind, produces cow pats and
spends its life eating grass and chewing cud, with a bunch of other
four-legged bags of milk, then ends up on a bun, drenched with ketchup,
mustard or mayonnaise and served with onion, lettuce and tomato.
What's so fascinating about that?
Up till a few weeks ago, the hot topic apart from the trial (and
how Daphne Caruana Galizia boldly stood up to the establishment
in print and in deed) was Mad Cow Disease. Now it's foot and mouth
disease, which not only affects cows, but other creatures as well,
including politicians who are affected by a virulent variant called
foot-in-the-mouth disease. It appeared to have been to some extent
eradicated until the recent Sant/Farrugia/Mizzi vs Austin Gatt performance
in Parliament proved otherwise.
The symptoms of Mad Cow Disease have been described as ‘insomnia,
memory loss, depression, anxiety, withdrawal and fearfulness'. I
don't know about you, but I reckon that most of the people living
in the civilised world suffer from most of these symptoms. A doctor
friend of mine believes that it's because they drink milk of amnesia
produced by mad cows.
I don't really blame the cows for being mad. Wouldn't you get hot
and bothered if a bunch of scientists and researchers kept poking
you, and studying your bodily functions? Wouldn't you get mad if
somebody took all the fun out of your sex life, replaced the bull
with a machine and impregnated you with genetically modified sperm?
I read in an article a few weeks ago that the methane gas produced
by 10 flatulent cows could provide heating for an average household
for a year. I'm not really sure how this was determined, but my
guess is that it involved a team of researchers being in the wrong
place at the wrong time. This is one reason why I've always made
it a point not to spend any time behind large animals. Can you imagine
the scene? You get these three persons in white lab coats gathered
around a cow earnestly discussing the finer points of a milking
machine that does not cause major discomfort to cows' udders and
suddenly the cow passes wind. As the cow shakes its head in utter
disbelief, they quickly move in nostrils a quivering to sample the
noxious cloud, then document their scientific interpretation: ‘Full-bodied,
yet odiferous, with a slight hint of explosive content'.
I also read that cows emit so much methane gas that it could seriously
damage the ozone layer. If the Department of the Environment ever
gets wind of this, (pun intended) every cow in the Malta and Gozo
will be subjected to regular emission tests. That could be fun to
watch.
All this fuss about BSE and Foot and Mouth disease is causing a
lot of people to worry about their eating habits. Fish, we are told
is full of mercury; beef and lamb from animals that are reared exclusively
on grass, are full of strychnine; chicken is rife with salmonella;
rabbits get myxomatosis Vegetables are either genetically modified
or sprayed with toxic liquids and MSG causes headaches and broken
marriages.
Consider the egg. Once thought to be nature's perfect food, this
dietary bomb is now damned as artery-clogging gunk. In their raw
state, eggs are now said to cause instant food poisoning. Bodybuilders
have stopped adding raw eggs to their high-energy protein drinks
and a raw egg on a steak tartare, once a gourmet treat now sounds
like a recipe for instant death. At this rate, we're going to end
up eating flavoured soya beans.
What, I wonder is going to happen when the world's food supply dries
up as a result of droughts caused by the depletion of the ozone
layer brought about by methane emitted by flatulent mad cows?
garlic@di-ve.com
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