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Whether it's tripe, liver, tongue or cheek, billions of people around the world regularly eat offal, the edible internal organs of an animal.
It is widely consumed in many European and Asian countries. For example, restaurants in Indonesia often boast a plethora of offal-based dishes, like coconut milk offal soup, intestine curry or stir-fried tripe, while the finest French brasseries serve up langue de boeuf (beef tongue), ris de veau (sweetbreads) and rognons (beef kidneys).
And yet, while Australians eat more animal by-products than people in other Western countries, many still turn their noses up at the thought of eating offal.
However their numbers might be waning, as there are signs of an offal resurgence, with some butchers saying they are selling out of popular cuts.
So what exactly is behind the recent spike in interest in offal?
'Just part of the cuisine'
Writer Sheila Ngọc Phạm grew up eating weeknight dinners like sauteed gizzards with rice and vegetables, chicken hearts and sliced liver with noodles.
"It was very normalised," she tells ABC RN's Late Night Live.
Her parents moved to Australia as refugees from Vietnam, where eating offal is common.
As an adult, Phạm, who has written about her relationship with offal, was surprised to learn it wasn't a regular meal for many Australians.
"I never knew that people might find [offal] squeamish or gross until I started eating yum cha as an adult with friends, and people would not go near [the offal dishes] with a bargepole," she says.
She believes stigma has something to do with the reluctance to eat offal. During the economic hardship of the Great Depression and World War II, many Australians were forced to eat offal as it was a cheaper cut of meat.
"But I never really understood that this was stigmatised or associated with poverty. For us, it was just part of the cuisine," Phạm says.
Our offal consumption
Right up until the 1980s, offal was consumed fairly widely in Australia.
It featured in popular recipe books, including a classic cookbook called NMAA (Nursing Mothers' Association of Australia) Cooks.
Aimed at breastfeeding mothers, the cookbook had a whole section of offal recipes — like kidneys in red wine, kidneys and sour cream, braised tongue, and lambs fry and bacon — because of its nutritional value. Some offal can be higher in iron and b12 than lean muscle meat.
But since then, offal has fallen out of favour with many Australians. And it's probably not just because of stigma.
"People have also suggested to me … that it has a lot to do with supermarket distribution as well," Phạm says.
"Dare I say, maybe it's a victim of capitalism and [it's] not so easily packaged nicely and and sold in supermarkets.
"There's a couple of generations of Australians who haven't really even eaten much offal in an overt way. They never see it sold in supermarkets. And so it's not even necessarily about taste or stigma, but just people have just no exposure to offal."
She also believes some people might be reluctant to try offal again after they were left with a bad taste in their mouths from childhood.
"People who did grow up eating offal, maybe it wasn't cooked in a delicious way and so people didn't find it very tasty," she says.
'It's come back into fashion'
Today, however, some offal seems to be enjoying a comeback.
Australian Meat Emporium commercial director Harriette Greenhalgh has noticed an uptick in the number of people purchasing offal, in particular cow's liver, from her business in the last year.
"It's come back into fashion," she says.
"Over the last year, offal sales have sort of exploded."
She believes it's down to a combination of factors.
In recent years, Greenhalgh has noticed more discussion, for example in health and fitness podcasts, about the health benefits of nutrient-dense offal, something she says may have contributed to the rise in offal sales.
She also believes more people are becoming interested in offal as a way to combat food waste.
"People have become a lot more aware that an entire cow is being killed and how [by preparing offal for sale] we're going to make sure that we're making the most of the animal
"It's really important to us that we are using everything possible," Greenhalgh says.
The spike in interest has prompted her business to expand its offal range.
"The liver has become very on trend. To the point [where] we were running out of liver ... So we had to try and figure out how to stretch that."
The butcher developed a mince of liver mixed with beef, which she says is "really popular".
Having grown up on farms, Greenhalgh says she hates to see any parts of a butchered animal go to waste.
"We've got our own cattle that we bring in every week and we use the nose to tail of the animals. So virtually nothing goes to waste," she says.
"That means that we sell the tongue … hearts, liver, kidney, marrow, bones, oxtail [and] tripe."
Like Greenhalgh, Phạm has a strong sense of where food comes from.
She grew up in a home where the family occasionally slaughtered chickens and ducks for food, and they didn't let any animal parts go to waste.
When it comes to eating offal, she says there is a "broader question around the ethics of eating meat".
"But part of that discussion has to be around offal.
"I think it's more ethical to eat less meat but also eat every part of the animal. That's how I grew up eating, and when I look back, there's a lot of wisdom in that approach."
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