Late 80s/90s kids - were you allowed to eat beef?

[magicalkitty]

90s kid here and I was not allowed to ever eat beef as a child. This was due to a fear my parents had about mad cow disease so it was never in the house.

I am a vegetarian now anyway, but I think I've only eaten beef once in my life, at a BBQ in my early teens.

Just wondered if other kids were also banned from eating beef, or if my parents were just odd?

We ate it almost every bloody meal. No one else wanted it so it was cheap.

Born in 85. Ate beef, was just standard fare in our house.

I stopped eating beef in the 90s, but was already a young adult at that point.

I think a lot of people were put off with the realisation that there had been contamination in the food chain for so long. There was a genuine concern that a lot of people were going to get sick and die.

I avoided giving it to my children (or eating it myself) until the threat of BSE had passed. I used lamb or pork mince instead of beef, and cut out all beef products from our diet.
As there is no way to destroy prions by cooking - they even survive cremation - I wasn’t prepared to play Russian roulette just to enjoy a steak.

Me too. I remember checking cat food as well to make sure we weren’t giving our cats beef.

No we ate it. By the time we all found out about it it would have been too late anyway, and after that point it would have been much safer than it had been.

Yes. I don't think we ate much beef as a family, but no one cared if I got a Big Mac for example.

I was born in 91, I wasn't allowed beef at all growing up. I think I was 13 or 14 before I tried it for the first time - I still hate the taste and texture of steak/mince etc

I do remember this and that a couple of my friends weren’t allowed to

Born in1985 we had beef most nights 🙂

We didn't eat it at that time, no

I was born 79 and we ate beef all the way through my childhood and teens.

Born in '79 and we didn't eat beef.
I then became veggie in the mid 90s for a few years so while I love burgers now, I'm not very good at remembering beef exists iyswim.

I stopped buying beef and never fed it to my DDs.

No, I was born in 93 and I wasn’t allowed beef until I was a teen so late 2000s. All of my friends seemed to be allowed though, but I grew up with my grandparents who I guess were just more worried still?

I think my parents went through a short phase of avoiding it, though I remember more clearly the period in 1986 when outdoor grown food was at risk of being radioactive.

My nan cooked it for us every now and again but my mother never cooked meat apart from chicken anyway. ('86)

I remember in the mid 90s it was really in the news headlines and then my mum decided we would no longer eat it. It was years before we ate it again as a family and even then mum worried it was unsafe.

I had my first baby in 1995. I didn't give her beef or anything with beef in.

We had beef all the time. The mad cow disease scare was just that, a scare, part of the human need to always believe we are facing the biggest crisis in history and are about to face catastrophe.

Before mad cow disease there was AIDS, before that there was atomic annihilation. Before that there was Hitler. Napoleon was an existential threat, witchcraft was a real danger.

After mad cow disease Islamic terrorists were going to be the end of us. Now there's climate change.

It's a weird part of our nature that we seem to need to believe we are at a particularly key moment in history. Usually this expresses itself in us stoking fear that unless we take drastic action right now then we're fucked as a species. This is why I don't give two hoots about climate change - it's just part of a long tradition of things designed to scare us that actually turned out to be nothing. (Well not "nothing" because some people will die, I just mean our fears are always grossly over-exaggerated.)

There was definitely a lot of concern/panic about beef products. We had roast beef but not burgers. After the initial panic, it was "mechanically claimed" beef that was supposed to be the issue.

It wasn’t exactly that we weren’t allowed - we didnt because my parents didn’t buy it. We ate chicken, lamb and pork. Dinner was put in front of you and there was no spare cash for McDonalds or anything like that.

I hadn’t actually thought about it but there was definitely a stretch of years there without any beef.

Never had beef in the house but wasn't restricted from eating it at friends houses. I don't remember it being a big deal though, or ever even discussed really, we just never had it.

God you've just unlocked a memory of my mum checking the cat food for beef! We weren't allowed to eat it for a good while - we hadn't been big beef eaters previously anyway but McDonald's etc on a day out was banned.

We definitely used to eat it.

All you who didn’t made the right choice! Prions are terrifying and the impact can come decades later.

Also just thinking about the food chain generally and how BSE came about repulses me now.