“These for your dogs?” the rancher-asked us at the farmers market, as my husband and I loaded our cooler with three beef hearts, 10 pounds of sliced liver, and a magnificently huge beef tongue.
“We eat them!” we replied. The rancher leaned forward in curiosity. “How do you manage that?” She confessed that, though she and her husband often sold out of choice cuts of grass-fed beef at the market, they never managed to sell even half of the organ meats. And frankly, she admitted, she had no idea what to do with them.
This isn’t unusual. The typical American diet is entirely absent of organ meats. Instead, we refer to unwanted animal parts as “offal,” a term of disgust. “Chopped liver,” after all, is an expression of inferiority. But for all their underutilization and idiomatic slurs, the organs of meat animals are highly nutritious, and they
