Butcher looks past beef in wake of mad cow

NICE, France (Reuters) -- French home cooking may never be the same again.

A butcher in the southern port of Nice, facing a collapse in beef sales amid consumer panic about mad cow disease, decided to offer his customers something slightly more exotic -- and his prime cuts of ostrich and bison are flying off the shelves.

"I can't get over it. The last 30 kilos of ostrich and bison I ordered for the week were gone in two hours," said Georges Mateu.

And to prove that France's pride in its gastronomy has been bloodied but not battered by the latest in a series of food safety crises, the meat is 100 percent home-grown.

"It's true that if you look around a little, you can always find some ostrich from Belgium and Israel, but it is clearly inferior to mine, which comes from a farm in Brittany -- real French ostrich, certified," he said.

Mateau, who saw sales plunge by 60 percent after several supermarkets revealed they had sold beef from a herd potentially contaminated with mad cow disease, said he marketed the meat as a natural alternative with very low cholesterol.

He even had some cooking tips for customers mourning the loss of T-bone steaks, which were banned last month.

"Bison is amazing, it melts in the mouth. Ostrich is a little bit different. Somewhere between horse and beef. Personally, I recommend making it with a green pepper sauce," the butcher said.

Scientists believe that bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), the scientific name for mad cow disease, is linked to an incurable brain-wasting disease in humans which has killed some 80 people in Britain and two in France.

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