There Is No Such Thing As “strange” Meat

About three years ago, I took a pig’s face out of its skull, sprinkled it with herbs, zest and spices and cooked porchetta di testa for a few hours. This process was recorded and made into a video (my first for Lifehacker) and it made a lot of people very angry.

I received several threats, one of which was directed at my spaniel, who briefly appears in the video, but most of the reactions were shock, disgust and horror. (The video was even blurred on Facebook due to “offensive content” for a while.) Other people were just “confused,” which is the most boring thing you can be.

I was not surprised by the reaction of vegetarians and vegans. If you decide that meat is not for you, then a video about animal slaughter and cooking is probably not what you want, and I understand the thought process behind your displeasure. What I find incredibly absurd, however, is the number of meat-eaters who expressed horror and disgust when faced with the head of a dead animal. If you don’t like the fact that your food once had a face, you probably shouldn’t eat things with faces.

There is far more cruelty (and environmental impact) in making this small, flavorful chicken nugget than there is in making this particular porchetta di dough. (I assume there is a possibility that more humane chicken nuggets exist, but the vast majority of them are commercially produced and grown in factories.) The head I used in the video was purchased from a local farmer a few miles from where I am. lived. , and belonged to a pig that was far more humanely raised than meat that can be bought at the grocery store. This meat cut is a problem in the United States, especially for white people who have grown up seeing their future dinners packaged in neat styrofoam bags.

Every time I write about meat that is slightly outside the diet of white Americans, a little backlash emerges. (Not much in the comments as the Skillet commenters are pretty good most of the time, but it definitely happens on Twitter.) Any offal, anything with a lot of bones and connective tissue (for example, chicken legs), and anything that is not chicken, beef, pork or lamb, causes a wide range of discontent, from emoticons with vomit on the face to blatant racism and classism …

Racism and classism are not accidental. According to Scientific America , this division between meat and offal dates back to the days of slavery:

Another dimension in the United States is historical – for a very long time, when an animal was slaughtered on a farm, the owners received steaks, and the slaves received offal … I especially noticed here in the south that the country … offal dishes, and there is more to their almost intuitive distaste for them than their classic and racist flavor.

This still affects the way people view meat today. While liver, chitlin, and scar are somewhat normalized in the American South, you won’t find them on the dinner table in middle-class white houses. I grew up visiting my father and grandparents every summer in Mississippi, and although they talked about our family members eating organ meat, they never served me. I was never told directly what meat is “for the poor,” but I knew that the family members my grandmother spoke of were poor, and my young mind made this connection on its own.

As expected, offal has become quite popular with upper-class gourmets over the past decade, as upper-class foodies always strive to differentiate themselves not only as connoisseurs of the “authentic” but also distinct from the uneducated “normal” middle class. … You can find “ best offal ” lists for cities like New York and Portland , and the restaurants featured tend to fall into two distinct categories: eateries and food carts that sell reasonably priced food made by people of color and the expensive white-owned, often award-nominated restaurants that make it onto all sorts of fancy “lists.” The difference is not in the quality of the preparation, but in the setting in which it is served, in the coating and (sometimes) in smaller, more “flavorful” serving sizes. (Frequently, fancy offal is “French” in quality; francification is an easy way to make things acceptable to white people.)

It is almost impossible to be objective about food in a country that is so steeped in racism and classism. Eating is one of the first ways to learn “different” in childhood. Even in kindergarten, American children “know” that PB&J is more “normal” than liver sausage, and immigrant children and people of color should listen to white people comment on their lunchboxes from a very early age. This kind of racism is annoying at best, but it can be devastating for a child.

Dismantling oppressive systems requires more than just expanding your palate, but you can certainly start by removing the words “strange” and “rude” from your vocabulary when talking about offal and other meats you don’t know. Apart from racism and classism, this makes no sense. If you are a carnivore, seeing how someone is using every part of the animal – even the part with the eyeballs – should thrill you. Meat is not a small neat product that is sold in neat styrofoam trays wrapped in plastic wrap. It’s a fucking animal. He had bones, he had a face, he had internal organs, and he had life. If any of this disgusts you, then maybe meat is not for you.