Byline: Tokyo
One of my favorite cheap Tokyo dishes has been the chipped beef on rice bowl. Yoshinoya has stopped serving it. Now they have substituted pork or chicken for beef and the other beef bowl restaurants in Tokyo have followed suit. Why?
This is because of the professor, the slob and the bureaucrat. The professor is Stanley Prusiner who demonstrated the existence of prions in the early 1980s. Prions are pieces of protein, folded in a way that allows them to be duplicated and yet makes them lethal because they fill in spaces and block processes that require functional proteins. Prusiner showed that his prions were the proximate cause of Kuru, a brain wasting disease transmitted by eating human brain, and Jacob-Creutzfeld, another brain-wasting disease of older people.
About the same time a butcher in a small town in England (his name and the name of his town are unknown to me) was doing his butchering in a traditional, but non-standard way. He was chopping cow brains and spinal nerves on the same chopping block that he used for all his beef. Unknown to the butcher, the cows he was butchering had been fed sheep brains that were infected with a brain-wasting disease. The prevailing scientific wisdom was that diseases like that don’t cross species lines.
In the early 1990s, 23 young men died from Jacob-Creutzfeld disease. Young people were not common candidates for this disease and 23 deaths was unheard of. When all 23 came from the same town and the same neighborhood, the butcher’s operation was singled out.
Since Prusiner had already discovered prions and prions had been connected to brain-wasting disease in cattle, the world quickly learned about Mad Cow Disease.
When the Japanese found madcow in Japanese cattle, a few years ago, they began a 100% inspection system. When madcow was found in the U.S., we immediately did nothing. After six months, an unknown bureaucrat in the U.S. Department of Agriculture decided to test a sample of 1 per thousand at-risk cattle. The bureaucrat also made it illegal for any rancher to test his/her own cattle and sell the beef on the basis of 100% testing. The logic was that 100% testing by a few ranchers would imply that all other beef was too risky.
The consequence is that Japan can’t import American beef. The owner of Yoshinoya made the public claim that his chipped beef bowl only tasted right with American beef. Other beef bowl restaurants of lesser culinary stature were forced to follow suit.
So, I don’t get chipped beef over rice this year due to the professor, the sloppy butcher, the USDA bureaucrat and, of course, the gourmet CEO of Yoshinoya.