MILTON KEYNES, England – Six days after a government announcement linked contaminated beef to a fatal human brain disease, the British Meat and Livestock Commission aired a television ad depicting teenagers eating ground beef pie.
“We couldn’t have got it more wrong,” said Chris Lamb, head of the commission’s beef promotion division.
Of all beef products connected to bovine spongiform encephalopathy, people feared ground beef the most because they suspected it was made of eyelids and tails that might carry the fatal element responsible for a new variant of Creutzfeld-Jakob disease.
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About 40 percent of British beef sales are ground beef and young people are the major consumers.
Following the government announcement, Britain went into a panic overnight. The beef industry struggled to react. How could it change the product to make it palatable to consumers again?
Before 1996, ground beef contained a combination of offal, possibly lymphatic tissue and beef trimmings from cull cows and bulls. It was made into lower quality burgers and meat pies. These raw products are now prohibited from being used in human food.
After the BSE scare, the commission moved quickly to save what remained of the British beef industry.
By the fall of 1996, it conducted 80 consumer focus groups to assess attitudes on the safety of British beef. The primary message it heard was “Beef kills me.”
While middle-aged parents said they would continue eating beef because it was likely too late for them, they refused to feed beef to their children. It appeared nCJD afflicted the young rather than middle-aged or elderly.
The commission, the National Farmers’ Union and the agriculture department developed a plan to restore consumer confidence.
Besides a traceback system involving ear tags and passports to record every movement of every bovine, the government banned offals, nerve tissue and bone products from the food supply.
No animal over the age of 30 months is allowed into the food chain. Since scientific evidence shows the youngest animal to develop this disease was 32 months of age, older animals are slaughtered.
The livestock commission also developed a seal of approval to ensure the quality of ground beef. It guarantees that British meat comes from inspected farms. It further promises ground meat is 100 percent offal-free beef from animals under 30 months of age.
These precautions have seen beef sales return to pre-BSE levels.
“We have since got back to normal life. The consumer’s concern today is more about convenience,” said Lamb.
The average consumer could not explain all the new rules to ensure beef is safe, but appears reassured that the government acted adequately to preserve the integrity of the food supply, said farmer John Cross, director of the marketing arm of the livestock commission.
He believes the British beef market has largely recovered.
“That’s not to say there are not a series of residual nagging doubts,” he said.
