Hollis Wyatt lets the menu sit untouched on the table—she knows what she is going to order. She heard from a friend that the Grange Kitchen is serving an unusual dish that is not to be missed. A twenty-one-year-old Zingerman’s employee, Wyatt digs her fork into what looks like a large, round crab cake. However, underneath the crispy crust lies not delicate crab meat, but shredded pieces of pig’s head. “When I ordered pig’s head, I was expecting a severed head on a platter, but it was surprisingly normal—very tender and rich,” she says.
Animals are not made of steaks or hamburger. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the meat sold wrapped in plastic at grocery stores only makes up an average of 56 percent of a cow’s weight. The rest is called offal, defined as parts that can be used as food but which are not skeletal muscle. The term literally means “off fall,” or the pieces which fall from a carcass when it is butchered. With a name that sounds like “awful” and a definition that includes the words “entrails” and “organs,” it’s not surprising that the concept of eating offal makes even many enthusiastic carnivores recoil in disgust.
According to Megan Perry, policy researcher for the Sustainable Food Trust in the United Kingdom, everybody ate offal until the end of the Second World War. However, after the war, people got wealthier, agriculture intensified, and packaged meat became more common. Soon many of the smaller butchers disappeared. “People started buying the expensive cuts of meat, so nobody grew up eating the bits that we think of as not very nice. In reality, we just aren’t used to eating them anymore,” she says.
But now, Perry says, “eating offal is getting almost fashionable in the sustainability world.” David Flaugher, who left Ann Arbor last year for Traverse City, is one of a small but increasing number of young people who choose to consume a diet that includes offal. “The liver is the best part,” he says. “It has a bloody flavor, but not a bad bloody flavor, just maybe one you wouldn’t be used to.”
While many people his age are just discovering offal, Flaugher grew up eating this way. When he was thirteen, his parents moved to a farm near Cadillac and began raising sheep for milk and pigs for meat. After they butchered an animal, “we tried to eat everything,” he says, “because we put a lot of time and effort into raising the animal, and you wouldn’t want to just throw that out.”
A similar sentiment is repeated by Brandon Johns, owner and chef at the Grange Kitchen on W. Liberty St. He explains that restaurants like Grange, which focus on local, sustainable food, buy whole animals from small organic farms. That’s much more expensive than buying precut meat from large distributors, so “every bit of skin, every bit of bone, every bit of everything–you have to make money on it.” Fortunately for Johns, offal is making a comeback in some restaurants, thanks to customers like Wyatt who want to know where their food comes from.
According to Perry, buying the whole animal is the most sustainable way to buy meat. “Obviously if you eat more of each animal, then you can reduce the overall number of livestock needed, which reduces the overall environmental impact of producing them,” she says.
However, it is also important to choose offal wisely. Perry says the Sustainable Food Trust advocates buying only grass-fed, organic livestock. “Especially the offal–say, liver or kidneys–if they have been fed antibiotics or chemicals, then they might not be very good for people to eat because that is where all of those toxins would accumulate,” she says.
It is also important not to overdo it: Susan Aaronson, director of the U-M’s didactic program in dietetics, cautions that offal is often high in cholesterol. “When preparing correctly and incorporating them in an otherwise healthy diet, offal can be included without harm,” Aaronson says, “unless you have heart disease, where you might want to be cautious of your cholesterol ingestion.”
It’s harder to prepare, too. “Anybody can put salt on a steak and cook it, but you can’t really do that to a heart or feet,” says Johns. “You have to have technique.” To make the dish Wyatt ordered, he started with a whole pig’s head. He boiled it, removed the meat, then formed it into seasoned patties.
Last year, he put it on the menu expecting few people would be interested. However, it sold out in just two hours. It’s been on the menu ever since.
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At Vinology on Main St., chef Adam Galloway also purchases whole, local animals and incorporates offal into the menu–although he doesn’t use that name. “I like to consider it the ‘fifth quarter,'” says Galloway, “A little nicer way of saying it.”
According to Galloway, offal “permeates” the menu at Vinology. His beef cheek pierogies are stuffed with blood-braised beef cheeks and served with bone marrow. “It comes out of the kitchen, and it’s literally a bone that the diner scoops marrow out of–we aren’t disguising it at all,” Galloway says. Although he said offal was a tough sell a few years ago, it has been extremely well received as of late. “I think the diners of Ann Arbor are really embracing nose-to-tail dining.”
U-M lecturer Margot Finn was converted while honeymooning in Paris, when she ordered pork kidneys accidentally and found them to be delicious. She says she likes to cook offal, but it isn’t easy to get your hands on much of it. “I really only cook at home with liver because you can get it anywhere,” she says, “where other organ meats have to be requested special.” She buys beef liver at Busch’s, and cooks up the livers that come inside chickens she gets from her family’s community-supported agriculture share.
According to Bob Sparrow, owner of Sparrow Market in Ann Arbor, patterns are changing. “Recently, I have noticed an increase in younger ones ages twenty-five [to] thirty-five asking for things like hearts or kidneys.”
Megan Perry thinks this decade is a new beginning for offal. “It went through a phase even until this century when it was seen as gross and what poorer people eat, but it’s changing.”
“I think it will continue to increase in the future,” Galloway says. “Restaurants are on the cutting edge of food trends. If people see offal in restaurants, it will eventually trickle down to the home cook.”
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This article has been edited since it was published in the April 2016 Ann Arbor Observer. Susan Aronson’s title has been corrected.
