Ris de veau, or sweetbreads, come from the thymus gland of a young cow or bull and are among the truly wondrous delights of old country cooking. Sweet. Succulent. Creamy. They harbor the texture of freshly plucked mushrooms but are as rich as liquid gold.

But ask for them here, right now, and most people will wonder if you've been bitten by a mad cow. Mad cows are everywhere, or at least on every newspaper front page, magazine cover and television news broadcast. And they are quickly herding their way across the continent as new cases of BSE, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, have shown up in recent weeks in the slaughterhouses of Germany and Spain.

In an emergency session held earlier this week, European Union agricultural ministers met in Brussels, Belgium, and voted to ban the use of recycled animal parts -- thought to be a major source of mad cow infection -- as feed for livestock for at least six months. They also voted to eliminate all cows more than 30 months old from the food chain unless they are tested and proven to be free of the disease, a decision that could lead to the destruction of 2 million head of cattle. The cost of these precautionary steps is estimated to be in the billions of dollars

French cattle farmers, and the beef industry as a whole, are reeling at that prospect. Mad cow disease, or vache folle, has terrified France in the past month, producing a generalized panic that makes the AIDS anxiety of the 1980s look like a bad flu epidemic.

Beef sales are reported to be down 50 percent in some areas and prices have fallen through the butcher's floor now that more than 100 slaughtered cows have been found to have BSE -- an unfailingly fatal corrosion of the brain that transforms the animal into an angry, staggering beast until it eventually dies of wasting and neurological failure. Its human form, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, has much the same effect on people. Faced with market collapse, slaughterhouses are sending Ferdinand and Elsie back to their pastures.

Sturdy farmers in their rubber boots and brown casquettes -- the very emblem of all that was good, true and honorable in the French patrimony, the backbone of the struggle against Big Mac globalism -- risk becoming veritable bêtes noires at the dinner table. How could it happen, when just a year ago the French were still holding out against importing British beef, where widespread mad cow fears first popped up nearly a decade ago and where thousands upon thousands of cattle were destroyed to stop the spread of the disease?

French herds, the French public was told, were safe because they had been isolated from the feed and breeding stock of British beef. Remember, too, that for centuries the two countries have sneered at each other with gustatory hyperbole: The French referred to their rivals as "les rosbifs" (translation: They're dull and fat) while the Brits dubbed those across the channel "les grenouilles" (slimy and effete).

"Les rosbifs" simply could not be trusted around food. The inventors of industrialization had allowed technology to run away with the butcher shop, producing not only Dolly, the world's first fully cloned sheep, but -- even worse -- a roast beef production line in which taste and food safety had been sacrificed to corporate profit.

In France, the hearthstone of modern haute cuisine, the natives assured themselves that no such gambles had been taken. The French system for inspecting, testing and labeling meat has long been far more advanced, with each side of beef indicating its geographic point of origin. The use of bone meal in feed, which in Britain was suspected as a possible vector of the disease, had been banned for French cattle. And just to drive home the point of French food superiority, poster-boy eco-farmer Joseph Bove led demonstrations against that most globalized symbol of corporate grub, Le Big Mac.

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