Like a lot of Germans, Claudia Pilz, 27, used to enjoy a good steak. Not anymore, not since the British "mad-cow disease" scare struck Europe. "I've been steering away from it, " says Pilz, a saleswoman at a Berlin hotel. "I'm eating noodles and fish and chicken instead." Even though Germany imported little British beef before the crisis erupted in March and is a strong backer of the European Union's two-month-old ban on British beef exports, Pilz isn't taking any chances. "Nothing has been proved yet," she concedes, "but I would rather wait until I know more." Germans, Europe's most health-obsessed citizens, haven't been impressed by pictures of Chancellor Helmut Kohl sharing bites of British beef with Prime Minister John Major. "For diplomatic reasons, he had to do it," concludes Pilz. "Kohl is so old, he probably figured it would take too long for BSE to affect him anyhow."

That kind of skepticism, shared by millions of consumers in other European countries, will be very much on the minds of European Union leaders when they gather for a summit this week in Florence in hopes of defusing the mad-cow crisis, one of the Union's worst in years. Britain is angry over the hard-line stance adopted by other member states, led by Germany, against lifting the export ban. London has vowed to continue its policy of "noncooperation" with the E.U. and veto any action at the summit unless leaders approve a plan for rehabilitating British beef. Even if they reach a compromise, it will be months before the suspect meat can be sold outside Britain, since tight certification procedures must be established.

The bad taste of the episode will linger. It has roiled domestic politics in Britain, where the tabloid press has cheered an ugly wave of jingoism. It has equally angered Britain's E.U. partners, which have accused London of resorting to blackmail. The controversy seems sure to encourage a movement, now under way at the E.U.'s treaty-review conference, to reduce sharply the number of Union actions that can be blocked by the veto of a single nation. Ultimately, says Gijs de Vries, head of the Liberal group in the European Parliament, the controversy "strengthens the case for an exit clause so member states can voluntarily leave the E.U."

In the eyes of Europeans--and unfortunately for Major, many British voters--the fiasco strengthens the case that the British government bungled the crisis. "With any other country, it would have never got to this stage," says one Brussels diplomat. The first mistake was failing to stamp out bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), so-called mad-cow disease, when an epidemic struck British cattle in the mid-1980s, as a result, scientists say, of using feed made from infected sheep carcasses. Although Britain banned the cattle feed in 1988 and said the disease did not threaten humans, the number of BSE cases rose to 36,681 in 1992; this year some 8,000 new cases are expected. The rest of Europe has had 451 cases since the outbreak began.

The next miscalculation came when British doctors found 10 young patients with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), a rare, fatal brain disorder that usually strikes the elderly. They concluded that a possible source of the new CJD strain was the infected beef. The government released this disturbing news with no plan to deal with the reaction, nor did it consult its European partners, major buyers of British beef exports. The result was worldwide panic, and the E.U. shut down all British beef exports. While Britain insists current beef supplies are safe, the damage has been done. Beef consumption in Britain is down 24% from precrisis levels, and even more depressed in such countries as Germany and the Netherlands

In London critic say BSE policy seems to be short for "Blame Somebody Else." Major made his top priority getting the ban lifted as quickly as possible rather than first setting out to restore public faith in the food supply's safety. "What the British just haven't got a feel for is that there is a genuine level of consumer concern in Europe," says Tony Robinson, spokesman for the European Parliament's dominant Socialist group. Indeed, the Major government sees the ban as a cause, not a symptom, of public dismay.

So while Europeans waited for a bold plan by London to purge mad-cow disease, British agriculture officials dithered, insisting that the ban lacked a scientific basis. Finally, last month, when the E.U.'s veterinary committee refused to allow exports of bovine by-products like tallow, Major declared diplomatic war on Europe, vowing to veto E.U. decisions. Britain's anti-European tabloid press added to the rancor with its own xenophobia. Give Germany "a boot up the Bach-side," cried the Sun, urging a boycott of bratwurst and Hugo Boss suits as well as Dutch tulips and Spanish sangria.

If the ruling Tories, faced with elections by next May and deeply split over Europe, hoped their stance would boost their sagging fortunes in the campaign against resurgent Labour, they were very wrong again. A Gallup survey this month showed Conservative popularity still dropping, with 55% of the party's own voters opposed to the policy of vetoing E.U. decisions. But the beef boycott has done further damage to the notion of a British place in a cohesive Europe, which Major still supports. The same Gallup poll showed 43% of all respondents would vote to pull out of the E.U., up from 37% last year. Last week 78 Tory M.P.s defied Major and cast votes for a bill, ultimately defeated, that called for a future referendum on Europe.

In Brussels, London's noncooperation policy also appears to have stiffened opposition to Major's government. Britain has so far blocked 78 actions, including some, like an antifraud measure, that it strongly favors. Normally placid European Commission president Jacques Santer slammed the British stance as "absurd" and "irresponsible." The European Commission, so often reviled by Tory Euroskeptics as "unelected, faceless bureaucrats," finally came to their rescue by overriding the veterinary committee and lifting the by-products ban. Last week Britain presented the commission with a "framework" for lifting the rest of the beef ban in five stages; insiders said the proposal looked promising.

Meantime, Britain has grudgingly launched its long-awaited anti-BSE plan. It has already slaughtered 124,000 older dairy cattle and 150,000 more are destined for the country's overwhelmed incinerators. Over farmers' protests and under E.U. pressure, it plans to cull an additional 80,000 BSE-susceptible beef cattle. Even with these steps, officials admit, cases of BSE will persist into the next century.

A deal in Florence is far from sure, since the Continent remains deeply suspicious of British sincerity. Those doubts were highlighted last week by reports that after the contaminated cattle feed was banned for use in Britain, it was sold to other European farmers, especially in France. At the same time, E.U. veterinarians said Britain's slaughter plans don't go far enough and more cattle should be killed. And health fears were reignited by French scientists who announced that monkeys injected with infected cow tissues developed CJD-like symptoms.

Whenever the crisis is resolved, the damage done by Britain's obstreperousness will remain. That has led some Continental critics to recommend a different kind of culling. "We cannot in the long run put up with such obstructionism," says Karl Lamers, foreign-policy spokesman for Chancellor Kohl's conservative coalition, "Europe must go ahead and leave the stragglers behind."

--With reportingby Helen Gibson/London, Erik Kirschbaum/Berlin and Bruce van Voorst/Bonn