(Partially inspired by shantih’s post in this thread…)
Now, before you say, “EWW!! NAASTY!”, think about it – tumors are just meat. In fact, most of the food we eat comes from squicky places, if you think about it. Bacon’s taken from a pig’s ass, cheese is a mixture of fermented breast secretions and cow’s stomach acid, eggs are avian embryos, and some people even consider placenta stew a delicacy. So there’s nothing all that unusual about tumors, once you get beyond the “eww!” factor.
Or am I wrong? Could eating tumors cause health problems? Assuming they are fully cooked, of course…and how nutritious would they be? Any recipe suggestions?
Not most of the time they aren’t. Meat is muscle tissue. Most cancers don’t arise from muscle.
Most tumors lack the features that makes meat and other tissues tasty, but I suspect a lot of a tumor is digestible. If it’s cooked properly and chewed well, anyway.
Yeah we normally don’t eat healthy lungs, or most of the tissues that commonly become cancerous. And then imagine eating fibrous lumpy mostly necrotic bits of lung-like tissue. Not very appetizing…
But there are other organs we eat that do get cancer. Liver and Kidney are the first that come to mind. Would a tumor in those organs taste like the original organs? Are these common enough in any animal that we eat to even find out?
Do you guys realize the business implications here? All we have to do is buy a herd of cows, let them graze next to a nuclear power plant until they get all sorts of cancer, then we’ll be able to sell twice the valuable organ meat as a regular cow!
Not true that we don’t eat lungs. They’re not consumed as much today (but then, neither are sweetbreads and other organs), but Americans and other groups used to eat lung. My mom says she used to love lungs cooked with (I’m not making this up) diaphragm wrapped around them. I admit it makes me queasy to contemplate eating that stuff, and she never cooked lung while I was growing up, probably because my dad thought it was so gross. Mom said he liked lung until he found out what it was.
Diaphragm is also known as flank steak. Very tasty, and if you have mexican dishes like beef fajitas, you’re probably eating diaphragm there. It’s a very well-exercised muscle.
Any tumor big enough to be detected by eye is most likely getting that organ condemned (and maybe other organs too).
Big tumors have necrotic (dead), putrefying centers. Or they may have chunky, calcified areas (that were once dead putrefying centers). I don’t see the appeal in that.
Valuable? Organ meat? Have you bought beef liver or kidney, lately. The cheapest steaks are about twice the price of organ meats. I think your business model needs a bit of work, here, before I invest…
