Waste Not, Want Not, Continued: Food Taboos in American Culture
Jonathan Bloom cares a lot about the food that we leave on our plates, but what about the food that never makes it there in the first place? The taboo on eating animal organs keeps a lot of very nutritious foodstuffs off the dinner table. When regular cuts of meat were routinely being shipped overseas to soldiers during World War II, the Department of Defense was sure that a nation full of protein-starved people was a security threat. So, the Department of Defense commisioned the Nation Research Council put together a group called the Committe on Food Habits in order to figure out how to make non-tradtional organ meats more attractive and less taboo as a source of protein for Americans.
Classified as wartime secrets, there were over 200 studies conducted by the social scientists, nutritionists, and marketers on the Committee on Food Habits. Many recommnedations from the studies went unheaded because the war ended well before anticipated. Still, as Brian Wansink, the author of Marketing Nutrition: Soy, Functional Foods, Biotechnology, and Obesity, points out, this “classified research
Organ meats made a comeback in the 1940’s thanks to national security propaganda about maintaining good health combined with the overall scarcity of regular cuts of meat. Today, the arguments for eating organ and variety meats are less about patriotism and more about environmental consciousness and sustainability. If you’re going to eat meat, you ought to consider not wasting a huge proportion of it. Really, you should have a cow, man.
Chef Chris Cosentino demonstrates that pig heads can be offal-ly good. Offal is the “Fifth quarter” or the things that would fall off (”off-fall“) after the butcher got through taking a primal down to chops, steaks and roasts. --Photo: Lisa M. Hamilton
Instead of the government heading up the cause, it’s chefs like Chris Cosentino making the case for eating animals “head to tail” by turning contemporary oddities into culinary delicacies. Making dishes like Florentine-style tripe and trotters with tomato and rosemary or grilled beef hearts with roasted golden beets and horseradish, Chef Cosentino demonstrates that you can be sustainable with flare.
Given how full the green/sustainable band wagon is these days, you’d think that people would realize that eating just skeletal cuts is plainly unsustainable. Not to mention that because they are generally less desirable, organ meats are often less expensive. Couldn’t we all stand to ease our grocery bills in these times of economic woe? So, variety and organ meats are delicious if prepared well, cheaper and more nutritious than skeletal cuts in most cases, and a more sustainable protein source–if the government isn’t going to start another campaign then the green folks should.
January 3, 2009
Tags: food, hunger, waste, World War II Posted in: Fun Food Facts, Politics
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