Make offal more popular in the USA

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Reduced urbanization? I'm making a semi-educated guess that consuming innards is more popular among farm folk than among city slickers.
 
Liver and liver products retain some popularity in the US, though probably not to the degree of half a century or so ago... encouraging people to eat more liver should be fairly easy, just an ad campaign or 2 emphasizing the nutritional quality of liver (which is quite high in some regards...)
For other "innards", yeah, it would be more of an uphill climb, as consumption of things like "chitterlings" and (uggghh) brains is associated with rural, agricultural areas, and there's just so much less rural population in the US than there was a century ago...
 
Better salesmanship. 120 years ago Horse Mackerel was considered unfit to eat by much of the US population. Relabeled as Tuna it sold well.

Repackaging organ meats as delicacies or as health food are two routes. In the first case they are still used as fillers in various forms of sausage, like cheap Boulongna, Weiners, ect... building on that is a option.
 
Playing the environmental card. If you are going to raise meat animals then it is only proper to use as much of them as possible. The classic ‘nose to tail’ morality.

Also they taste delicious. Devilled kidneys, black pudding, haggis, faggots, liver and bacon, pig’s trotters, brains on toast, tongue, grilled marrow bones and not forgetting sausage skins. so get the TV chefs to do their duty too. Wobbly bits rule!
 
How can I make organ meats more popular in the United States?
I think this is doable, but it kinda depends on what you define as being offal in that it is probably going to be easier to get things like the "mainstream" organ meats like liver into a level of higher popularity than the more fringe things like, say, brains, "oysters" and "bull sausages" because of the sheer strength of the squick factor in play. Something like liver is pretty low hanging fruit (ie, liver and onions is pretty well known even if not that commonly eaten nowadays) and kidneys are probably the next easiest, as you've got steak and kidney pies over here in the UK that show a pretty good way to get it across the line into a more mainstream form of food. Stomachs seem harder (perhaps the presence of a large Scottish immigrant community in the USA manages to establish haggis as a Scottish-American food?), but the hardest organs are going to be the ones people just find weird; I'm not sure how you could get eating brains into the mainstream (maybe you could get a short lived phenomenon of it from something like a far more popular Dawn of the Dead, but I doubt it), but things like intestines, trotters and tripe are going to be an even harder sell.

I think you could potentially get a sort of PoD to get this into the food culture of the USA during something of a major economic downturn/agricultural production problem (a question I leave to others more familiar with the details of American history to figure out) where larger and larger amounts of the population are willing to buy cuts of meat that they might've never considered in order to get themselves at least some kind of protein on the table. You'd need that time period to hold long enough not just for people to start to get used to the idea of eating organs (and for their children to get used to eating organs) but also to allow the popularization of the stuff in cookbooks and the like, which'd be how you break it into the mainstream. A lot of different cuts of meat as a whole can end up being proper naff if you've got no idea what to do with them, but give them a good amount of seasoning, the proper herbs and spices and the right cooking method and they come alive. The same thing holds true to offal, which a lot of people wouldn't know how to cook properly so they'd be stuck in the dreary grey phase either til they stop having offal (and probably never touch the stuff again) or til they figure out how to cook it in a way that lifts it up and shows what it can do.

It's that second one that you need. If you can get that off the ground, you've got better chances of seeing the stuff break out. It'd never be enormously popular (I don't see Kentucky Fried Trotters or Liver King becoming a thing), but it'd still be far more popular in that timeline than in ours. Probably. Does anyone have any statistics on the amount of offal getting eaten nowadays? :p
Playing the environmental card. If you are going to raise meat animals then it is only proper to use as much of them as possible. The classic ‘nose to tail’ morality.

Also they taste delicious. Devilled kidneys, black pudding, haggis, faggots, liver and bacon, pig’s trotters, brains on toast, tongue, grilled marrow bones and not forgetting sausage skins. so get the TV chefs to do their duty too. Wobbly bits rule!
Midlander from the UK: they're nice, but finding good ones can be an absolute pain in the backside. They're the kind of thing you need to go to a butcher for rather than just trying to buy frozen (which tend to have weird amounts of breadcrumbs in them and can make them look like a very sad teabag), but all the butchers around here are really, really dodgy. Like, using sauce to hide the fact that meat has gone bad levels of dodgy. They're nice, but they ain't playing Russian roulette with food poisoning nice :p
 
Isn't part of the issue that offal was historically common but "low class"? As US society grew wealthier and meat grew cheaper, the "cheap" cuts lost popularity.

I think if you're looking for an offal revival, it would probably need to start with higher end foodie restaurants (and offal is a thing in high-end UK restaurants, for example) re-popularizing it and then that diffusing back down. Food trends often tend to filter top-down. Things maybe get introduced as a minority thing, get taken up by high culture, and then go mainstream.
 
Playing the environmental card. If you are going to raise meat animals then it is only proper to use as much of them as possible. The classic ‘nose to tail’ morality.

Also they taste delicious. Devilled kidneys, black pudding, haggis, faggots, liver and bacon, pig’s trotters, brains on toast, tongue, grilled marrow bones and not forgetting sausage skins. so get the TV chefs to do their duty too. Wobbly bits rule!

I mean the truth is every part of the animal does get used. If it doesn't get sold as is, it ends up going into processed foods, animal feeds, or industrial uses.
 
Isn't part of the issue that offal was historically common but "low class"? As US society grew wealthier and meat grew cheaper, the "cheap" cuts lost popularity.
Yes, although I’d add a qualifier to the wealthier bit, as it wasn’t just the wealthy in the US who could afford better, but rather everyone but the poor. Meat has always been significantly cheaper in the United States than in Europe. It’s one of the reasons that vegetarian dishes back in Europe had meat added, because what would have been an expensive luxury in Europe was more easily purchaseable in America.
 

Nephi

Banned
Liver and liver products retain some popularity in the US, though probably not to the degree of half a century or so ago... encouraging people to eat more liver should be fairly easy, just an ad campaign or 2 emphasizing the nutritional quality of liver (which is quite high in some regards...)
For other "innards", yeah, it would be more of an uphill climb, as consumption of things like "chitterlings" and (uggghh) brains is associated with rural, agricultural areas, and there's just so much less rural population in the US than there was a century ago...

Beef liver and onions though. Mmmm it's so good and good for you, fried chicken livers. Delicious. Gizzards chewy goodness.

My favorite part of a chicken or turkey is that pack inside of goodness.

Hearts omg, have you ever had a bag of fried chicken hearts.

Mmmm
 

marathag

Banned
Beef liver and onions though. Mmmm it's so good and good for you, fried chicken livers. Delicious. Gizzards chewy goodness.

My favorite part of a chicken or turkey is that pack inside of goodness.

Hearts omg, have you ever had a bag of fried chicken hearts.

Mmmm
People say they don't like organ meats.
I'd say they don't care for the _idea_ of organ meats, but will eat sausages and potted meat, so it's not really the taste, but more the consistency

Hormel was famous for using everything but the 'oink'
 
Beef liver and onions though. Mmmm it's so good and good for you, fried chicken livers. Delicious. Gizzards chewy goodness.

My favorite part of a chicken or turkey is that pack inside of goodness.

Hearts omg, have you ever had a bag of fried chicken hearts.

Mmmm
I have not done the chicken hearts, but I can't resist a batch of fried mixed livers 'n gizzards from time to time... throw a little hot sauce on 'em, good to go :)
Something some of the mom 'n pop Greek restaurants do around here is beef liver, sliced thin and heavily seasoned, with pepper and onion over rice... dayum good :D
Yep, sweetbreads... the hidden treat inside a fried chicken thigh...
People who don't eat offal don't know what they're missing! ;)
 
People say they don't like organ meats.
I'd say they don't care for the _idea_ of organ meats, but will eat sausages and potted meat, so it's not really the taste, but more the consistency

Hormel was famous for using everything but the 'oink'
I think they still are :p
Much of what I eat comes out of a can, so Hormel is a very familiar brand to me :)
 
I mean the truth is every part of the animal does get used. If it doesn't get sold as is, it ends up going into processed foods, animal feeds, or industrial uses.
Tell me about it... there's a "rendering" facility near me... on a warm day, you can smell the place from a mile around, at least 🤮
I had a friend who took a job there once, because the pay's really good... he lasted for exactly one day.
 

Nephi

Banned
Tell me about it... there's a "rendering" facility near me... on a warm day, you can smell the place from a mile around, at least 🤮
I had a friend who took a job there once, because the pay's really good... he lasted for exactly one day.

Tell me about it... there's a "rendering" facility near me... on a warm day, you can smell the place from a mile around, at least 🤮
I had a friend who took a job there once, because the pay's really good... he lasted for exactly one day.

I can imagine that's absolutely vile, not really the same thing but it's 🤣 I mean depending on what they're rendering. Apparently China has really clean rendering plants which also use insanely happy music in their training videos.
 
In all honesty, if a fast food chain was able to make organ meat taste so good that people don’t care what’s in it (think McDonalds or Taco Bell) then that would technically make it popular.
“The McLiver is live! All the taste you’ve come to love from our products but packed with powerful nutrition! Nutritional comments not currently backed by the FDA
 

Riain

Banned
Offal is povo food, poor people ate it because they couldn't afford the good cuts like steak and chops. I think the growing popularity of thinks like lamb shanks is because that stigma has been forgotten over the last 40 or 50 years and as a result people can focus on the flavours. I don't know how to change this other than a slower rise of living standards making good cuts of meat less affordable for more people.
 
In all honesty, if a fast food chain was able to make organ meat taste so good that people don’t care what’s in it (think McDonalds or Taco Bell) then that would technically make it popular.
“The McLiver is live! All the taste you’ve come to love from our products but packed with powerful nutrition! Nutritional comments not currently backed by the FDA
Well, McD's already puts out the McRib every year, and nobody really knows what's in that, soooo... :)
I remember a few years back, Taco Bell tried to be a little innovative and a tad more "authentic" with the "Cantina menu"... they had soft-shell tacos, with real meat (chicken or beef, and not that beef-paste-whatever-it-is that they typically use), with cilantro and onion and some specialty sauces... they were actually pretty good...
It didn't last very long... apparently most Americans thought it "tasted weird" 🙄
If Taco Hell were to try tacos with lengua or tripe, hell, I'd try it... but I doubt most of mah fellow Amer'cans are quite that adventurous... yet...
 
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