Variety Meats

No need to say "no," but don't foreclose upon your options...

Last Saturday, I attended a Variety Meats workshop hosted by the local chapter of the Weston A. Price Foundation. I'd had a vague idea about how supremely nutritious the animal organs are, but had no idea how to go about cooking or eating them. Really, I haven't become a confident muscle meats cook either, as we don't practice much around here.

The workshop was such a great introduction! They prepared about 12 different dishes of a variety of organs for us to sample, gave us the recipes, did demonstrations, showed us good and bad examples of the raw product, and talked about the nutritional profile of various organs. I learned that liver is the most nutrient-dense food we know of.

For the first time in my life, I got to taste thymus, kidneys, heart, liver, and gizzards. I really liked everything except the kidneys. I was honestly surprised that it was so tasty--these cuts have such a bad reputation! I'm sure knowing how to cook them well and mixing the meat with other ingredients helps immensely.

It was also interesting to me how normal it was to eat these cuts 50 years ago, and how uncommon it is now. We saw a school lunch menu from 1949, and they served some form of liver 5 days a week! In most other countries, these are still very normal part of the diet, and especially prescribed for the ill.

It is crucial to only eat the organs of pastured animals (not factory farm), because toxins concentrate in organs, so if they live in an unhealthy (re: typical) environment, the consequences will reside in these cuts, and the desired nutrition from the grass these animals are designed to eat will be lacking.

A few interesting factoids that are still sticking with me a week later:

• In the dawn of zoo-keeping, big game cats would never reproduce in captivity. They couldn't figure out why, until someone observed a big cat attacking its prey in the wild. The animal gobbled up the organs, then covered up the rest of the carcass and walked away. Once they figured out what cats eat in the wild, they started feeding them organs instead of muscles, and the cats started reproducing!
  
• In the 1970's they did an experiment where they fed three groups of rats normal diets, but each had these supplements, respectively: (a) 11 essential vitamins, (b) vitamin B complex, and (c) powdered liver. After a couple months, they put the rats in drums of water and timed how long they could swim before giving up. The results were: (a)13.3 minutes average, (b)13.4 minutes average, and (c) 2+ hours (with a few stragglers giving up at 63 & 83 minutes) !!! Kind of incredible.

I'm convinced, show me to the deli counter! :)

I am grateful for this opportunity to have my hand held for my first encounter with organ meats. I'd like to start making them part of my diet as our budget allows.