Don't you want your offal?

This thread is discussing, among other things, the proper definition of a pie. One sticking point concerns organ meats, as noted here:

Correct on all counts. To the point where you’d have a bit of a time getting offal, inside or outside a pie, in most of the US.

My question is: why? At what point did Americans stop noshing on abdominal cavity organs? Is there a historical reason why we 'Merkins throw most of the pig away?

Americans haven’t stopped eating offal. They just hide it in their hotdogs.

I think, with the exception of calf and chicken liver, which have always been reasonably popular, if not huge favorites, offal is associated with 1) farm people, 2) poor people, and 3) “foreign” people, or some combination of the above. Using up all of the animal smacks of a thriftiness which was avoided by the middle classes, starting in the '50’s, I would guess.

My relatives down on the farm were happily eating brains, beef heart and, and so forth, when I was growing up in the 60s and 70s. Notably, though, they always came from a friend’s or neighbor’s animal, not from the grocery store.

Sweetbreads, on the other hand, have long been a fixture on the menus of any restaurant with aspirations toward Continental sophistication.

It’s all ground up at the factory and put into processed foods. It wouldn’t be cost-effective to “throw most of the pig away.”

…and in their scrapple. mmmmm

One thing I do to torture supermarket drones is to go to their meat counter and ask for various types of offal. If I really want to get them to cross their eyes, I ask for suet and turn down anything that is not proper suet.

Just entertain yourself sometime by reading the ingredients lists on Vienna sausage, potted meat and some of those tasty snack foods. It’s amazing what a few shovelfuls of spices can do to otherwise repulsive meat-like things.

Except for some specialists who charge excessive prices for their sausages, it seems the main reason to make sausage is to get rid of the offal without feeding it back to the hogs. (My father once told me that the only thing a hog won’t eat is another hog or a cucumber, but he told me many things that have been shown to be Urban Legends.)

Wouldn’t many of those things be more like Rural Legends?

You do have a point, troub. I just wasn’t aware there were Rural Legends as such. If so, then the term folklore is probably as good a synonym. In any event, I doubt it’s true, although I have never seen a hog eat a hog – or a cucumber.

…I finished Fast Food Nation today and it mentioned pig remains being fed to pigs… I’ll find a quote later.

hmm through a very minimal scan through the part that I thought would have it, I can’t find anything. However it does mention many different animals, incl. dogs and cats being fed to dogs and cats, pigs, cattle, and chickens to cattle, cattle to pigs, and cattle and chickens to chickens. Someone else care to find anything about hog cannibalism?

None of the leading national brands of hot dogs (Oscar Mayer, Hormel, Swift, Armour, etc.) in the U.S. contains beef or pork byproducts. The U.S. Dept. of Agriculture requires that all the meat in products labeled simply “hot dogs” or “frankfurters” be from skeletal muscle only. The U.S.D.A. requires that if the hot dog or frankfurter does contain meat byproducts, that it be labeled “Hot Dogs with Byproducts” or “Frankfurters with Byproducts”. The phrase “with Byproducts” must be in a typeface the same size as the “hot dogs” or “frankfurters”.

Interesting tidbit related to offal at the discovery magazize site, seems a process called Thermal de-polymerization turns turkey offal into usable and sellable products. I guess they can put turkey guts, human waste , a fax machine, pretty much anything besides nuclear waste into the front end of this machine, and turn it into usable components. Is this not the most amazing thing in the world? Other than a finished unified field theory or the completed human genome, I think this is the most revolutionary idea I’ve ever heard. Who woulda thought that Butterball would be involved in the future of matter recycling.

I LOVED that article. Wonderful if it really delivers. I think it deserves its own thyread.

I remember as a kid I didn’t mind (calf)liver, although it was a bit pasty. Then, when I took biology in college I realized I was eating a “poison filter” and haven’t touched it since. I inadvertently ate horse kidneys in France once. I knew something was terribly wrong just by the taste–Not speaking a lick of French at the time I decided that my body must have recognized something truly offal.

Which makes me ask the next (hijack!) question: how is it that our bodies accept such truly nasty things as ‘nourishment?’
Has anyone read the entries in “EXTRAORDINARY ORIGINS OF EVERYDAY THINGS” about “Eating Hat (hatte)” and “Humble (umble) Pie?” It confirms what the 'Merkins (there is, by the way, a fishing fly called the “merkin” which is used for catching, get this, BONE FISH!) have been asserting all along: If you like to eat guts, then you have accepted life on the bottom rung.

Hijack not accepted - the OP is basically asking why Americans regard such nourishment (enjoyed in many other countries) as being nasty.

Having seen that fine documentary, “Night Of The Living Dead,” I can assure you that Americans who have been turned into zombies will eat basically any part of you.

Somebody please explain “chitterlings.”

—Jomo “Happily Vegan” Mojo

Mmmm…scrapple. Comfort food.

We yanks have shunned organ meats for a long time, but now we have solid reasons for it. Organ meats have a much higher level of cholesterol than skeletal muscle. More recently still, we’ve found that eating brain and spinal nerve tissue can be risky in terms of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (mad cow disease.)

Note: Chitterlings are also known as chitlins.