Offally Good...

Meat has many drawbacks. It’s expensive, it’s often unethically produced and it’s bad for the environment. But for many of us food lovers its range of flavours and textures is impossible to sacrifice. In the current economic climate, and with climate change ever more pressing, why not learn to love the more unusual parts of the beast?

What we generally know as ‘meat’ is merely the muscle holding the bones together. Offal takes its name from the phrase ‘off-fall’ - the bits of the animal that fall away when it’s butchered. Its counterpart is properly called ‘pluck’ - the internal organs you have to pull away. In combination, this includes the heart, lungs, liver and kidneys, but the term ‘offal’ is often used to refer to anything other than the layer of skeletal muscle. While we might squirm at the idea of eating a brain or testicle, we may well have eaten intestinal casings and ground offal in sausages hundreds of times over without a second thought.

The Food Standards Agency Food Labelling Regulations 2003 forbid retailers from describing anything other than ‘skeletal muscle with naturally included or adherent fat and connective tissues’ as meat. Since the BSE crisis and more recent concerns about bird flu, it is understandable that people want to know what they’re eating, but I suggest that this should drive us to eat well produced animals, rather than limiting our consumption to particular cuts.

Sadly, many modern reference books describe offal as the ‘waste parts’ of the creature. In Britain, we haven’t always turned our noses up at offal as we do now. Until the post-war era, offal was used in many popular dishes. Liver and kidneys were frequently used as ingredients in many traditional British meals, and tripe was particularly common in Yorkshire and Lancashire.

It still seems commonplace in many countries with less gratuitous wealth than ours to make the most of the slaughtering of an animal by using every edible morsel. The knowledge of how to cook these parts well goes hand-in-hand with a need for thriftiness and an understanding of the farming process; that calorie for calorie, producing an animal is far less efficient than arable faming. Nevertheless, cultivating animals makes use of plant and vegetable waste that humans can’t digest and can provide an excellent source of protein. Disposing of even a tiny bit is a foolish waste of a highly valuable resource.

With the economic downturn, British consumers are more concerned about thriftiness once again, and many now understand that the contents of their shopping basket also affect the environment. Belief in the value of locally produced goods and craft foods has led to an increase in British artisan produce and farmers’ markets. Happily, it seems these factors might be starting a resurgence in the use of more parts of the animal and a confidence in their production values. There are certainly a number of celebrity chefs and highbrow London restaurants that advocate the use of trotter, cheek and tripe.

I’d argue that if the increased popularity of offal remains the preserve of foodies and the upper middle classes, society is missing a trick. Organs like liver and kidney are low in fat and high in essential nutrients, often at a fraction of the cost of chicken breast and steak. Whilst some parts such as heart can take quite some time and effort to prepare well, liver can be chucked into a stir fry very easily. The relatively low cost means that it’s much more affordable to buy locally sourced, properly reared animals. Surely these meats provide an opportunity for those on a limited budget to eat high quality, healthy cuts of the animal?

In addition to the cost and health benefits of buying unusual cuts and organs, offal has a great deal to offer in terms of adding variety to your cooking. Many people use chicken giblets to add flavour to gravy, precisely because the internal parts of the animal contribute rich and complex tastes. The only reason offal isn’t more frequently used is because people feel awkward about where it comes from. We need to get over this squeamishness. Any meat is a dead animal and if you feel uncomfortable with that, you shouldn’t be eating it at all.