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By Tony Emerson
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For the sake of France and the "evolution" of its haute cuisine, chef Alain Passard has decided to dump his grandmother's duck recipe. Discarded, too, are the sweetbreads, the rump steak with oil and pepper, the lamb with savor of harissa--12 signature meat and poultry dishes that earned three stars for Passard's restaurant, L'Arpege, putting it at the pinnacle of the Parisian food chain. Instead, the famous chef aims to tantalize his customers, who pay more than $300 per meal, with "the simple onion, the simple carrot, even a turnip," adorned with flowers, spices, roots and mushrooms. After years of deliberation Passard, 43, decided to "explore a new domain called 'The Vegetable'." Not since the 1650s has a real chef built a cuisine around vegetables, says Passard, and now he has taken it upon himself to save a continent frightened by threats to its meat supply. "The real fallout from mad-cow disease is that we don't have this vegetable-based cuisine to fall back on," says Passard. "Today there's a conflict over mad-cow disease, maybe in 10 or 20 years there'll be a new problem. Well, we'll have that long to create a vegetable cuisine." The veggie menu is, in Passard's view, a matter of European "nutritional security."
Passard has been dismissed as a turnip-hugging nut by Paris critics, but he is only a step ahead of his time. Just a few months after belated government testing began to find more and more cases of mad cow disease in herds all over mainland Europe, the scourge is more than just a scare. Nearly 2,000 cows infected by bovine spongiform encepalopathy have died from Portugal to Germany. So far 86 people have died from the human variant of mad cow in Britain, two in France and one in Ireland. But scientists fear the incurable disease may still be incubating in as many as 136,000 people in Britain, the hardest hit country. Already the mad-cow threat is changing eating habits, increasing the population of vegetarians, reshaping the food industry in favor of "organic" everything, toppling agricultural ministers, giving a huge boost to green parties and shaking a political establishment that had scoffed at the threat of mad cow on the Continent. Most strikingly, a growing consumer rebellion may lead to real reform of the European Union subsidies that encouraged "factory farming," now widely blamed for fueling the epidemic. Political scientist Corinne La Page says French government dithering over the problem has sparked a crisis of confidence in democracy itself. If that overstates the mad-cow effect, it's nonetheless clear that this is not a passing phenomenon. Evoking the Biblical plagues, German organic farmer Helgo Schmidt says that for Europe, "there's a time before BSE, and a time after BSE."
For a vision of how this crisis may play out on the Continent, Europe need look no farther than Britain, where the frightening disease emerged 15 years ago. There, a cycle of media hysteria and official denial has already led to cultural change. Beef sales still dip dramatically with each new report on mad-cow disease. The epidemic helped inspire a boom in organic food businesses, which have survived the end of hysteria. The folks at the Soil Association, which promotes organic farming, say Britain's organic market has grown sixfold since 1990 to more than £600 million. Demand so far outstrips supply that the nation's second largest grocery chain, Sainsbury's, is working to realize the goal of "a totally organic island in the Caribbean." It is discussing an agreement with the Windward Islands--Grenada, Dominica, St. Lucia and St. Vincent--to produce organic bananas, mangoes, coconuts and other fruit for a "guaranteed" British market.
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The notion of a new British empire built around "totally organic" bananas arouses no mirth in London. The tragedies surrounding mad cow and the fear of genetically modified food have even taken the punch out of jokes about Prince Charles's organic farm. Now, the idea of "going organic" seems perfectly logical, and the mood on the Continent is catching up fast. "What we are seeing is a rerun of 1996 in Britain," says Tim Lang, a food-safety professor at Reading University who raised some of the first warnings about BSE in the early 1980s. "People in Europe are overwhelmingly angry that their governments--and those who control the food chain--colluded in the view that this was just a mad British disease."
Now, continental Europe fears it has imported mad-cow disease in tainted British animal feed. The resulting brouhaha is, by all accounts, worse than anything seen in the United Kingdom. Demand for beef has plummeted 47 percent in France, 75 percent in Italy. From Stockholm to Lisbon, many restaurants have taken steak off the menu. The provenance of a T-bone is now treated like the vintage of a wine. "People talk a lot about mad cow," complains Paris butcher Gerard Esnault, 51. "But I think it's the people who have gone a little bit mad."
Anything that is not beef seems to sell. Ostrich farms and importers of kangaroo and crocodile report soaring sales across Europe. Kudu and springbok steaks are showing up in fine restaurants. Stocks of pork and chicken are running low. "We're desperate for 2,000 more pigs a week, but our farmers can't grow them fast enough," says Thomas Dosch, head of Bioland, Germany's biggest organic farmers' cooperative. Germany's 80 equine butchers will make meat and sausages from 70,000 horses this year, twice as many as last year. Bild, the nation's biggest tabloid, recently printed a recipe for a ratlike rodent called the nutria (add red wine and garlic and bake for 70 minutes). Since then, butcher Sven Hdicke in the eastern town of Halle has sold more than 1,000 kilos of nutria.
The next step is vegetarian conversion. Since the first BSE report, market surveys show, the number of self-proclaimed vegetarians in Germany has doubled to 6.6 million. The number of Italian vegetarians has risen from 1.5 million to 2.5 million in the past year. Of course, these converts may not stay converted. But the German branch of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has had a massive run on its vegetarian "starter kits." PETA manager Silke Berenthal says even parents who once feared the group's pro-veggie radicalism are now "calling to ask how we can help them turn their kids into vegetarians." At the venerable Pasteur Institute in Lille, doctor and nutritionist Jean Michel Lecerf says, "Vegetarianism was considered a bit cultish. But to say that you don't eat meat is no longer odd; people understand it."
Forswearing meat has even attained a certain chic. German techno-pop star Blumchen and punk diva Nina Hagen have joined a PETA campaign preaching the meatless diet. The Rome glitterati now flock to Margutta Vegetariana, a high-end vegetarian restaurant near the Piazza di Spagna. A trendy new vegetarian fast-food bar called Tibits has Zurich teens lining up for couscous wraps. And chef Passard's new menu is, in part, designed to make sure the veggie future is not shaped by the wrong hands. "Who runs vegetarian restaurants?" sniffs Passard. "People who aren't professionals. If we chefs can work behind our experience and our stars to map out a real program, that would be fantastic."
Politicians are taking notice. In Sweden, Prime Minister Goran Persson proudly announced he had quit red meat as of December. Italy's vegetarian Health minister, Umberto Veronesi, has banned red meat in school cafeterias. The small farmers' union of French radical Jose Bove scored big in recent elections to a regional agricultural parliament in part by blaming the mad-cow crisis on big agribusiness and government incompetence. The trend is much bigger than Bove. "Europeans were ill-prepared for the first mad-cow crisis, and that unpreparedness helped shape the political debate. Health issues became the primary concern. GM foods, food security, pollution, mad cow, that's what the Europeans want to talk about," says La Page, "They've become political lightning rods."
None more electric than the "factory farm." Media coverage of the mad-cow crisis has undermined the popular myth of the small European farmer, struggling to survive against huge American agribusiness. European Union subsidies, which pay farmers by the bushel or the animal, have fueled the growth of "factory farms" that aim to churn out as many crops or cows as they can. The industrial breeders used to feed cows the cheap, now-banned feed made from ground cow parts that is widely believed to spread BSE. Of course, small farmers get the same subsidies, and used the same feed--but they're getting a pass in the current debate. It is the factory-farm lobby that is blamed for thwarting the creation of a monitoring authority like the U.S. Food and Drug Administration that might have prevented the mad-cow crisis.
This simple story line has set off something of a popular rebellion. Since last year Italy, Germany and Denmark have appointed new ministers of Agriculture--all from the green party or its sisters. They are promising to steer European subsidies away from agribusiness and toward small, organic farms. Bowing to public outrage over mad cow, Germany's Agriculture and Health ministers resigned last month. Chancellor Gerhard Schroder promptly renamed the Agriculture Ministry the Ministry of Consumer Protection, and put a prominent green, Renate Kunast, in charge. "BSE marks the end of old-style farm policy," she vowed. "We're going to put an end to factory farming."
On this point, it seems, much of Europe is now green. An overwhelming 82 percent of Germans support an end to "industrial farming," and 70 percent say they're willing to spend at least 20 percent extra for organic food. Kunast announced that by 2001, Germany would toughen farm monitoring and introduce a subsidy to farmers who switch to organic methods. Her goal: to raise the organic share of total farm production from 2.5 percent today to 20 percent by 2010. Italy has set a similar goal of 25 percent. "Consumers have changed politics," says Hohenheim University nutrition expert Stephan Dabbert. "It's the first time decisions are being made by people on the consumers' side, not the [industrial] farmers'."
Now there is a new image of the yeoman hero. Once treated as hippie freaks, Germany's 11,000 organic farmers are now in high demand. "When we first started, people would give us funny looks," says Helgo Schmidt, who switched his family farm outside Bonn to organic production in 1985, way before this trend took hold. Experts predict at least 3,000 German farmers will go organic this year, as demand booms. Local supermarkets are desperate for Schmidt's tomatoes and arugula, and he is doubling the size of his own farm store. "Now," Schmidt says, "the neighboring farmers are all coming to ask how they can switch, too."
It's not only small businesses. Organic food sales have been growing for years, but spiked upward--by 30 percent in France last year--as a result of mad-cow disease. "The crises only feed the consensus," says Dominique Verot of the National Federation of Organic Farmers. "It's a societal evolution." Anthropologist Annie Hubert of the National Scientific Research Center says more young farmers are turning organic: "They know that's what people will be looking for in years to come."
And big players don't want to be seen as out of touch. At the Agriculture Salon this week in Paris, three big agro businesses (Duc, Charal and France Autruches) will be taking part for the first time in this annual celebration of "reasoned agriculture," featuring events like a children's lesson on "the life of organic bread." Another first-time visitor: McDonald's, the American giant greens love to trash as the ultimate symbol of factory food. "They want to show the public that they're concerned," says Anne Benatot, a salon organizer. "It's the first time we've seen that from bigger companies. It's one of the most political events all year."
It won't end there. Asia and America fear tainted British animal feed has arrived on their shores, and are on the lookout. Nations across Europe are following Britain's lead in incinerating millions of potentially infected cows. And this is only one of many food scandals, from the worm infestation of North Sea fish last year to the exposure of Bavarian pig farmers using forbidden antibiotics last month, to a surprise French ban on various sheep innards last week. "In years to come, we'll see problems with sheep, poultry, even milk," says consumer researcher Jean-Pierre Loisel, "We'll be talking about these things more and more."
Why? Perhaps an increasingly organic society is a more watchful society. "We've lost our sense of security over the food we produce and consume," says Dabbert. "This goes very, very deep." The European organic ethos is a natural development, says Hubert, "because we're rich and we don't have to worry about what we eat tomorrow, we can focus more on how we nourish ourselves and how we treat the planet." With its horrifying symptoms of brain rot, mad cow has provoked "a hysterical, but sociologically understandable, mass-movement reaction" that will dissipate with time, says Hubert. "People develop complicated mechanisms to cope. You grow into accepting risk," as the British have, she says. And if you are a great French chef, or a German green, you may seek "nutritional security" for your nation in the domain of the vegetable.
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