Essay on Mad Cow Disease accompanying an exhibition by the artist Roger Hiorns at the Hayward Gallery, London

“Like a virus, but different–the BSE pathogen is coded by the host, so the cow’s immune system doesn’t detect it……It affects then destroys the cen-tral nervous system. Believe incubation period is 4 years.”

On December 1st 1988 I began my first notes on BSE —Bovine Spongiform Encepalopathy—in one of those hardback foolscap notebooks that in pre-computer days, BBC journalists were advised to write all their notes and contacts’ details.

They start with a record of a conversation I’d just had with Farming Today’s reporter and presenter Dylan Winter.  He’d read an article in the Veterinary Record journal showing that if you injected tissue from cows infected with BSE into the brains of several sets of genetically different mice, one set, with a particular genetic make-up, developed spongey brains. He’d also been following the doings of what was then an obscure Whitehall working party headed by biologist, Sir Richard Southwood. That had been set up earlier in the year to consider whether there was any risk to human health from the newly discovered disease. Dylan knew he was on to a unusual story.

So, I set off on my own journey into the ABCs of food and farming, disease and power. I didn’t know then that it was going to be a story that would reshape British attitudes —and not just to food.  Or that it would reshape me. I’d had my journalistic damascene moment in New York when I’d realised that writing about food was a powerful and mostly un-trodden way to understand the world. I’d then spent nearly three years at a magazine there investigating the collusion between government and commercial interests. But the USA is a big place and it was hard to get close enough to any story to see day to day how that collusion works in all its subtle ways. For this story I was in London, working for the BBC, and physically just a walk away from where decisions were being made.

Many scientists now think that BSE first appeared sporadically amongst dairy cattle in the 1970s—but the animals were sent to slaughter and no post-mortems were done. The cow that got the story going was on a Sussex farm. In 1984 the farmer called in the vet because one of his cows was tottering around the yard, arching her back, shaking her head from side to side.  She was put down and her head sent to the government’s Central Veterinary Laboratory (CVS), then the most important centre for the diagnosis of disease.

The CVS took her brain apart and discovered something new: Bovine Spongiform Encepalopathy—spongey brain in cows.  By mid-85 the CVS was seeing other cows with the same symptoms. But they didn’t officially notify the Ministry of Agriculture about the disease until June 87.  By then there were four dairy herds in the country with tottering, head-tossing cows.

Where had the disease come from? When I stumbled on the story the dominant theory was their feed—( it’s still the dominant theory.) I was surprised to learn that for decades cows had been eating the mashed (rendered is the technical word) remains of sheep. And some of those sheep probably had scrapie, a disease similar to BSE, and known to have been in British flocks for at least 200 years.

So, one of the first people I spoke to was geneticist Dr Alan Dickinson who’d been studying scrapie for decades. He’d been the founding director of the Agricultural Research Council & Medical Research Council’s

Neuropathogenesis Unit at Edinburgh University, one of just two centres in the UK that specialised in these unusual diseases. But he was hard to find. Contrary to what I’d been told he was not longer at the unit. I tracked him down at home

‘“I took early retirement last year. I was tired of pushing water uphill. Fifteen years ago I was refused permission to carry out tests to see if scrapie-like organisms could be passed from sheep to cattle”

He’d found himself an early victim of the new orthodoxy in government circles—that research couldn’t be done in response to scientific curiosity, it must be useful to the market. Or as he said in 2001 in his evidence to the BSE inquiry :

“one element of the BSE disaster lay in the slow politicisation of the

Research Councils. ..the political intention, from 1971 [the Heath government] was to curtail expenditure by the Research Councils and redirect their research choices into so-called ‘consumer/contractor’ priorities and leading eventually to `corporate planning’ styles of management.

There’d been no evidence until that Sussex cow that scrapie could jump species. But, as Dr Dickinson said, any attempt to find evidence had been actively discouraged by the two ministries funding the UK’s neuropathogenesis research.

As I phone-bashed on I met a lot of obfuscation and dead ends as well as discovering facts that surprised me:  cows, it turned out, weren’t only being fed sheep, they were also eating other cows. They’d been turned into cannibals. All perfectly legal. There were chicken droppings in the feed too, along with whatever slaughterhouse waste was available that week. Not that farmers knew that’s what they were buying in their sacks of concentrate. Years before the government had given into the animal feed companies desire not to list ingredients on the bag.  Soya beans, chickens, sheep, chicken droppings or cows—it was all protein on the label.

But why were cows— herbivores —being fed animal proteins? I interviewed MAFF’S chief vet Keith Meldrum. It was basic economics, he said—without cheap, protein-packed feed, milk production wouldn’t be “cost effective.”

.. so for many years cattle have been given a supplement containing all types of material, mostly in fact, vegetable proteins’

Why he was so confident that it had been mostly vegetable protein wasn’t clear, but Mr Meldrum was all confidence. As he told me before I turned on the microphone, he didn’t know why I was making such a fuss, doing a story that just stirred people up for no good reason. British meat was perfectly safe.

As I discovered talking later to ruminant specialists, when cows are fed on grass and hay they produce milk at the rate they’d need to feed a calf or two. But supercharge their diets with concentrated protein and you could treble or quadruple production. Keeping milk cheap. And cheap food, at any cost, had been UK government policy since the end of WWII.

The questions continued to unfold.  If, as Keith Meldrum told me, cows had been fed sheep and the other carnivorous dainties for years before BSE appeared, why had the disease appeared now? The answer was also related to “cost effectiveness”.  In the late 70s the animal feed industry had changed the way it processed slaughterhouse waste from a high temperature system to a low temperature one. And the prion—the DNA-less, misfolded, infectious protein that appears to cause scrapie, BSE and similar neurodegenerative diseases—is hard to kill. As far as I could discover, the new money-saving processes had been introduced without any serious tests on what effect they might have on the safety of the feed.

But so far this had been a story about animals. As I worked my way through a long list of contacts—most of them unwilling to talk to me—it became clear that scientists who knew most were worried about the disease affecting us. The government’s Southwood working party was early evidence of that (though the following year they’d finally report that it was “most unlikely that BSE would have any implications for human health”)

But what serious reason was there to think that humans were at risk from BSE when we’d all, apart from vegetarians, probably had more than a taste or two of scrapie? The man I was told I should talk to was Dr Hugh Fraser who for years, along with Alan Dickinson, had been studying scrapie & was now the one of the country’s leading experts on BSE. He agreed to talk to me at the Edinburgh neuropathogenesis unit.

“ The fact that the disease has occurred in cattle was a surprise ….Can it be passed on to humans? We’d be quite wrong to be complacent . My own prejudices are that the likelihood of it being a human health hazard is remote. But remote is not negative. We don’t know. That’s all we can say. But, it would seem sensible to remove the infectious matter: the spleen and other nervous tissue from beef carcasses before they go into the human food chain…. though we need to know more about the meat processing industry”

What Hugh Fraser wouldn’t let me record was his answer to my question about whether he’d changed his own diet as a result of his research.  The answer was, Yes. Like a number of his colleagues he no longer ate meat pies or sausages or tinned sauces that might contain beef offal.

They’re the processed foods most likely to be made from what the industry called MRM…mechanically recovered meat.

Like Hugh Fraser I wanted to know more about the meat processing industry but the industry wasn’t talking to journalists. But David Roberts, chief trading standards officer in Shropshire, knew a lot about the industry and was happy to be interviewed.  He described the hydraulic machines that crushed animal carcasses after the butcher’s knife had removed all the meat reachable by a blade. Bone, spinal cord, gristle were all crushed into a grey slurry—MRM, used, perfectly legally, “ in a wide variety of meat products”.

So, infected tissues were going into meat products that were being made into foods most commonly eaten by children. In those pre-Jamie Oliver campaigning days, the cheapest MRM foods were on the daily menu of almost every school in Britain. .

This didn’t matter the Chief Vet told me because

“we believe that farmers are complying with their legal and moral obligations and are reporting suspect BSE cases to the ministry at the earliest opportunity”

—- so, all BSE infected cows would be slaughtered and burned.

The drawback to Mr Meldrum’s happy complacency was that, first, infected cows were infectious for years before symptoms were obvious. And second, the ministry was only paying farmers half the compensation for a cow reported as having BSE as they’d get for one slaughtered as a “casualty”. For every BSE animal they reported they lost £300.

It wasn’t till February 1990 that farmers stopped being incentivised to ignore BSE and got 100 per cent compensation. And not till November 1989 did it become illegal to put spinal cord and other possible infectious tissues into MRM slurry.

As two of the country’s Chief Medical Officers Sir Donald Acheson and then Sir Kenneth Kalman reassured us “British beef is safe to eat” and John Gummer, minister of agriculture force-fed his daughter a hamburger to prove how safe it was, the scientific evidence built that BSE was moving on to other species…goats, deer, cats. That didn’t change the government message.

Even when 19 year old Stephen Churchill died in 1995 of a new variant of the rare degenerative disease Creutzfeldt Jacobs Disease (CJD) the government denied there could be any link with BSE.

In March 1996 the mainstream media declared themselves “shocked” to hear minister of health Stephen Dorrell announce in Parliament that BSE and the new disease vCJD were “probably” linked.

A week later, in spite of every effort by the government and the meat industry to explain that “probable” link as a result of long discarded policies, the European Union banned all exports of British beef.  What both government and industry had tried to protect through ten years of obfuscation, lies, hypocrisy, intimidation and double think had come to pass anyway.

It was ten years that triggered a deep, continuing public disillusion with politicians and experts. For ten years the message was that British beef was safe. But people had been watching cows go mad on their nightly news programmes. . They saw that herbivores had been turned into cannibals and in interviews from Ullapoole to St Austell they told reporters it was ‘unnatural’. Numerous experts lectured us on the absurd naiveté of such a view, but we’d all seen what we’d seen, and it was unnatural.  When Tony Blair and his successors tried to enthuse us about GM foods, they discovered the power of the cynicism government had created.

But good also came out of the multi-billion-pound horror of BSE. Suddenly it wasn’t just the policy wonks who were concerned about the food system. Everyone had seen that cheap food had a cost. A cost worth paying?  It’s a discussion we’re still having, and it all began with BSE.