Offal Politics

It's 2019 and the debate over American soul food, and more generally the consumption of offal, continues:

"Chitterlings (also known as chitlins) are both a peasant food and a delicacy the world over, like menudo in Mexico and andouillette in France. But regardless of whether you have eaten, will eat, or patently refuse to eat the small intestines of a pig, the dish is heavily associated with African-American culture, thanks in large part to the legacy of slavery: Pig intestines were given to African slaves after their masters had eaten 'high on the hog,' a phrase that came directly from the idea that the “higher” part of the pig’s body you were eating from, the better off you were economically.

'They didn’t want all that stuff—the intestines, the cow stomach, [so they gave it to us],' recalls Maudessa Rich-Harris, my boyfriend’s mother. For her part, she grew up loving chitlins, even if she hated the arduous (and admittedly stinky) process of cleaning refuse out of them.

'The conversation was around the smell,' says Kimberly Barnes, host of the black vegan podcast Do Fries Come With That Convo? She says chitlins were such a constant on her family’s holiday table that she doesn’t remember ever having any sort of conversation about them, except when it came to their distinctive odor.

'It smells like a butt,' she says."

There's a lot going on here so I'll just add two thoughts --

1) Processing any animal into food tends to be stinky and unpleasant and gross.  In committing to process the entire animal ("nose to tail" as the kids say these days) rather than just cutting off the easy, readily tasty bits you're going a long way to keep all  meat consumption a viable thing, which is by no means a guarantee now.

2) I'm lucky to live in a country that's never "struggled" with nose to tail, it's just always been a way of life.  Blood sausage?  Blood soup?  Grilled intestines?  Chicken feet?  Delicious (if not always heart-healthy) stuff all around.  So maybe it's a bit liberating here, where eating the gnarly bits was never imposed by slave hierarchies.  (Interestingly, grilled intestines were considered a delicacy by one of the greatest Korean kings himself.)

And here's the kicker from the article:

"'Either we embrace soul food or we don’t,' says Jametta Raspberry, the founder of the Minneapolis-based culinary collective House of Gristle. 'You can’t pick and choose.'

And, she continues, 'maybe you should go ask a white person how they feel about their ancestors giving these parts to us, while they kept all of the other parts to themselves? No one will want to answer that.'

'We have nothing to be ashamed of,' Barnes says. 'We took something that was bad and turned it into something that is a delicacy.'”

There is absolutely no shame in celebrating food cultures that grew out of necessity, if not desperation, and managed to do it so successfully.