Nose To Tail Eating, Can You Stomach It?

With 15 billion farm animals killed each year for food in the UK, eating the whole animal is the ethical choice. The Ecologist follows Fergus Henderson's lead and tries a week of eating offal

It came as a bit of a surprise to see someone putting ‘sustainable’ and ‘meat’ together in a recent newspaper article. Tim Wilson, a butcher and the founder of the Ginger Pig restaurant in London, explained in the Times that because almost the entire pig could be eaten, it was the ‘ultimate sustainable meat’. Whether or not meat production is environmentally sustainable or ethical is, in itself, one hell of a question.

What is clear, though, is that we are not sustainable or particularly ethical meat eaters. A recent study into UK food waste by WRAP found that we throw away 8.3 million tonnes of food a year, 5.8 million tonnes of which was avoidable. Within this, meat and fish account for just seven per cent, but still throws up some eye-watering figures.

Pork is the worst offender for avoidable waste levels: we throw away 93,000 tonnes a year, which tots up to £440 million of unnecessarily discarded pork. Even lamb - the most efficiently used at a comparatively minimal 8,000 tonnes avoidably wasted, and widely regarded as being reasonably ethical - accounts for £51 million in the bin. Not, after-all, the most sustainable meat.

Sustainable meat

It hasn’t always been this way. Meat wasn't traditionally unsustainable or unethical. Without falling prey to nostalgia, our ancestors should be praised for making the most of the less popular cuts of meat - shoulders, necks, jowl - and offal - the innards, from the brains to the kidneys. Everyone, it seems, has a parent or grandparent who enjoyed sheep brawn or goat’s head stew as a dietary staple.

A recent BBC article on favourite old foods, for example, listed tripe and chitterlings as some of the foodstuffs that were once cherished but have now waned in popularity. But recent years have seen a minor revival of the unusual cut. The chef Fergus Henderson championed the idea of eating the entire animal as being more respectful to the ‘beast’, as he calls it. Fergus Henderson's cookbook Nose to Tail Eating, published in 2004, became a hit and any ambitious pub worth its salt now has slow roast belly pork on the menu.

But, even if we are beginning to let fewer parts go to waste, does this make eating meat more sustainable or ethical? Hypothetically, yes: if we were more efficient in eating one pig, it would reduce our need for another in a simple equation of supply and demand. Going further, Simon Fairlie, author of the groundbreaking Meat: A Benign Extravagance, argues that meat is intrinsic to the UK’s agricultural tradition. ‘Whether you like it or not,’ he argues, ‘it would be wasteful to not consume meat or dairy. Something I’d like to see happening is people keeping a neighbourhood pig and making bacon.’

While keeping a pig between my flatmates and I probably wouldn’t have met with the approval of our landlady, the idea of nose to tail eating in the spirit of avoiding waste seemed like a good challenge. And a step - perhaps - towards steering our flesh consumption towards sustainable meat. But could I handle it for five days without opting for a more conventional fillet or, worse, cave in to squeamishness? I started slowly, with liver, the most familiar type of offal. With its strangely brown hue, wrapped in a vacuum-packed sheath of blood, liver is immediately recognisable on supermarket shelves. It's also cheap.

Very cheap. As would become clear over the week, eating unpopular cuts saves the pennies: my 350g of lamb’s liver was at its sell-by date and had been reduced to a ridiculous 47p. My girlfriend and I decided to try the classic liver and onions. Preparing the meat is the worst part of the dish: before you fry it, you need to rub the liver in flour, which turns almost clay-like when it mixes with the blood, leaving your finger-tips strangely numbed by their blood-flour coating.

After that, fry the onions until they begin to caramelise, add the liver and fry for five minutes, then mix in some stock and simmer for 15 minutes. Liver is an acquired taste, its distinctively rich flavour accompanied by an almost gritty crunch, and would work well in small portions. In our case, the amount we had was more than enough for the two of us.