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THE MOST EFFECTIVE agent of dietary change is the adulated eater—the king who embraces whelks, the revolutionary hero with a passion for skewered hearts. “Normally disgusting substances or objects that are associated with admired . . . persons cease to be disgusting and may become pleasant,” writes Paul Rozin. For organ meats today, that person has been taking the form of celebrity chefs at high-profile eateries, such as Los Angeles’s Animal and London’s St. John, and on Food Network programs. On the Iron Chef episode “Battle Offal,” judges swooned over raw heart tartar, lamb’s liver truffles, tripe, sweetbreads, and gizzard. If things go as they usually go, hearts and sweetbreads might start to show up on home dinner tables in five or ten years.
Time and again, AFB’s Pat Moeller has watched the progression with ethnic cuisines: from upscale restaurant to local eatery to dinner table to supermarket freezer section. “It starts as an appetizer typically. That’s low risk. Then it migrates to an entrée dish. Then it becomes a food that you can buy and take home and fix for your family.”
With organ meats, where the prep may include, say, “removal of membrane,” the last phase will be slow-going. Unlike filets and stewing meats, organs look like what they are: body parts. That’s another reason we resist them. “Organs,” says Rozin, “remind us of what we have in common with animals.” In the same way a corpse spawns thoughts of mortality, tongues and tripe send an unwelcome message: you too are an organism, a chewing, digesting sack of guts.
To eat liver, knowing that you, too, have a liver, brushes up against the cannibalism taboo. The closer we are to a species, emotionally or phylogenetically, the more potent our horror at the prospect of tucking in, the more butchery feels like murder. Pets and primates, wrote Mead, come under the category “unthinkable to eat.” The same cultures that eat monkey meat have traditionally drawn the line at apes.
The Inuit, at the time I visited Igloolik, had no tradition of keeping animals as companions. A sled dog was more or less a piece of equipment. When I told Makabe Nartok that I had a cat, he asked, “What do you use it for?” In America, pets are family, never fare. That feeling held fast even during the years of World War II rationing, when horse or rabbit—delicacies right over the pond in France—might, you’d think, have seemed preferable to organs. In the 1943 opinion piece “Jackrabbit Should Be Used to Ease Meat Shortage,” Kansas City scientist B. Ashton Keith bemoans the “wasted meat resource” of jackrabbit carcasses that were being left for coyotes and crows after being killed by ranchers in “great drives that slaughter thousands.” (Most of these seemingly collected by Keith’s mother: “Some of the pleasantest recollections of my boyhood are of fried jackrabbit, baked jackrabbit, jackrabbit stew, and jackrabbit pie.”) SELF-MADE “NUTRITIONAL ECONOMIST” Horace Fletcher espoused a singular approach to getting Americans through a wartime meat shortage without resorting to rationing, or jackrabbits. What Fletcher proposed was a simple if burdensome adjustment to the human machinery.
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* The Inuit Games. Most are indoor competitions originally designed to fit in igloos. Example: the Ear Lift: “On a signal, the competitor walks forward lifting the weight off the floor and carrying it with his ear for as far a distance as his ear will allow.” For the Mouth Pull, opponents stand side by side, shoulders touching and arms around each other’s necks as if they were dearest friends. Each grabs the outside corner of his opponent’s mouth with his middle finger and attempts to pull him over a line drawn in the snow between them. As so often is the case in life, “strongest mouth wins.”
* Among themselves, meat professionals speak a jolly slang. “Plucks” are thoracic viscera: heart, lungs, trachea. Spleens are “melts,” rumens are “paunch,” and unborn calves are “slunks.” I once saw a cardboard box outside a New York meat district warehouse with a crude sign taped to it: FLAPS AND TRIANGLES.
* The children were wise to be wary. Compulsive hair-eaters wind up with trichobezoars—human hairballs. The biggest ones extend from stomach into intestine and look like otters or big hairy turds and require removal by stunned surgeons who run for their cameras and publish the pictures in medical journal articles about “Rapunzel syndrome.” Bonus points for reading this footnote on April 27, National Hairball Awareness Day.