How Organ Meat Got Into Smoothies

The Atlantic

17-04-2025

In the video, the man and his burgundy slab of beef liver are best friends. Their bond is revealed in a series of vignettes: The man ties a dog leash around the meat lump and lugs it behind him on a skateboard (afternoon stroll). The man dresses it in sunglasses and a necktie and positions it with a copy of Marcus Aurelius's Meditations (reading date). The man pulls back his bedsheets to reveal that the liver is his new pillow (slumber party!).
It's a joke, clearly, but the video's caption, posted by the nutrition influencer known by the pseudonym Carnivore Aurelius, is earnest: He hopes it inspires his 1 million Instagram followers to eat more beef liver. 'If nutrition were a Roman coliseum, kale would be the defeated gladiator,' he wrote, 'and beef liver would be the lion tearing him to shreds.'
This extravagant devotion to organ meats has become common within online wellness communities promoting 'ancestral' diets—a relative of the paleo diet, which endorses the consumption of whole, unprocessed foods. On TikTok, tradwives, carnivore bros and girlies, and holistic wellness influencers tout the benefits of eating organ meat, mostly from cows. Some of them eat it raw; others eat it cooked. The enthusiasm has spawned an industry that turns offal—a catchall term for an animal's nonmuscular parts—into pill or powdered form. 'Sneaking in' organ meats is a recurring theme: Some clips show moms blending beef-liver powder into their toddlers' orange juice and smoothies; one shows a man dropping offal chunks into his partner's ground beef.
All of this social-media attention has been translating into people's actual eating habits, Victoria Fitzgerald, who oversees Whole Foods Market's meat merchandising, told me. In 2020, the grocery-store chain introduced frozen organ-meat blends into its stores, and every year since, the products have seen triple-digit growth in sales. In some stores in Miami and Austin, Whole Foods' most popular organ-meat product—Force of Nature's 'grass fed beef ancestral blend,' a ground mix that includes beef liver and heart—sells at 15 times the rate of other frozen meat items. The buzzy Los Angeles supermarket Erewhon also got in on the offal hype, selling a $19 'raw animal' smoothie last year made with freeze-dried beef organs. And, like Whole Foods, Natural Grocers, a supermarket chain with stores west of the Mississippi River, named organ-meat products a top trend for 2025.
In the United States, this latest revival is particularly striking given how unpopular offal has been with Americans in recent history. Here, organ meats have been regarded with something of a 'yuck factor,' Mark McWilliams, a professor at the U.S. Naval Academy and the editor of Offal: Rejected and Reclaimed Food, told me. Many Americans view them as 'forbidden and unfamiliar,' he said. And the more unfamiliar a food is, the grosser it might seem to some people to eat.
Yet today's fanfare isn't because of a sudden switch-up in Americans' tastes. Rather, the influencers who extol offal's virtues seem to do so on the basis of its nutrient density. Organ meats appear to be viewed less as meals and more as supplements: something to be consumed not primarily for flavor but in pursuit of the influencers' vision of optimal health.
For as long as humans have eaten animals, they've eaten offal. The first humans ate the whole animal when they hunted, starting with the heart and brains, according to the chef Jennifer McLagan's book Odd Bits: How to Cook the Rest of the Animal. Ancient Romans feasted on goose-feet stew; Greeks ate splanchna, or bowels; Elizabethans nibbled on bird tongues. Organ meats played a key role in the Navajo Nation's traditional diet—and people all over the world continue to eat the whole animal today.
Sometime in the late 18th century, though, offal started suffering from an image problem, viewed by some people to be an affordable but second-rate food. McLagan traces this shift in reputation to the rise of slaughterhouses in England, which led to a greater availability of meat as well as an oversupply of perishable, hard-to-ship offal. Instead of tossing these cuts, the slaughterhouses would offer them to poor people who lived nearby. 'The result of this generosity,' McLagan writes, was that organ meats' 'prestige fell.' Around the same time in the United States, offal developed a reputation in some quarters as a food eaten mostly by people of low social status; according to some scholars, enslaved people in the antebellum South were often given the parts of livestock considered less desirable, such as pig's feet, jowls, and small intestines (chitterlings).
Even so, into the early 20th century, enough Americans were apparently still eating offal that Irma Rombauer included recipes for liver, brains, and kidneys in her wildly popular 1931 cookbook, Joy of Cooking. But by the 1940s and '50s, organ-meat consumption had begun to taper off. Family farms and butcher shops were giving way to factories and supermarkets. Muscle meats, such as chicken breast and sirloin, became cheaper. 'People forget chicken used to be a very special dish—a roast chicken was something you had on Sundays,' McLagan told me. When eating muscle meat daily became a possibility, many people opted out of offal. (By the time the 1953 edition of Joy of Cooking came out, Rombauer felt the need to add a coy introduction to her organ-meat recipes: 'The following is a hush-hush section, 'just between us girls,'' she wrote.) Since then, organ meats produced in the United States have largely been exported, made into pet food, or simply thrown in the trash.
Many people have tried to rebrand organ meats for wider consumption, to little lasting effect. During World War II, meat rationing led to a government campaign encouraging families to eat offal, which was renamed 'variety meats.' This effort led to a brief boost in popularity, though by the war's end, organ meats were once again mostly abandoned. In the 1990s, the British chef Fergus Henderson popularized the 'nose-to-tail' movement, which primarily focused on animal rights and sustainability and aimed to use as much of the animal as possible. 'If you're going to knock it on the head,' Henderson said, 'it seems only polite to eat the whole thing.'
That ethos gained popularity with some Americans too: In 2004, Henderson's cookbook, full of highbrow recipes such as deviled kidneys and potato-stuffed pig's foot, was released in the United States with a glowing introduction by the food celebrity Anthony Bourdain, who called the roast bone marrow at Henderson's restaurant St. John his 'death row meal.' When McLagan released Odd Bits in 2011, she, too, was hopeful that organ meats were on a fast track to the mainstream. Yet the nose-to-tail movement, appealing mostly to fringe foodies, never made a big dent on eating habits. 'I thought that I would change the world with the book,' McLagan told me. 'Of course, I didn't.'
The newest organ-meat revival doesn't bother as much with time-intensive recipes—it's far more focused on convenience. Besides ground-meat blends and supplement pills, offal is being sold as salted crisps, chocolate-almond-flavored protein bars, vinegary meat sticks, and freeze-dried powder toppings to be sprinkled on dishes like pizza or steak. Whole Foods is planning to expand its offal selection, Fitzgerald told me; easy-to-cook options such as premade organ-meat burgers and meatballs should soon be available.
Today's offal movement is, in part, an offshoot of the carnivore diet—a meat-heavy approach to eating that, despite copious warnings from nutritionists, rose to prominence online beginning around 2018. Controversial influencers such as Paul Saladino, Brian 'Liver King' Johnson, and Joe Rogan all helped popularize the trend. Many influencers have painted organ meats as a miracle food, claiming that eating them had improved ailments such as fatigue, anemia, and hives; in one 2020 podcast, Rogan suggested that eating offal and other types of meat could possibly cure autoimmune disorders. 'Don't believe anything that is too good to be true,' Melissa Fernandez, a professor at the University of Ottawa who studies nutrition influencers and misinformation, told me. Some influencers, she noted, are entrepreneurs whose businesses may benefit from their own nutritional advice. Saladino and Johnson, for instance, each own organ-meat-supplement companies. (Saladino has denied any conflict of interest, saying that organs 'are some of the most nutrient-rich foods on the planet.')
Despite the scant scientific support for influencers' more extreme health claims, in recent years the offal hype has also extended past carnivore-diet enthusiasts to include a broader, omnivorous group of nutrition-focused eaters. The refrain 'Mother Nature's multivitamin' is fairly ubiquitous on organ-meat social-media posts, where influencers typically list off an alphabet soup of nutrients, among them vitamin A, B12, and iron. Organ meats are also portrayed like munchable fountains of youth: Beef liver has been deemed, at once, ' nature's botox,' ' edible retinol,' and the ' one supplement to make you hotter.' Offal does indeed have lots of nutrients—but like influencers' health assertions, most of these beauty claims have little evidence to support them, Pieter Cohen, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and the leader of Cambridge Health Alliance's Supplement Research Program, told me. 'Do I know of any research that has proven that eating organ meat—the food—improves skin, improves mood, or improves the quality of your hair?' Cohen said. 'No.'
Consuming organ meats as supplements could actually be harmful to people's health, Cohen and Fernandez said. The supplement industry has little government oversight and is known to be rife with ingredients that are either ineffective or, worse, dangerous. 'I have huge, huge concerns over their safety,' Fernandez said of these new organ-meat supplements. Given organ meats' nutrient density, eating liver every day in any form—whether as a capsule or sautéed with onions—may be hazardous. Fernandez flagged that people could end up consuming too much vitamin A; this is especially notable for pregnant women, who risk the possibility of birth defects through overconsumption, she told me. 'There's actual danger there in toxicity.' (Johnson's Ancestral Supplements and Saladino's Heart & Soil—which the Liver King also co-owns—have both dismissed concerns about vitamin A toxicity, suggesting that their products fall within a safe daily dosage.)
That's not to say people should steer clear of organ meats. The nutrition experts I spoke with just advised treating them as actual food instead of supplements, and not eating them every day. Fernandez suggested seeking pleasure in offal, such as by cooking a new dish. And although offal may never become as ubiquitous as muscle meat in American diets, more people eating organ meats could come with some positives. In McWilliams's and McLagan's view, offal provides a real way to combat the moral quandary of meat eating. 'If you're someone who wants to eat meat but is conscious of the problems of industrial food production,' McWilliams told me, 'eating the whole animal is one way out.' Beef liver may not be a gladiator-crushing lion ready to dethrone kale in some fictive nutritional coliseum. But, at the very least, it doesn't need to go in the trash.