010809 Tourists Wary of Eating French Beef

Paris - During a trip to France 12 years ago, May Osher enjoyed this nation's cuisine to the hilt, eating what she wanted without a second thought.

Not now. During a two-week trip this summer, the teacher from Santa Monica, Calif., and her 13-year-old daughter, Katie, avoided meat for fear of mad cow disease.

“We're scared,” Osher said as the two dined on mushroom tarts and vegetable pate at Aquarius, a vegetarian restaurant in Paris. “We've had a lot of salade nicoise. And oeufs and poisson” - eggs and fish.

The mad cow epidemic has battered France's beef industry, dampening appetites for gastronomic classics like entrecote and rib eye steak, and forcing authorities to ban certain cuts of risky beef, like the T-bone.

Still, restaurants say they have plenty of alternatives for hungry tourists who invade France each summer expecting a foodfest: poultry, fish, pork and even vegetarian dishes.

“If clients don't eat meat, they eat something else,” said Andre Daguin, president of the French Hotel Trade and Industry Union, which represents 80,000 travel-related enterprises in France.

One way resorts and hotels are getting around the mad cow fears is to offer a buffet table.

“We are doing nothing special because one of the strengths of the club is the great choice of food we offer in the buffets,” said Annie Jan of the Club Med resort chain. “Even vegetarians can eat very well at Club Med.”

Near-panic about the safety of beef erupted in France last November after a supermarket chain had to clear its shelves of meat that came from a herd of cattle where mad cow disease was found. Meat sales dropped 30%.

Since then, though, such fears have greatly subsided. Meat consumption has recovered considerably, and is now down only 10% from May 2000, according to OFIVAL, an industrywide beef and poultry association.

Mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, is believed to be caused by a mutated protein that is transmitted through eating pieces of the brain or nervous system of an infected animal. It is linked to a human brain- wasting disease, variant Creutzfeld Jakob Disease, that has so far killed 102 people in Britain since 1995, three in France, one in Ireland and one in Hong Kong.

Jessica Ketcham, who came to Paris to study for a semester, said about a quarter of the 43 students in her university program asked about the disease when they arrived.

“A lot of people were saying, `My mom told me not to eat beef,”' said Ketcham of Baton Rouge, La., who ordered split pea soup, vegetarian lasagna and carrot juice at Piccolo Teatro, a vegetarian restaurant.

Experts say the likelihood of catching the fatal disease appears very low.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advises travelers that the risks cannot be precisely determined, but they appear to be “extremely small” in Britain - where the disease was first identified - and perhaps nonexistent elsewhere.

Milk and milk products are not believed to pose any risk of transmitting the agent that causes mad cow, the CDC says.

The European Union has taken steps to reduce the risk of catching the disease, as have individual nations. France's Food Safety Agency, for example, has banned the use of animal parts - such as the spleen, the intestines and the thymus - in meat products. As a result, delicacies like ris de veau - succulent sweetbreads made from the thymus gland of young cattle - have been whisked off menus.

But dishes like French President Jacques Chirac's favorite, tete de veau - calf's head, served with brains and tongue - are still savored at the president's Elysee Palace and elsewhere.

For the wary, there are still many gourmet options: gigot d'agneau, or roast leg of lamb; escargots, or snails in garlic-butter sauce; chicken, duck, fish, and the bistro favorite of the working class, egg mayonnaise - hard-boiled egg with a large dollop of mayonnaise. And, there's always the dessert cart.

Not everyone is avoiding beef.

“We eat everything,” said Steve Crescenzo, a tourist from Chicago, as he bought sausage and cheese sandwiches near Notre Dame Cathedral. “If a cow walked up to me, I'd eat it.”

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