camouflage.
The writer and philosopher Roger Scruton describes food as having ‘meaning, not just nourishment’. Because offal takes many forms, and attitudes to it vary in different cultures and within different income groups, its meanings are enmeshed. Its recipes, tastes, smells and textures, history and cultural context all exist against a backdrop – in the affluent West at least – of uncertainty over whether this is stuff we ought to eat. In cultures that until recently enjoyed offal, the better-off classes are beginning to reduce their consumption of it, while – conversely – many a gourmet or chef in the West encourage us to return to offal. Attitudes to offal, and remembered impressions of it, can be peculiarly complicated, but then so is offal itself. The rub here is between the physical sensations of taste, smell and appearance via our lips, mouths, taste buds and eyes, and our moral tastes or preferences. The food writer Tara Austen Weaver struggles with the idea:
I think offal is far more intimidating than simply meat. Offal is foreboding, the nasty bits that many people prefer to avoid. In some way it is the essence of the animal – intestines, kidney, heart. 6
The ways in which offal-associated vocabulary is used and the metaphors that surround it are illuminating. The fourteenth-century theory of bodily humours has invaded our ways of expressing internal life, forging a connection between physical organs and their hidden functions: one can be splenetic, choleric, liverish, phlegmatic or even just sadly melancholic. I may be lily-livered if I am gutless, heartless when I am not heartfelt. One suffers from heartburn or a chill on the kidneys. The edition of Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable of 1870 sourly informs us that veins or kidneys ‘were even by the Jews supposed to be the seat of the affections’.
There exists a lexicon of words and phrases that appear to draw on our associations with offal, and suggest in turn how we have come to think of it. You may consider this to be a load of tripe, with not enough gristle, a bloody mess, brainless. Even archaic expressions can affect current attitudes. Blister my kidneys! I must keep my head, trust to my palate, be true to my heart’s core, whether or not we are of the same kidney. Consider the extraneous offal parts and all their everyday comparative uses, which make eating their animal parities seem disturbingly intimate: keep your nose/snout out of it, keep your eyeballs peeled, your tail between your legs, your skin on, your ears flapping, heart’s blood, in the recesses of your visceral maw, yet hold your tongue, for I never intended to seem tongue in cheek.
Given the backdrop of our relationship to offal and its associated vocabulary, any desire to imagine our own insides as a neat arrangement of organs and tubes like a child’s model or a biology diagram at school, or just the wish to avoid thinking of ourselves as entrails encased in muscle and skin, is disrupted by our encounter with this foodstuff. We have a very limited idea of what lies inside our bodies. Jonathan Miller describes how what we think we know is often pastiche: ‘We reconstruct our insides from pictures in advertisements for patent medicines, from half-remembered school science, from pieces of offal on butcher’s slabs and all sorts of medical folklore.’ 7 The resulting confusion may account in part for the curious impression that offal can make. In Edinburgh, chocolatier Nadia Ellingham sells haggis-flavoured chocolate: one suspects that it is popular not only for the blend of spices used, but also because the idea of meaty innards and chocolate creates a sense of pleasing disjuncture (thoughthe chocolates contain no actual offal meat). The punning Glasgow Herald headline is revealing: ‘Haggis Chocolate Does Not Taste Offal.’
Often people claim distaste for offal without having eaten it. Fermented fish offal, for example, is sometimes criticized because
The writer and philosopher Roger Scruton describes food as having ‘meaning, not just nourishment’. Because offal takes many forms, and attitudes to it vary in different cultures and within different income groups, its meanings are enmeshed. Its recipes, tastes, smells and textures, history and cultural context all exist against a backdrop – in the affluent West at least – of uncertainty over whether this is stuff we ought to eat. In cultures that until recently enjoyed offal, the better-off classes are beginning to reduce their consumption of it, while – conversely – many a gourmet or chef in the West encourage us to return to offal. Attitudes to offal, and remembered impressions of it, can be peculiarly complicated, but then so is offal itself. The rub here is between the physical sensations of taste, smell and appearance via our lips, mouths, taste buds and eyes, and our moral tastes or preferences. The food writer Tara Austen Weaver struggles with the idea:
I think offal is far more intimidating than simply meat. Offal is foreboding, the nasty bits that many people prefer to avoid. In some way it is the essence of the animal – intestines, kidney, heart. 6
The ways in which offal-associated vocabulary is used and the metaphors that surround it are illuminating. The fourteenth-century theory of bodily humours has invaded our ways of expressing internal life, forging a connection between physical organs and their hidden functions: one can be splenetic, choleric, liverish, phlegmatic or even just sadly melancholic. I may be lily-livered if I am gutless, heartless when I am not heartfelt. One suffers from heartburn or a chill on the kidneys. The edition of Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable of 1870 sourly informs us that veins or kidneys ‘were even by the Jews supposed to be the seat of the affections’.
There exists a lexicon of words and phrases that appear to draw on our associations with offal, and suggest in turn how we have come to think of it. You may consider this to be a load of tripe, with not enough gristle, a bloody mess, brainless. Even archaic expressions can affect current attitudes. Blister my kidneys! I must keep my head, trust to my palate, be true to my heart’s core, whether or not we are of the same kidney. Consider the extraneous offal parts and all their everyday comparative uses, which make eating their animal parities seem disturbingly intimate: keep your nose/snout out of it, keep your eyeballs peeled, your tail between your legs, your skin on, your ears flapping, heart’s blood, in the recesses of your visceral maw, yet hold your tongue, for I never intended to seem tongue in cheek.
Given the backdrop of our relationship to offal and its associated vocabulary, any desire to imagine our own insides as a neat arrangement of organs and tubes like a child’s model or a biology diagram at school, or just the wish to avoid thinking of ourselves as entrails encased in muscle and skin, is disrupted by our encounter with this foodstuff. We have a very limited idea of what lies inside our bodies. Jonathan Miller describes how what we think we know is often pastiche: ‘We reconstruct our insides from pictures in advertisements for patent medicines, from half-remembered school science, from pieces of offal on butcher’s slabs and all sorts of medical folklore.’ 7 The resulting confusion may account in part for the curious impression that offal can make. In Edinburgh, chocolatier Nadia Ellingham sells haggis-flavoured chocolate: one suspects that it is popular not only for the blend of spices used, but also because the idea of meaty innards and chocolate creates a sense of pleasing disjuncture (thoughthe chocolates contain no actual offal meat). The punning Glasgow Herald headline is revealing: ‘Haggis Chocolate Does Not Taste Offal.’
Often people claim distaste for offal without having eaten it. Fermented fish offal, for example, is sometimes criticized because
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