We often have a soup of Chicken Giblets. Delicious!
Well, this probably belongs more in Cafe Society at this point, but yeah, I do enjoy making yakitori, chicken liver and chicken thighs grilled with a sweet sauce. I do worry about the colesterol content, but not the toxin story. Many people dislike the texture of liver and other organ meats, but cut into small pieces, and grilled on a skewer, I hardly notice behind the sweet sauce.
What toxins are you thinking of? What does an animal eat, arsenic, cyanide, what? Are you worried about the hard-drinking alcoholic cow, the crackhead veal, what? Like everyone else said, this organ is no more saturated with toxins than any other body part.
Liver does not accumulate toxins; it breaks them down so that they can be eliminated, either by excreting them with bile into the stool, or by making them water soluble so that the kidney can excrete them.
Otherwise as discussed - very high Vitamin A source, good protein source, good iron source, fairly low fat, pretty low calorie, just really high in cholesterol. A slice of liver has just 120 calories but 20gm of protein (40% of the average person’s RDA), 4X the RDA for Vitamin A, 90% of the RDA for cholesterol, 25% RDA for iron, only 4g of fat, and huge amounts of various B vitamins and copper. In short it can definitely be “part of this balanced breakfast.” And chopped liver on Matzah Tams … yum!
I would never eat the stuff unless it was literally the last edible morsel available and I was starving to death. IMHO it is about the most disgusting-tasting substance claimed to be food. I don’t care what its function in life was. I will eat poultry hearts and gizzards, as will 2/3 of the rest of my family, but liver goes right in the garbage. We used to cook it for our pets but they didn’t like it, either. My parents and sister liked the stuff, but my mom finally gave up on trying to get me to eat it. When I found out it is high in cholesterol, I was mighty pleased. All this time they were saying it was good for me. Ha! Told you it was nasty.
Master talks :
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/198/is-liver-good-for-you-isnt-it-full-of-pesticides
Liver on its own is too powerful a taste for me; but in pate form it’s scrumptious.
Liver is a favorite of mine. Beef liver dredged in bread crumbs and sauted in butter is heavenly. I also like chopped chicken liver.
And, yes, I know what it is. Doesn’t matter – by the time I learned, I was already a fan. It’s like learning there are rat hairs in food – I’d been eating it for years, so why should it make a difference?
Maybe bacon? That’s a must. add sausages, mushrooms and good thick gravy on a bed of mashed potatoes and you realise…
There is a God…
I don’t want to hide the liver.
My personal theory is that the whole “eat X, it’s good for you” is just BS passed down through generations, like home remedies or folktales.
Ed Gein, Jeffrey Dahmer, Jack the Ripper all liked to eat liver.
what about liverwurst, is it actually made from liver? Do I really have to worry about too much vitamin A?
O Lord how I love liverwurst. It’s God’s gift to bread, cheese,onion and mayo.
deeper question: so they began turning out mammals with livers because it was foreseen that we would have the internal combustion engine, petroleum products and pesticides up the ying-wah?
Quite apart from the fact that it does not function as a filter, and does not accumulate toxins, detoxification is only one amongst its many vital functions, and probably not the most significant. It is one of the most important organs in the vertebrate body. You cannot live without your liver!
If you do not like the taste of liver, that is your business. Like most foods, some people like it and some do not. However, to try to justify this idiosyncratic preference by repeating nonsense about its function and its nutritional qualities is simply to spread ignorance about this important organ and this highly nutritious and, for some of us, delicious food.
For all of the people in this thread stating that the liver does not act like a filter, the fact remain that Cecil’s column (previously linked above), clearly indicates that the high concentration of trace heavy metals (including lead, mercury, and cadmium) are found in the liver at levels much higher than that of muscle tissue. Kidneys (not surprisingly) are even worse. The only way this can happen is if the liver and kidneys are bioaccumulating heavy metals.
I note that because trace metals are elements, they cannot be converted from a toxic form to a less toxic form in the liver.
If trace heavy metals accumulate in the liver (and kidneys), it’s probably not a good idea to be eating them. So personally, I don’t think that “eating a oil filter” is all that bad an analogy.
Of course there are some “toxins” in the liver. You don’t suppose the animal’s body senses its impending doom and moves all the toxic elements the liver is currently converting to somewhere else 5 minutes before it’s hit with an air hammer, do you? Logically, if the liver is working at the time of death, it’s going to have a higher percentage of toxic elements than elsewhere in the body, because it’s detoxifying those toxins up until the moment of death.
I don’t think that it should affect your choice on whether to eat it or not, since you also have a liver to take care of those toxins you’re ingesting. But that doesn’t mean they’re not there.
The “toxins” that it is detoxifying are, as stated earlier, organic molecules. Many of these are going to be destroyed by cooking anyway. Most of them are not really all that toxic in the first place in the quantities they occur in in a normal animal (although they would be harmful if the animal did not have a liver, and they built up to high concentrations in the blood). For example, one of the toxins the liver routinely handles is ethyl alcohol. You will get a lot of more of that in you from drinking a sip of beer than you will from a liver in any condition.
In any case, your argument quite erroneously assumes that the liver will cease all action on the substances that are already in it at the instant the animal dies. That is nonsense.
Ocra’s love liver, especially the liver of Great White’s.
No, it doesn’t. It assumes that cellular diffusion will not cease well *before *the animal dies. Even if the detoxification process continues for a few minutes post mortem, a claim I don’t entirely accept without citation, it’s got to be moving terribly slowly since we don’t have blood or lymph flow to/from the area anymore. All you’ve got working for you at that point is osmosis, which won’t move anything very far with that many membranes in the way.
If you must use an analogy, I think “catalytic converter” is more apt. The liver is jam packed with enzymes which oxidize molecules (specifically those containing a benzene-like group) which the bloodstream passes through it. This makes them more water soluble and easier to pass into the urine.