4 days ago
Not so awful offal
Hannah Miller Childs, funder of The Lady Butcher
Photo:
Davina Zimmer
One of Hannah Miller Childs' go-to bar snacks is chicken hearts.
"A bit of mustard, you can eat it with a toothpick," she says.
You could also chop it up, add it into mince and make it a full nutritious meal.
Adding offal to mince in government school lunches last week hit the headlines because parents hadn't been warned it was coming.
But what's the big deal?
Offal is back on the menu
not just at school, but in high-end restaurants and one specific pub just off Auckland's Dominion Road.
Originally from America, Miller Childs moved to New Zealand a little over a decade ago to pursue a career in butchery. She founded a boutique business, the Lady Butcher, specialising in traditionally crafted, locally sourced meats.
She follows the nose to tail philosophy, which as the name suggests, means using the entire animal from nose to tail, including all the crunchy, wobbly, icky bits widely known here as offal.
"Stomach, heart, liver... bones can be part of that as well, usually the head in its entirety is referred to as offal, although in more recent years cheeks have become popular so now what we'll do is we'll take the cheeks off, and the rest of the head would become offal," Miller Childs says.
While some may remember growing up eating parts like kidney or liver, offal hasn't necessarily been a popular protein choice.
Miller Childs thinks offal is having a comeback and is in full support of it.
"There's a reason why in nature, when a lion takes down a gazelle, they eat the guts first. That's where the nutrition is," she says.
There are different kind of offal, red and green. The former refers to organs like the heart, liver and kidneys and the latter encapsulates things like the intestines, stomach and bladder. Miller Childs says red offal is especially good for you.
"Heart particularly, really high in protein, but also vitamins... a lot of women don't get enough iron, eat some heart, and a small amount goes a long way," she says.
It's also significantly cheaper than the standard slab of steak or chicken breast. So while you might not want to commit to a whole ox heart, swapping out your chicken breast or steak with something like chicken hearts could significantly cut down your grocery bill.
"You're looking at ... a couple bucks, whereas for the same weight-wise for a steak you'd be paying upwards of $20," Miller Childs says.
But Miller Childs acknowledges there's an ick factor to eating offal, in part because we've become disconnected from where our food comes from.
"The thing with offal is, it looks like what it is, a heart looks like a heart ... so there's that confrontational aspect," she says.
Miller Childs thinks as a society we've removed ourselves from that confrontation but says actually knowing what you're eating and where it's coming from is incredibly important.
"While I'm pro eating offal, I do want to know what's in my food and I think that we should all have a healthy interest in that," she says.
Consuming offal doesn't just mean eating it yourself, it could also mean feeding it to your pets. The main thing is avoiding as much waste as possible.
"This animal took years to raise, someone spent their life doing that ... there's a lot that's gone into it and it's very easy, in today's life, to just go, 'buy a packet of mince and off you go', without thinking about it.
"If it doesn't get eaten, or if you can't be bothered with taking leftovers for lunch it ends up in the bin and it's a waste of that whole process."
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