"What do I cook for my family now?" lamented Ms Doris SchroderKopf, wife of Chancellor Mr Gerhard Schroder, on the cover of the mass-circulation Bild newspaper yesterday.
German beef is off the menu in the Schroder household, at least for now, and Ms SchroderKopf's predicament mirrors that of "millions of other German women at a loss what to cook for dinner", according to Bild.
Until last week, Germany had only six cases of BSE on record and all were from foreign-born cows, trumpeted the agriculture ministry. But it has taken just two German-born BSE-infected cows out of 15 million to shatter the illusion cherished by Germans, and maintained by the government, that Germany was Europe's last mad-cow-free oasis.
Now a nation of meat-lovers are reconsidering their eating habits and butchers have already reported a beef sales slump.
"How many kilograms of wurst have I eaten happily since my childhood? Enough in any case to now make me feel queasy in my stomach," said Ms SchroderKopf yesterday, speaking for the nation.
Her husband has good reason for feeling queasy too, but not because of anything he ate. The German media tore into the Chancellor and his centre-left government last weekend for their broken BSE promises.
"The madness has caught up with us. For too long we believed the yarns spun by the gang of soft-soapers that Germany was BSE-free," said Welt am Sonntag. Fifteen years after the first recorded case in Britain, Germany has gone into BSE overdrive.
Dutch BSE expert Mr Albert Osterhaus told news magazine Der Spiegel yesterday that for every BSE-infected cow identified in Germany, two more have gone undetected. Worse still was his opinion that infected cows have already entered the food chain in Germany and that the risk to humans of BSE is "at least as big as the risk in Switzerland or France".
Germany's humbled Health Minister Ms Andrea Fischer admitted the government was "deluded" in thinking the country was BSE-free. She also apologised to Britain, Germany's BSE whipping boy. Though Germany lifted its four-year ban on British beef earlier this year, it had continued to blame Britain for the spread of the disease.
The BSE crisis is likely to have a negative effect on sales of Irish beef in Germany, as it did after scares in 1993 and 1996. German sales of Irish beef have fallen from over 20,000 tonnes annually in the early 1990s to 3,500 tonnes last year, according to An Bord Bia's Dusseldorf office.
