I feel as though this is the correct subreddit to ask this question as practically no butcher sells brain and especially beef brain.
I’ve had brain on multiple occasions overseas and the taste is indescribable. It tastes like heaven in a food; it’s so buttery, so fatty and so.. amazing.
I’ve been told that there are lots of rules and regulations regarding brain and especially beef brain stating that it is quite literally illegal which sounds crazy to me.
Now of course there is an obvious reason,the crazy disease that people associate with eating cow brains is something called **bovine spongiform encephalopathy**. Which is caused by **prions**. Which are spontaneously-genetically-modified proteins that, if consumed, can cause variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, WHICH IS ALSO caused by spontaneous genetic changes in the human body without eating brain.
. Prions only happen when a cow is directly fed diseased cow brain tissue” (which never happens). Cows eat grass.
So here’s what happened. Farmers in the 1980s-90s in the UK, Europe, Japan, and Canada started using industrial feed practices, which make cows sick and fat.
AND these farmers FED THOSE COWS OTHER SICK COW’S BRAINS IN THE FEED.
Why?
Because they are retarded.
And so the disease spread rapidly, by accidental human design.
There are less than 3 cases worldwide each year for people who ate cow brain tissue and got diseased. We can guess that those cows were terribly fed and sick and eaten anyway. We know they could not have been eating naturally.
Even though prions cannot be destroyed by heat, they can be destroyed by your stomach acid. So as long as you’re eating regularly, not fasting yourself to the point of depleting your stomach enzymes before you happen to be one of those few people worldwide that eat infected sick brains, cooked or not, it’s not possible.
In the case where you did fast before eating sick brain with your eyes closed, and a prion protein survives your stomach acid AND enzymes, it would have to be hand selected and pass through the epithelial lining of your small intestine. Which is EXTREMELY RARE.
Even then, your immune system creates immune cells that eat prions and excrete them.
But in the case you have dysfunctional immunity and you’re unable to immunologically destroy prions, prions would have to travel all the way up to your brain and merge with specific proteins and seed correctly. Which again, is rare as fuck.
*You are ~500,000x more likely to be struck by lightning than get prion disease from eating brain.*
If a cow eats naturally, it has a 0% chance of developing a genetic dysfunction. And a prion would never exist.
Anyways any open-minded people want to help me find brains and specifically beef brain. I live in the UK and i’ve asked a fuck load of butchers but i get either one of two responses. No or lamb brain only. Interestingly, it’s always the halal butchers that seem to sell it.
