Unless you’re a health-food enthusiast or an aspic freak you
might be unaware of the ubiquitous presence of gelatin in our foods, yet it’s
certainly there, in everything from ice cream and candies to margarines and pâtés. This isn’t a bad thing, mind you. Gelatin's many applications include solidifying and stabilizing certain liquid
components in foods and clarifying certain kinds of wine (for example, champagne) and beer. So it’s
usually both a justified as well as a justifiable ingredient.
Indeed, for many people, gelatin only passed into the realm
of controversy with the discovery of BSE (aka Mad Cow disease). Unlike vegetable
gelatins such as agar-agar, which is derived from seaweed, traditional gelatins are derived from the bones, hides and other
collagen-containing tissues (such as skull and spinal cord) of cows. Unfortunately, these are the very
tissues that have been implicated in the transmission of BSE. When this information hit the media, it scared the poop out of those hyper-informed, health-conscious
citizens whose overriding, common goal is to live pain-free, protracted lives. Quite a number of kitchens (and bathrooms) throughout Europe and the U.S. became gelatin-free zones.
On January 18th of this year, at the end of an inquiry into the matter, the European Food Safety Authority released its
unequivocal opinion: consumption of bovine-derived gelatin is safe for humans. If you’re interested in reading either a
summary or the entire text of the opinion, you can find it at: http://www.efsa.eu.int/science/biohaz/biohaz_opinions/1333_it.html.
Since the onset of the BSE scare in the 1990's, I’ve admittedly felt compelled to curtail my profligate
predilection to aspic everything. It’s
good to know that I can resume indulging sans
guilt.
2:27:35 PM 
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