Deer Neck

The problem with the neck is it contains the spinal cord, which, along with the brain and lymph nodes, is one of the tissues most likely to contain the prions which cause Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD). Prions are neither bacteria, virus, nor fungus. They are proteins that are not “alive”, and yet they replicate themselves and are even transmissible between generations of hosts. They are what cause brain disorders like Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) and Mad Cow Disease (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE)). These are all versions of Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathy (TSE). OK, that’s it for the acronyms.

The brain, which floats in cerebrospinal fluid, shrinks. Glial cells, the janitors, are removing it cell by cell and the volume is replaced by more fluid. If you are a cow, you probably got this because the factory farm you live in recycled the brains and spine of other slaughtered cows back into your feed and some of those cows had BSE. Scientists got upset about BSE because an untreatable prion based disease could make a spectacular pandemic if it made the jump to humans. Farmers got upset because the scientists made them slaughter 3.7 million cattle. Over a hundred British people who ate beef with BSE came down with CJD. 

An outbreak of CJD in a tribe of humans in Papa New Guinea was traced to the ritual consumption of family members’ brains. Cannibalism and eating brains are commonly held, by many cultures, to be pretty gross. I see no obvious reason for this. After watching a movie about surviving a plane crash in the mountains and reading some Ann Rice books, I figure it makes about as much sense to eat dead people as it does to eat any other dead thing. More, if you have some emotional or spiritual attachment to them. Look, I'm not considering it, I'm just saying I can understand how a culture could develop the idea of having this intimate connection with a dead person, and as the dead person, I would like the idea of my body being used by my loved ones, being part of them, living on in them. As for brains, well it's mostly fat, and there are plenty of recipes from all over the world that make perfectly delightful dishes out of neural tissue.

It's interesting that our gag reflex is triggered by socially transmitted beliefs. You don't have to have gotten food poisoning from a family member’s brain to feel nauseous about eating one. We each walk around with a library of associations and appetites that we get from a mixture of personal experience, contemporary branding, and ancient cultural biases with mysterious origins. Maybe there is some wisdom in the bias against eating brains that was triggered by TSEs. I also get how eating people could be socially problematic in a food insecure environment, what they call a slippery slope.

There are zero cases of known CWD transmission to humans. This feels less comforting when you consider that, in humans they call it CJD and there are 350 new cases every year in the US, all with mysterious origins. Also, there might be a 50 year latency between transmission and detection. They say everyone in Britain was exposed to MCD prions, and that the epidemic the scientists were worried about might be well underway.

In Texas there are a few places where they have discovered CWD in deer. If you take a deer in one of those places, you must bring the brain to a testing facility where they will record it and let you know if it's contaminated. 

It does not matter how long you cook your meat, prions don't mind heat. They are stable in soil. They are absorbed into plants. There's no way to clean them out. Once infectious prions are concentrated enough in the environment, in theory, you won’t have to eat infected tissue to acquire them. I write this from the time of quarantine in the first wave of Coronavirus, so the possibility of a prion based pandemic with no hope of vaccine or even decontamination is terrifying.

My doe was young and healthy looking, shot in a region where they have not discovered CWD and do not advise testing, and there are lots of great recipes for slow cooking deer neck, but I just don’t want to cook anything with the spinal cord still in it.

It's impossible to cut all the meat out from around vertebrae and frustrating to attempt. The erector spinae and multifidae are high quality meat, thousands of hard working stabilizing strands that make that crazy contraption work. Vertebre are islands of compression floating in a sea of tension. 

Consider replacing those cables with something that could shorten and lengthen and that’s how a spine works. This design can also take a lot of weight.

Except vertebrae are crazy shaped. They have these wings called facets that attach to muscles. Being farther away from the center of rotation gives them pulling leverage. These muscles are always working, so, like the psoas (tenderloin), they are rich and tender. The bone imparts a richer flavor, and I braise bone-in whenever possible. I've eaten the spinal cord itself in the past. It's waxy. You get it on your lips and it's like chapstick. It would probably make good chapstick, except for the prions.

I tried to get the cord out of a two foot section of neck.  Factories do it like this:

I can't split the spine in half like that, much as I would love to. I tried jamming the tip of a honing steel down a short section to shove it out the other end but there are too many nerve roots that exit between the vertebrae and I started worrying about contamination from the resulting mess. So I gave up and hacked away.

Alot got left behind. It drives me crazy, having gotten it all the way from the dirt in San Saba to become a disposal problem. I have to keep this in the garage fridge until garbage day so it doesn't stink up the place. “Garbage” is a magical word, it means “Im not going to deal with this anymore”. I feel good about the parts of nature I can bring full circle, but unlike vegetables, I can’t compost animal parts I don't eat, so it goes from being a good thing to a bad thing. This is a weakness in the meat eating ethos.

What we ate was delicious. I seared it and braised it with onions, mushrooms and potatoes. I was worried that without the fat and flavor from all the tendons and bones the long braise would make it tough, but no, it's tender and rich. After a few days of frozen dinners and easy to make meals, it feels great to eat our fill of real food and have leftovers. 

I'm getting that hollow feeling in my freezer though, and Fall is so far. If I'm going to be stuck in Texas this summer, I wonder if I could finally manage to get a pig at Granger...