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?

Born 1981. We always ate beef and still do. My dad was disappointed he couldn't buy t-bone steak for quite a long while.

I think putting the AIDS crisis in with worries about nuclear annihilation is a bit off, whichever PP that was. The AIDS crisis was absolutely a tragic scale of governmental/medical professional mismanagement.

yes we ate it. But my parents always ensured it was locally sourced.

I was born first half of the 80s. We gave up beef for a few years in my adolescence/early teens (due to its cost we only really ate mince/burgers anyway which were meant to be the worst ones). Can't really remember how/when it crept back on to the menu (though burgers never did).

No it can’t.

not true, while some countries won’t touch British blood donations, it is not correct that no other country in the world will touch them.

Very very occasionally we are beef. My parents were semi vegetarian phase anyway

No, not really. In fact I put the CJD outbreak down to my long term vegetarianism from the age of about seven into my thirties. I eat some meat and fish now, but no red meat. I was very worried about CJD as a kid (born in 83) and we stopped eating beef in my house when the whole thing hit the headlines. However I read recently that very few people ever died of it- circa 300 in the UK. That said one of those people was a close friends uncle... I didn't know him until not long before his uncle died in 2000, but it made me feel justified in my vegetarianism!

I had my first baby in 1995 and we did give her things with beef in, once she was weaned obviously, for the reasons given by @Mumof2teens79 i.e. If there was anything in the scare we would all have been infected years ago and by the time it became a concern standards were improved.

We ate it as normal, on a 3 week rota with chicken and pork for Sunday lunch and at BBQ's

My DC were born in the 90s and we continued to eat beef.

Good quality, well reared beef from a good butcher, who sells Mince cut and minced from a while beast is entirely different from what is sold out of a truck at a market. I question the provenance of all meat that does not come from a reliable, named source. I would also never eat a burger/hot dog from a burger van or touch a shish kebab - off those rotating things made for salmonella parties.

We were banned from all beef, including gelatine sweets, for years. Didn’t stop me sneaking bags of haribo at every opportunity, I still have a complete inability to resist chewy sweets which I put down to them being “forbidden” when I was young.

Born 1989 and was never stopped from having beef. I do remember the mad cow disease headlines though.

Shows how dumb I am, I can’t give blood in America so I assumed it was all true?

How do you get CJD then?

Do you have a source for your claims @Notamum12345577 ?

NHS states that “It appears not everyone who's exposed to BSE-infected meat will go on to develop vCJD.”

Also that 1 in 2000 people are infected, but that food controls appear to have worked to stop further infection.

It appears that to develop the disease you need to both be infected and have a certain gene yourself, and that it is fortunately rare.

But it is linked to BSE infected meat.

https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/creutzfeldt-jakob-disease-cjd/causes/

We are beef mince loads as kids in the 70s and 80s because it was affordable (frozen obviously) compared to other meat. Those beef and onion pies from the chip shop were also a favourite because fish was more expensive.
By the time CJD was a thing I was buying my own food and had upgraded to locally produced meat where possible and just though if I was going to have it it was too late to worry about it so just carried on. I remember that chicken seemed to become more available and affordable at that time though so probably not as much as before.

I grew up on a farm which had cattle so yeah we never stopped eating beef....

Boycotted McDs for a while!

All the medical literature I’ve read states that BSE-infected meat is “believed to be linked to” or “thought to trigger” vCJD - so not entirely conclusive, and that around 95% of cases of vCJD cannot be linked to beef consumption.

Born in 1986, we ate beef as far as I know. We didn’t eat freezer food or fast food though, so perhaps my parents thought that fresh mince and steak was fine.

Ahh, prions, they were the days!

I think stopping eating beef at that juncture was pointless and reactionary, any contaminated beef was no longer in the food-chain when it was realised that feeding ruminants meat wasn't a brilliant idea. Any potential human infection had already occurred by that point.

I was an adult then and was just slightly annoyed that unsound farming practices and the resulting panic meant I couldn't enjoy a rib of beef or t-bone for about two years!

Very few people developed vCJD.

Born in 85! I remember seeing about 'mad cow disease' on the news but my Dad said that we would have already got it if we were going to so there was no point stopping eating beef 🤣

Born mid 80s. My family kept eating it but I stopped. I hated beef (my mum cooked it to death, it was dark brown and dry and chewy and awful) so the whole mad cow disease was a brilliant excuse. Looking back I'm amazed my mum let me but I guess there was enough doubt about BSE to let me get away with eating something different from the rest of the family.

Ate it several times a week

My mum doesn't like chicken so we had beef a lot.

As a parent of small children at the time I stopped serving "beef products" but we did still eat good quality whole pieces of meat . (I even minced my own for a while). I also did the same with other types of meat.

Yep - born very late 80s.
We ate beef all the time - minced beef in spag bol, cottage pie, burgers, roast beef.

Born early 80s. DM stopped buying beef early 90s when the story broke and never bought it again. Half the reason is that she likes cows and a particular cow that she once lived near, but she kept up the BSE/ CJD moralising long term.

It felt very rebellious to start buying beef when I went to uni at the end of the 90s after not having been allowed to eat it for half my childhood.

It's still not worth mentioning that I buy beef or feed it to my children!

We ate it but I remember being terrified of mad cow disease!

Remember the man feeding his small child a burger to " prove" beef was safe?

Fun fact.. I cannot give blood due to having a blood transfusion in the 80s in case I have CJD