Preppers are not zombies, and shouldn’t eat brains.
I imagine this is not a controversial or difficult-to-follow suggestion, but it’s also not a joke… preppers need to be VERY careful when processing game meat to not cut into the brain area or the spine.
Opening up the cranium or the spine around meat you intend to eat can have catastrophic and tragic consequences. There’s also some prion contamination in the lymph nodes. People don’t intentionally eat lymph nodes though; they look to the butcher like random bits of non-edible connective tissue. Here’s why.
Spice, Why Should Preppers Avoid Cutting Into Their Game Animal’s Spines?
Chronic wasting disease (CWD). Kuru. Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE, Mad Cow). Scrapie. Variant Creutzfeld-Jacob disease (vCJD).
All of the diseases named above are prion diseases. Prions aren’t living things like bacteria. They’re proteins. The problem is that they are otherwise normal proteins that are folded wrong; and once they’re in your cells they cause other copies of this protein that you make to fold wrong too, creating more prions. The prions interfere with neural function, causing a lot of brain cells to die and eventually leading to death.
The bad news is, prions are way tougher than living things. Heating to food cooking temperatures doesn’t destroy them. They last for a very long time on surfaces, even outside in the weather. Basically you’ve got to treat them with strong chemicals to destroy them, which doesn’t exactly work if you’re worried about prions in your dinner.
Avoidance is best. The prions are concentrated in the nervous tissue; brains and spinal cord. There’s also some in the lymph nodes, little inconspicuous ‘inner bits’ that are scattered throughout the mammal. Not opening the skull or vertebral column and removing the meat cuts without casually including stuff that looks like ‘junk’ does a pretty good job of avoiding prions.
Example: Eating Brains (Or Contaminating Your Meat With Spinal Matter) Can Kill You
Anybody of a certain age can remember the huge “Mad Cow” problem that England had back in the 1990’s.
Mad Cow is a disease known to science as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), and it’s a prion disease. The big issue with it is that it can be passed on to humans who have eaten an infected cow’s flesh.
In the United Kingdom, between 1986 and 2001 more than 180,000 cattle were infected and 4.4 million slaughtered during the eradication program. 143 humans were confirmed to have developed variant Creutzfeld-Jacob disease in Britain, with many more cases suspected.
The most common way of getting infected, as a human, is if you eat parts of the cow that have been contaminated by tissues from the brain area and the spinal column… however, you can get infected (although it is far less likely) by eating any part of an infected cow. Blood access – such as by handling brains, spinal cord, or lymph nodes with hands with cracked skin – can also transmit the disease.
Closer To Home
Now most people don’t think “eat brains” when they think deer meat, rather they think of steaks, ground meat and jerky. Still, you have to be careful how you process the carcasses. This is especially true in areas where herd-wide disease problems are occurring – like most of the U.S..
Chronic wasting disease (CWD) is a disease of hoofstock wildlife currently spreading through North America. Deer and elk are heavily infected in some areas, and antelope and sheep aren’t clean either. It’s infiltrating into Missouri as we speak, and the Conservation Department monitors the deer harvest every year to keep an eye on it.
Can people get CWD? It’s not proven yet, but other primates do. Some researchers at Calgary started feeding and introducing by skin wounds meat from CWD deer to monkeys. After about five years, all the monkeys tested were in the process of developing CWD, and some of them were beginning to show symptoms. Since skin wounds caused infection, it’s likely that open wounds on a butcher could pick it up from an infected animal. (1)
CWD as a prepper problem
The CWD of deer and elk is thought to be a variant of the same prion that causes Mad Cow disease in cattle, and Mad Cow does get transmitted to people who eat the cattle. It kills them (cattle and people) through neurodegeneration. It is also thought to be essentially the same prion that causes kuru in people. Kuru, called the ‘laughing disease’ used to be a major killer among the Fore people of Papua New Guinea. The Fore mostly passed it along by ritual cannibalism, but it is suspected they got it originally by eating sheep contaminated with the sheep version, scrapie.
So, even though there’s no human transmission of CWD proven to date, you wouldn’t catch me eating one of those deer. Since many preppers have eating wildlife as part of their plans for some scenarios, in my eyes that makes CWD relevant to preppers.
Also, since it’s in wild hoofstock and all hoofstock seem to pass these prions around, cattle might pick it up from them. Monitoring for and vigorous culling of cattle with Mad Cow has made it very rare in the current population of cattle. The disease is still there in the wild populations though, so it’s ready to make a comeback if vigilance falters.
I LOVE Head Cheese… Do I Have To Stop Making/Eating It?
Well, on the one hand, YUCK! Head cheese is, in this reporter’s opinion, something I wouldn’t feed to my dog, let alone eat for myself.
Having said that, as long as your head cheese stays away from the actual brain, spinal materials, and lymph nodes, it’s safe (if somewhat disgusting to me) to eat.
Commercially manufactured head cheese is not made out of brains. It’s made but out of the musculature on the hog’s face, as well as other non-prime parts of the animal, including things like heart, tongue, hoofmeat, etc. They don’t intentionally use lymph nodes; but given the harvesting procedure I wouldn’t say there are none in there.
It’s tied together, generally, with some kind of gelatinized glop to make a “meat product” that is technically fit to eat (if you are into that sort of thing).
Eating Brains: The Wrap Up
Yes, we know that very few of you out there actually eat brains, and most of you probably don’t process your own meat.
Having said that, many books out there that talk about “natural tanning” talk about using brains in the tanning process. With the prevalence of prion diseases today, that’s a really, really dangerous idea.
Best case is just to stay away from brains, spinal area, and lymph nodes when processing game, it’s just the safe thing to do. Cross cuts through the spine are one butchering method that should be left behind.
p.s. by Spice: I tried some brains (scrambled and fried) many years ago. You’re not missing anything worthwhile, imo.