What's Awful about Offal?

A comment made on the previous posting actually raises an interesting point. As an awful lot of offal does go into processed meat products. As my American friend points out, most Americans would baulk at the idea of eating the edible offal. It is not really that different here in Britain, as some people will and do turn up their noses at Liver, Kidneys, Heart et al. Yet all are incredibly good food and good value too.

Here in Britain, people of my generation, were put off eating Liver at school. As simply the liver we were served in “liver and onions” we did not know if we were meant to eat it or repair our shoes with it. Yet even at a relatively young age, I also knew that liver when turned into a pate was very good. Equally I knew from an early age that other offal went into other meals, the classic that springs to my mind was a Stake and Kidney pudding.

When I was a child, and I almost hate myself for saying this but it was true, you either ate what you were given or you went hungry. This prevented us becoming fussy eaters and it meant that we did eat our greens and a whole range of foods that some folks now struggle with. To be quite honest I don't think I could cope with a child that refused to eat vegetables. But as I know how to hide vegetables in a dish, I would hope that I would never have that problem.

Its the same trick though that the food industry uses to hide the poor quality cuts in meat products. In Britain (and Europe) you can include twenty five percent fat and twenty five percent connective tissue, tendons, skin etc. and still call it meat. So that 100% burger or hot dog could only have half the meat you think. Even reading the label will not enlighten you. Further that meat may contain offal too. While the percentages differ a little across the pond, the situation is similar in the US as it is in Europe.

However, here I will stick to what is allowed in Europe and specifically Britain. And here items like Heart meat has to be listed separately on the labels of processed foods. Now heart is a very flavourful meat, but as it is a heard working mussel it requires longer cooking times to make it tender. Thus in a pie from a food manufacture, its inclusion can normally be detected when the pie is chewy and tough.

Its rather funny, funny peculiar that is, as just last week the Food Standards agency here in Britain started a campaign to get people to use low fat milk. This will help fight obesity. Well as I have now got off the floor and stopped rolling around laughing, and changed my wet underwear, I thought what a waste of time and money. As the difference between full fat milk and skimmed milk is just one percent of the fat in milk. Had they tackled the amount of hidden fat in processed meats, well that would really help. But that actually requires doing something and not just making it look as though you are doing something.

I personally do not have any problems with eating offal. I am a great fan of nose to tail eating. Not only does this reduce waste, but it also means that farmers actually get a reasonable return on the whole of an animal. If you only use the prime cuts, the farmer has to send more animals to slaughter just to meet the demands for the prime cuts. While the rest of a beast does go to the processed food industry, the reluctance to eat the cheaper cuts and the offal perpetuates the problems of food and farming.

While I know that the readers of my other Blog will have already heard this and will be bored by this, but I stopped eating meat and became a vegetarian when I discovered what cattle were fed and the writers of this book were predicting BSE long before it (BSE) had even been discovered. The difficulty for me was that I did not know what I was eating. As people became more demanding regard quality and provenance, I felt that it was only right to support the farmers that were now doing what I wanted. Yet many of the people who would extract the urine from me for being a vegetarian, will happily eat all the processed meat that the food industry can offload on them, while I can know where the meat or offal I eat comes from. Often right down to the breed.

Most people are already eating offal hidden in processed foods. This is something that amuses me when folks say that they would never eat this or that! This is why I think that cooking is such a fundamental skill, as only if you can cook from scratch can you truly know what is in your food.

Eating offal has a long and honourable tradition in Britain and Europe. When folks have tried a food and genuinely do not like it, then I respect that. What I can never understand is people that will not even try. Especially as these people will readily eat foods manufactured for them without any knowledge of what really goes into it. Further, I respect that there are cultural differences between the foods that different nations will eat. I don't think I could ever eat insects, yet in some cultures they are delicacies. The difference here, is most of the foods that people say they would never eat, they already are consuming.

There is just one last detail that I would like to mention for my American reader, that haggis are coming. Last week I read that America is changing its import regulations so that the traditional Scottish Haggis can be imported into the US. I have eaten this myself, and who knows, the Scottish could convert Americans to eating offal on a regular basis.