Heinz - is this for real? >>Zoos raided as German food scares grow
By Imre Karacs in Berlin
28 January 2001
What a sad place the little city zoo in Berlin's Kreuzberg district is.
Children weep for their missing favourites; Gustav the gander, his
wings drooping in sorrow, pines for his harem. All the other geese
have vanished in recent days, along with four ducks and seven hens.
The staff have eaten them.
Nothing seems sacred any more as Germans, confronted by empty
shelves at the supermarkets, go foraging for food. With BSE beef
already off the menu, followed by sausages and now pork, filling a
German belly is becoming nearly impossible. As hunger grips, no one,
not even the dedicated Kreuzberg zoo keepers, will object to a bit of
free-range poultry.
Other options are fast running out. Even those still willing to risk steak
are finding that restaurants are no longer serving it, while meat
counters have at best only a token display of browning beef.
After the first scare in November, shoppers switched to game. Now
the consumers are being informed that venison is also dodgy,
because deer in German forests are apparently fed on the same kind
of bone-meal fodder that has brought BSE to cattle.
Lamb is to be avoided, scientists warn, because of scrapie. Battery
chickens come laced with salmonella and occasionally dioxin. Cats
and dogs, in case anyone should fancy them, are out because of the
low-grade beef they consume.
Other pets, such as hamsters and guinea-pigs, are equally
unwholesome because they, too, have been unwittingly munching on
the remnants of animal carcasses for years.
That, more or less, leaves fish, largely unknown to German cuisine
apart from the roll-mop variety. Fresh fish, in any case, is hard to find.
There was also pork, of course, prepared in hundreds of ingenious
ways from the humble fried chop to Helmut Kohl's beloved Saumagen,
or stuffed pig's stomach. No German would starve while there was
pork around in abundance.
Unfortunately, officials discovered last week that millions of Bavarian
pigs have for years been fattened up with the help of illegal drugs,
including the sort of anabolic steroids that enabled East German
female athletes to swim as fast as men, at the price of growing hair
on their chests.
To someone who does not wish to repeat the feat, pork is looking
rather unappetising.
It is bad news for most Germans, who would rather die than become
vegetarian. What are they supposed to eat? That is the question
preoccupying much of the nation's media, with television channels
scheduling special programmes every day in search of the elusive
answer. But so far, consumers have only learnt from these what they
cannot eat, not what they can.
That leaves Alfred Biolek, Germany's best-known TV chef, with the
task of educating the masses. Mr Biolek is trying to wean people off
their traditional greasy meat and stodgy veg. Viewers learnt the
secrets of gnocchi with chanterelle mushrooms last week. They got
the recipe for sauerkraut soup a week earlier.
What people can eat is also a political question in certain sensitive
areas. For instance, the German parliament's canteen appears to have
banned both beef and pork. Its latest offerings include cabbage stew,
elk ragout, and organic vegetarian cannelloni.
Beef has also been declared verboten in the armed forces,
presumably on the grounds that you cannot have mad soldiers. But
too much muscle has never done the troops any harm, so pork is still
allowed.
Everyone else must get used to elk, reindeer, ostrich, crocodile and
other exotic meats which have recently turned up at the shops, or go
hunting. In this frenzy, the sheep in Kreuzberg are probably safe for
the moment, but the rabbits had better watch out.
Old Gustav, by the way, survived the zoo keepers' feast because he
was thought to be too chewy. <<
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