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33. Mad Cow Disease

Writer's picture: English and BeyondEnglish and Beyond





[00:00:00.160] - Oliver (Host)

Welcome to another episode of English and Beyond, the video series. As you can see, we do have a video, but our production values are even lower than usual because we are here in Bristol. If there is anything that you don't understand about this episode, then you can find the transcript plus Quizlet flashcards available at www.morethanalanguage.com. Now because it's Bristol, it's the UK and because my mum likes to keep her house like an icebox, I'm wearing this jacket. César is wearing his jacket, his coat, but I'm also wearing this because I want to maintain my anonymity and also because I think it looks a little bit like the killer from, I Know What You Did Last Summer.


[00:00:54.300] - César (Guest)

I mean, you can you can see the tip of your nose.


[00:00:57.550] - Oliver (Host)

Oh, you can?


[00:00:58.350] - César (Guest)

Yep.


[00:00:59.390] - Oliver (Host)

Oh, I better...


[00:01:00.590] - César (Guest)

Yeah. Turn.


[00:01:02.270] - Oliver (Host)

(I'm) revealing all sorts of things if you can see the tip of my nose. Okay. So today, César, we're going to talk about something very specific, unusual, and quite different from the kinds of things we usually talk about.


[00:01:15.760] - César (Guest)

Very difficult topic, I must say.


[00:01:18.000] - Oliver (Host)

Oh, yes?


[00:01:18.640] - César (Guest)

Yeah.


[00:01:19.040] - Oliver (Host)

Well, we'll see. So it's something that used to terrify me when I was growing up. So nowadays, we live in a world of pretty much constant health scares to such an extent that it's actually really hard to work out what it's worth worrying about. If you open a newspaper or you read the news online, you're constantly bombarded with warnings. That means you're receiving loads of these warnings just like 1 bomb, 1 after another. Bang, bang, bang. The Internet means that the whole world's information is at our fingertips. It's easily accessible for us, which means that there's no limit to the scary things that we can read about.


[00:02:02.910] - Oliver (Host)

There are terrifying new diseases, old diseases that were thought to be almost extinct, almost eliminated, which are making a comeback. There are chemicals in our food, air pollution, water contamination, superbugs in hospitals, microplastics in our bloodstream, the list goes on. And of course, a lot of these warnings come with dramatic headlines and very little scientific explanation. The journalists themselves don't even really understand the science, so what hope do we, the laymen, the ordinary people, have to work out how stressed we should be when we read the latest scaremongering article? But one of the curious things about these scare stories is that many of them seem to come and go, and there is no real world effect for most of them. Post COVID, I have read many articles about a new disease that promises to cause a whole new worldwide panic. Fortunately, to date, these fears have been overblown, they've been exaggerated. Although I am worried that we're gonna tempt fate in me saying this, we're gonna cause the opposite to happen.


[00:03:17.570] - Oliver (Host)

You okay there, César?


[00:03:18.610] - César (Guest)

Mhmm.


[00:03:19.410] - Oliver (Host)

Okay. Good. Sometimes though, health scares do have a lasting impact, if only on people's psychology, and growing up in the UK in the 1990s, there was one that cast a really long shadow over my childhood, even if it too fortunately seems to have been somewhat overblown in hindsight, in terms of number of people directly affected. I'm talking about an illness that in English is called "Mad Cow Disease". It's a name that sounds almost comical, doesn't it? "Mad Cow Disease."


[00:03:54.430] - Oliver (Host)

But when I was a child, it felt like something that could get me at any moment. And what made it worse was that it felt like no one really knew how dangerous it was or how widespread it had become. The somewhat amusing name also obscures, it hides, the truly terrible nature of the disease if you are unlucky enough to catch it, to develop it. First, I'll introduce this by noting a real world impact of this health story. Until 2023, I wasn't able to give blood in Europe or in the USA because I had lived in the UK during the nineties.


[00:04:31.490] - Oliver (Host)

This wasn't because I have a tattoo, or a blood borne virus, or any of the other usual reasons they refuse blood donations. Instead, it was about the fear of the governments of these countries and regions about the quality of British blood. They worried that because I had lived through the height of the mad cow disease crisis in the UK and because I had eaten beef during that time, I might be carrying something dangerous, something that could infect someone else without me even knowing I had it. What were they so afraid of? Well, mad cow disease is the common name for something much less catchy, variant Creutzfeldt Jakob disease or vCJD.


[00:05:15.230] - Oliver (Host)

vCJD is the human version of a disease found in cows called Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy or BSE for short. Both of these diseases, the form found in humans and the form found in cows are neurodegenerative, which means that they impact us by damaging our brains and not just by damaging them a little bit. BSE and vCJD essentially create holes in the brain. If you ever look at a picture of a brain affected by these diseases, it looks a little bit like a kitchen sponge, full of holes and craters, and that's where the spongiform part of the name comes from. Now one of the reasons that variant CJD is interesting is because it's sometimes considered the first man made epidemic.


[00:06:08.870] - Oliver (Host)

That is we, humankind, mankind, created this disease by our own negligence. And in fact, really, I should say we, the British. But what actually happened? How did we end up with a disease that could eat holes in our brains? And what does this have to do with the UK and its cows?


[00:06:28.600] - Oliver (Host)

Well, the story starts in the 1980s and it's not a very flattering one for the British government or the British agricultural industry. It begins with the way that cows were being fed. Now cows, as you may know, César, are herbivores. What is a herbivore?


[00:06:48.090] - César (Guest)

It's an animal that eat, eats, herbs, no? Plants.


[00:06:52.730] - Oliver (Host)

Plants. Exactly. Grass and other vegetation.


[00:06:55.370] - César (Guest)

I feel like I'm a primary student and you are testing me.


[00:06:58.570] - Oliver (Host)

Maybe this is what we can do. That's what they were evolved to eat. That's what they evolved to eat. But in the 1980s, farmers were looking for cheap ways to increase their cows' protein intake, so they could produce more meat or milk. So what did they do? César, what do you think they did?


[00:07:16.400] - César (Guest)

I guess they gave them meat or, like, very low quality meat or things like that...


[00:07:21.840] - Oliver (Host)

They did. They started feeding cows with something called meat and bone meal, a protein supplement that was made from other animals. In some cases, these other animals even included cows themselves, which made the cows what?


[00:07:38.170] - César (Guest)

Sick.


[00:07:38.890] - Oliver (Host)

Well, it did make me sick, but it made them cannibals.


[00:07:42.030] - Oliver (Host)

Oh, wow. So a cannibal is, an animal or or humans that eat other, examples of its own own species, I think. So they weren't just eating cows. They were eating sheep, pigs, and other animals that were being ground up, were being kind of like "grinded", ground down into a fine powder. They were processed and then they were mixed into the cattle feed to increase the protein.


[00:08:06.920] - César (Guest)

Oh my god. You've just ruined my hot chocolate.


[00:08:11.470] - Oliver (Host)

It sounds a bit like something from a horror film: "The cow that ate the other cows", but it wasn't just unpleasant, it was actually dangerous. By feeding cows the remains of other animals, farmers unknowingly created the perfect conditions for BSE to spread. The disease was able to pass from infected cows to healthy cows through their feed. And once it got into the food chain, it was only a matter of time before it made its way to us.


[00:08:39.520] - Oliver (Host)

But any diagnosis of the disease came with a delay. The first two cases of the disease in cows were discovered in the 1980s, but the cows themselves had probably been infected a decade earlier. This is one of the reasons it was so scary as a health care crisis. You could be living with the impact of something you unknowingly did more than 10 years ago. It became something of an epidemic amongst the bovine, the cow, population, with almost 200,000 cows dying between 1986 and 2015.


[00:09:17.380] - Oliver (Host)

The British government's response to all of this was not ideal. At first, they tried to downplay the crisis. They insisted that British beef was perfectly safe to eat and there was no risk to humans. Memorably, in 1990, the Agriculture Minister, the politician with responsibility for farming, etcetera, tried to feed his little daughter a burger in front of the national media to demonstrate that there was no risk to humans from British beef. Amusingly, she actually refused to eat the burger so he ate it himself.


[00:09:52.210] - Oliver (Host)

But as more and more cows started showing symptoms of BSE, which included cows collapsing in their fields, twitching uncontrollably or starting to behave aggressively, people started to panic. And when the first cases of vCJD were discovered to have made the jump to humans in the mid 1990s, the panic arguably turned into full blown hysteria. For me, as a child, I remember seeing news reports that showed cows staggering around and collapsing. The images were unforgettable. These cows did look mad.


[00:10:28.570] - Oliver (Host)

They looked sick in a way that was hard to comprehend. And then there were the stories about people, people who had developed vCJD. At first, the symptoms were subtle, mood changes, problems with memory and coordination. But then things would get worse. The disease would progress rapidly.


[00:10:50.000] - Oliver (Host)

And before long, the person would be unable to walk, talk, or feed themselves. There was no cure, and there still isn't. Once the disease starts, it's always fatal. As of the 2020s, fewer than 250 cases of the disease have been recorded worldwide in humans. That doesn't sound like very much, does it?


[00:11:13.770] - Oliver (Host)

It doesn't sound like something that deserved the terrifying headlines and the global panic that it caused. But if you're talking about the potential of a disease for creating panic, the actual number of recorded cases is only one part of it because the psychological impact of this disaster was enormous. There are a few reasons for this. The first is that virtually anyone in the UK over a certain age could be exposed. If you think about it, how many of us eat beef every week?


[00:11:43.250] - Oliver (Host)

How many of us eat products containing gelatin, which is often made from bones and other parts of animals? How many of us use medicines or cosmetics that are made using animal products? Almost everybody does to some extent. Right? So the fear wasn't just about a few isolated cases, it was about the possibility of an epidemic that could spread to millions and millions of people. Secondly, you can never really relax. The incubation period of this disease, that is the time that you can have the disease without knowing it, without showing symptoms, is unknown but believed to be possibly decades. And then lastly, when symptoms do present, they are dreadful, terrible and without any treatment or cure. So in combination, the significant number of people possibly exposed, the uncertainty of how long you have to live in fear, and then the terribleness of the disease makes for a psychologically powerful trio.


[00:12:44.460] - Oliver (Host)

And psychologically impactful epidemics like this have a secondary impact that is not minor. One thing that I think is worth mentioning is how this crisis shaped people's views of food safety and government trust. The BSE scandal shattered the British public's trust in the government's ability to keep them safe. After all, people had been assured that British beef was fine. There had been no warnings about the dangers of meat and bone meal, or the way cows were being fed.


[00:13:13.310] - Oliver (Host)

And yet, here was this terrifying new disease spreading silently through the food chain. And then, of course, there were the international and economic consequences. British beef was banned across the world. Exports collapsed. In fact, beef exports from the UK to the USA only resumed in 2020.


[00:13:34.640] - Oliver (Host)

The image of the British food industry was ruined and it took years, decades even, to recover. Even today, there are still people who refuse to eat beef from the UK because of the BSE food crisis. So why did this scare me so much as a child? Well, I think that it was partially because vCJD just felt so random. You didn't have to do anything reckless or dangerous to get it.


[00:13:59.530] - Oliver (Host)

You didn't even have to go on holiday to a faraway exotic country or come into contact with sick animals. All you had to do was eat a burger, for example. Something that millions of people did every day. Something that my family did every week, virtually. And if you did get infected, you wouldn't even know until years later because the disease has a long incubation period.


[00:14:22.680] - Oliver (Host)

So in other words, you could be walking around perfectly healthy, not knowing that the disease was already in your brain waiting to appear. In the end, this disease never became the huge epidemic that many people feared it would. The number of cases was limited, and strict measures were put in place to stop the disease from spreading any further. But for me, and for many people who grew up in the nineties, it remains a reminder of how fragile our systems can be, how some bad decisions, some uncertainty or confusion can have consequences that last for decades. So that's the story of mad cow disease.


[00:14:58.130] - Oliver (Host)

It's a story of fear, of government failure, and of the unintended consequences of human action. But it's also a story of lessons learned. Today, the way we produce and regulate food has changed enormously, and that's partially because of BSE. Sometimes it takes a crisis to force us to pay attention. And that it seems like a constant battle to prevent these things from happening. So the first thing I should say is this episode, it's obviously not a funny episode, but it's, it's, definitely the the most, maybe the most amateur episode we've done from the beginning of the podcast. No?


[00:15:40.450] - César (Guest)

Probably. But, I mean, when you travel, you have to you have to adapt yourself to the circumstances. So we're recording with a different microphone.


[00:15:49.970] - Oliver (Host)

Mhmm.


[00:15:51.650] - César (Guest)

Recording with the iPhone, and we're in the middle of a kitchen. So yeah. The dishwasher was beeping.


[00:15:58.050] - Oliver (Host)

Yeah.


[00:15:58.370] - César (Guest)

A few seconds ago. We got your mum's...


[00:16:01.710] - Oliver (Host)

Elderly pug.


[00:16:03.070] - César (Guest)

Elderly pug. He's very quiet though.


[00:16:06.020] - Oliver (Host)

He is very quiet. I was gonna say -


[00:16:07.710] - César (Guest)

He's behaving.


[00:16:09.230] - Oliver (Host)

Yeah. Because sometimes when she's not here, he gets stressed or sad. Mhmm. And so yes.


[00:16:16.000] - César (Guest)

Anyway, you you made me anxious.


[00:16:18.000] - Oliver (Host)

Oh, I did?


[00:16:18.880] - César (Guest)

Yeah.


[00:16:19.360] - Oliver (Host)

About food safety?


[00:16:20.720] - César (Guest)

Well, I was thinking it all sounded like a horror film.


[00:16:26.080] - Oliver (Host)

[Unintelligble] It's like, one of like, do you remember when COVID happened and that film, I think it's called Contagion with -


[00:16:36.610] - César (Guest)

Ah, yeah.


[00:16:36.930] - Oliver (Host)

Gwyneth Paltrow and Kate Winslet. Mhmm. I think, various different actors and actresses. I think it's a bit like that, isn't it? You can make a good film out of it.


[00:16:47.470] - Oliver (Host)

But I think it is, I think it is, of every disease that I've ever heard of because I and you, we're both quite hypochondriac.


[00:16:54.750] - César (Guest)

Yeah. I was thinking that, I'm, I'm glad I was a kid because if that had happened when I was an adult, I had [would] had a really bad time.


[00:17:04.400] - César (Guest)

Well, I mean -


[00:17:05.120] - César (Guest)

Trying to cope with the hypochondria.


[00:17:06.880] - Oliver (Host)

Did you ever come to the UK in the nineties?


[00:17:10.400] - César (Guest)

No. I didn't.


[00:17:11.200] - Oliver (Host)

Well, you're probably okay.


[00:17:12.640] - César (Guest)

But I I remember being a kid Yeah. And, obviously, the vacas locas, which is the cow -


[00:17:21.650] - Oliver (Host)

The mad cows.


[00:17:22.690] - César (Guest)

Mad cow disease, was all over the news, all the time. And everyone was talking about it. And, especially, my whole family on my mum's side worked in the meat industry.


[00:17:36.070] - Oliver (Host)

Oh, yeah.


[00:17:36.950] - César (Guest)

My mum was a butcher.


[00:17:39.670] - Oliver (Host)

Mostly for horse, though. No?


[00:17:41.660] - César (Guest)

No. That was maybe I don't know. But maybe they shifted to horse meat because of that. I don't know. Because it was during the nineties, but they they they worked, I think, mainly with pork and beef.


[00:17:53.500] - César (Guest)

My uncles worked at the, abattoir.


[00:17:59.720] - Oliver (Host)

Abattoir.


[00:18:00.430] - César (Guest)

Abattoir.


[00:18:01.150] - Oliver (Host)

Or the, you can say abattoir, but I think, in American English, they say the slaughterhouse.


[00:18:06.360] - César (Guest)

The slaughterhouse. Yeah. Where, basically, you you kill the the animals. So I guess they were especially worried about it because of their jobs.


[00:18:19.050] - Oliver (Host)

Their livelihoods, we can say.


[00:18:20.730] - César (Guest)

Exactly. But yeah. And I also remember someone calling someone else crazy and saying, like, "You probably eaten, mad cow because you're crazy." It was like an insult. Very, very trendy at the time.


[00:18:40.090] - Oliver (Host)

I think that, one of the things about about the disease, as I said, I I think that -  I made an, an implicit reference to the fact that we have a lot of benefits from living in the UK or living in Spain, where there are relatively few food safety issues or, what we might consider an exotic disease. You know, it's like one of the reasons I think that you you know, many British people are a bit obsessed with Australia, in terms of a kind of the land is because there's this joke that if you go to Australia, like, basically anything can kill you. Whereas in the UK, I think we've got maybe one venomous snake, and you're never gonna die.


[00:19:26.080] - César (Guest)

Very rare.


[00:19:26.960] - Oliver (Host)

Yeah. You know, you're not you're never gonna you basically, the UK, I think, is, due to its boringness, one of the safest places you can be, in terms of the natural environment, in terms of its disease profile. And so I think that probably one of the reasons that this is quite horrifying to or was quite horrifying to lots of people in the UK at the time is because we're not used to being exposed to diseases where there is no cure. You know, which is quite a horrifying idea, really.


[00:19:58.150] - Oliver (Host)

And, you know, I'm not saying that the disease wouldn't matter if it had originated in another country. But I think that it it wouldn't have, been as shocking because there would have been already other diseases that that are horrifying. Like, for example, Ebola, which is a truly horrifying disease, where I think, again, there's no cure. But you by by treating the symptoms, you can actually, get a better survival rate.


[00:20:22.980] - Oliver (Host)

But the UK doesn't have things like that nowadays. It obviously used to. But, yeah. So I think that that's part of the reason why it's such a modern horror for people of my age.


[00:20:34.470] - César (Guest)

Definitely. Definitely. And, you mentioned how the meat industry completely plummeted in the UK for obvious reasons, but I guess -


[00:20:43.750] - Oliver (Host)

Well, I talked about the exports. Basically, no one else would buy our meat.


[00:20:48.080] - César (Guest)

Yeah. And I guess people didn't buy beef in the UK either.


[00:20:52.880] - Oliver (Host)

I don't think we ever, in my family, I don't think we ever stopped eating beef, for example. So I don't I actually don't know. And I you know, if we hadn't been doing this episode, abroad, well, although in the heart of the origin of the disease in the UK, if we hadn't been doing it, here and I'd have more time to research, I would know the figures.


[00:21:12.990] - Oliver (Host)

But, I imagine that the UK beef industry with like, for domestic consumption was affected, but I don't think that it it was as horrendously affected as the exports. Because I think that, as I as I mentioned, you know, lots of countries just banned the exports. So it didn't come down to a thing of personal choice. But my parents continued to serve us beef.


[00:21:34.030] - César (Guest)

Yeah. Okay.


[00:21:36.110] - Oliver (Host)

And I don't think it was out of patriotism. I think that they thought, well, correctly that it was going to be mostly okay.


[00:21:44.950] - César (Guest)

Yeah. Well, with anything you have this, I guess you have an idiom in English as well: más vale prevenir que curar.


[00:21:56.950] - Oliver (Host)

Yeah. We do. I would say well, we can say "a stitch in time saves 9". Which is to do with sewing, and basically if you - I think it's to do, I don't, I've never sewn, but if you sew with, kind of, like, good sense, then basically one sewing movement is a stitch, and if you do "a stitch in time", a stitch at the right time, then that saves you having to do 9 stitches later to repair the damage. Yeah? So, basically, it's better it's better to, it's you I mean, I guess you can just say it's better to prevent than cure.


[00:22:36.530] - César (Guest)

Yeah. Exactly.


[00:22:37.490] - Oliver (Host)

Which is what your idea meant.


[00:22:38.610] - César (Guest)

That would have been my philosophy at the time, not eating any any beef.


[00:22:43.420] - Oliver (Host)

Well, I think especially since there is no cure, César. So there's only prevention. Yes. I mean, you, I'd say vegetarian, vegan, somewhere on that spectrum now, you, you know, you would have been fine in the nineties anyway. Obviously, not in the nineties itself, but now.


[00:23:01.200] - César (Guest)

I had a lot of beef by then.


[00:23:03.200] - Oliver (Host)

Yes. But it's not that, Spain is totally alien, or totally unused to similar health scandals. No?


[00:23:12.840] - César (Guest)

Yeah. Actually, I think we had one of the biggest scandals in Europe.


[00:23:17.400] - Oliver (Host)

Oh, really?


[00:23:17.960] - César (Guest)

In recent years. Yeah. It was during the eighties. There was an issue with -


[00:23:22.520] - Oliver (Host)

Before you get there, actually, just to talk about one that's a little bit more recent, do you remember the horse meat scandal?


[00:23:29.580] - César (Guest)

But that was in the UK as well?


[00:23:31.180] - Oliver (Host)

It was everywhere. Yeah. But I think -


[00:23:32.700] - César (Guest)

It was everywhere? I thought it was only -


[00:23:33.900] - Oliver (Host)

All over Europe.


[00:23:35.180] - César (Guest)

Okay.


[00:23:35.660] - Oliver (Host)

Because I think that the, I mean, this was not really a food - I suppose it is a food safety scandal because it's about labelling, isn't it? But I think probably also, it it probably was, worse received in the UK. There was probably more upset about it in the UK, because there's no culture of eating horse.


[00:23:51.850] - César (Guest)

Yeah.


[00:23:52.250] - Oliver (Host)

In the UK.


[00:23:52.890] - César (Guest)

I suppose so.


[00:23:53.530] - Oliver (Host)

Because this scandal for anyone listening from abroad, or non Europeans, essentially, it was where a variety of meats, usually frozen meats, I think, which was sold as beef or pork, so coming from a cow or a pig, was actually just horse.


[00:24:11.760] - César (Guest)

or part of it. No? It was, like, mixed.


[00:24:14.240] - Oliver (Host)

Yeah. Well, I think all those meats are mixed, really, aren't they?


[00:24:16.320] - César (Guest)

Basically, that that scandal happened during my 1st year in the UK when I was studying at university.


[00:24:21.520] - Oliver (Host)

 I can't believe it was such a long time ago.


[00:24:24.720] - César (Guest)

It was 2012, 2013. And because I didn't have a lot of money, my budget was very low. I used to buy food in Iceland, not the country, but the supermarket. It's all frozen food.


[00:24:39.700] - Oliver (Host)

Yep.


[00:24:40.340] - César (Guest)

And so I'm sure because that was one of the supermarkets, which was on the news all the time, so I'm sure I had amounts of horse meat during that time -


[00:24:50.900] - Oliver (Host)

Yep. Okay. Well -


[00:24:52.180] - César (Guest)

Which I didn't mind that much because I used to have, horse meat when my mum was a horse butcher.


[00:25:02.970] - Oliver (Host)

Horse meat butcher.


[00:25:03.770] - César (Guest)

Horse meat butcher.


[00:25:04.090] - Oliver (Host)

Yeah. So, well, there may be some listeners who are feeling very smug right now.


[00:25:10.850] - César (Guest)

About the horse meat?


[00:25:11.890] - Oliver (Host)

Well, thinking, well, I'm a vegetarian, like you and I are. You know? So I'm a vegetarian, so I don't need to worry about the, the various meat scandals. But I know already the scandal that you're gonna talk about, the Spanish one in the eighties, because I've read about it before in the past. So even if you're vegetarian, you're not safe. So what was that scandal?


[00:25:33.050] - César (Guest)

Well, I'm not an expert in this kind of scandals, but, basically, in Spain, in many other countries, we have some sort of little markets or flea markets where you can buy from secondhand clothes to, you know, utensils for the kitchen, but you can also buy sometimes food. At these markets, one specific type of oil was sold that had a component that was very toxic and it wasn't it wasn't, you know -


[00:26:10.170] - Oliver (Host)

I don't know very much about it, but I think it was, like, industrialised or something?


[00:26:13.290] - César (Guest)

Yeah. It was harmful for the for for humans, basically. So it took them a few years actually to identify what was going on. They thought it it it was the tomatoes.


[00:26:25.100] - Oliver (Host)

People were dying?


[00:26:26.220] - César (Guest)

People died, or over a 1000 people died.


[00:26:28.770] - Oliver (Host)

Oh, wow.


[00:26:29.170] - César (Guest)

And but there were many people who were affected with, with, side effects, really bad symptoms. And, yeah, and and I read that it was one of the the worst scandals in terms of food scandals in Europe over the last few years.


[00:26:45.130] - Oliver (Host)

So, I mean, I actually yeah. I think it's interesting because I, when when did this happen? In the eighties, did you say?


[00:26:51.610] - César (Guest)

Yeah. Early eighties.


[00:26:52.810] - Oliver (Host)

I mean, I didn't I, obviously, in the early eighties, I was not alive. But, I had only heard about this scandal quite recently when I maybe when I started doing the research for this episode, but I read about it then. It's funny about how some scandals capture the public's imagination. And then other ones just kind of seem to disappear a little bit. Because obviously that 1 sounds like, you know, if a 1000 people died and more people were kind of seriously injured as a result of, their illnesses, and that is so significant and much more significant than the figures in the BSE scandal. But I suppose because I lived through the BSE one and also it's in the era of getting to 24-hour news cycles.


[00:27:40.200] - César (Guest)

Yeah. I thought about how we feel affected to [by], this kind of news because we live in the era of clickbait. Right? So many times you only remember the headline. You don't even read the the whole -


[00:27:56.030] - Oliver (Host)

Absolutely.


[00:27:56.590] - César (Guest)

Article. So you almost every single day, there's a food scandal or something about health.


[00:28:05.000] - Oliver (Host)

I remember someone actually put together a very amusing list of - the Daily Mail is a newspaper in the UK - and I think it was, all of the things that the Daily Mail said would give you cancer. And, you know, the list was not only incredibly long, but I think also sometimes contradictory. Like, self contradictory. So I can't think of an actual example but maybe, like, a glass of wine every day will give you cancer. Also, not drinking any wine at all will give you cancer. Do you know all sorts of things? I can't remember. But it was it was, quite amusing. And I think that nowadays, despite being a hypochondriac, I think I just, I have to accept that what happens happens. Like, I think I'm getting to a "que sera, sera", attitude, which we say in English, by the way. Que sera, sera.


[00:28:52.420] - César (Guest)

Que sera, que sera.


[00:28:54.110] - Oliver (Host)

Well, we say with our with a British accent, que sera, sera. Which means what will be, will be, because of the song, you know? Very, I like that song. Mhmm.


[00:29:03.960] - Oliver (Host)

Okay, well, César, I think that we have stumbled through this episode enough.


[00:29:10.520] - César (Guest)

Yeah. And I think we have to unload the dishwasher because it's been beeping throughout the episode.


[00:29:15.990] - Oliver (Host)

Crying out for for help. So listener, if you are new to this episode, choose another one. You know, don't think that this is the typical. And, thank you very much for listening.


[00:29:30.000] - César (Guest)

And subscribe or follow the podcast. It's very important.


[00:29:33.200] - Oliver (Host)

I was just about to get that.


[00:29:34.720] - César (Guest)

Oh sorry!


[00:29:34.880] - Oliver (Host)

Yeah. For the first time for the first time, I was gonna do it without any prompting. So, yeah, please subscribe. How ironic that I would do it after an episode that I thought was not very good.


[00:29:45.360] - César (Guest)

And maybe, maybe you can tell us as well if in your country there had been any food scandal.


[00:29:51.280] - Oliver (Host)

So Oh, yes please.


[00:29:52.400] - César (Guest)

On the comments on Spotify.


[00:29:53.520] - Oliver (Host)

That would be interesting. Yeah. Exactly. On Instagram as well, @BritishEnglishAndBeyond. I think that we've done all our little promotion.


[00:30:01.730] - César (Guest)

Yeah. You got over a 100 followers now.


[00:30:03.970] - Oliver (Host)

Over a 100. Can you believe it? I still - yeah. Well well, sad.


[00:30:09.210] - César (Guest)

Picture, picture, imagine a 100 people in a room. That's a lot of people.


[00:30:15.430] - Oliver (Host)

Yeah. That, I mean, it is true. Well, but I don't wanna imagine a 100 people following me.


[00:30:21.680] - César (Guest)

Why not?


[00:30:22.320] - Oliver (Host)

I mean, just walking down the street and a 100 people. Yeah. Sorry. That's like a dad joke. Like a dad level joke. Okay. Well, thank you very much, César. Thank you for -


[00:30:33.250] - César (Guest)

Thank you.


[00:30:34.050] - Oliver (Host)

Putting up with this.


[00:30:34.930] - César (Guest)

Yeah.


[00:30:35.650] - Oliver (Host)

And, until next time, listener.


[00:30:39.810] - César (Guest)

Thank you.

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