Why We Stopped Eating Organ Meats, What We're Missing, and How to Start Again
Approximately a 10 minute read | First published in 2018; substantially updated March 2026
Universally, in traditional cultures, organ meats were eaten first, with reverence. A family or community gathered around, gave thanks and honored the life of an animal, then ate the precious organs before processing the rest of the meat. Organ meats were the animals’ most nutritious gift to humanity.
In modern society, we tend to be repelled by the idea of eating organ meats. What happened?
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When my first child was a baby, I read the book Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon. I devoured it like a novel, and it started me on a real food journey that has served my family well. A few years after that, we were able to organize our life to where we now have the privilege and responsibility of raising our own meat.
My eldest is now 18 and we still raise our own meat. We've raised chickens, goats, pigs, and cattle over the years, for meat, milk, and eggs.
We know our larger animals by name (there are too many chickens to name, although the kids gave it a good go when they were younger). We raise them without chemicals, hormones, or grain, and provide a humane death with an attitude of respect, reverence, and gratitude. Animals that die for us to eat do so from among their friends, with grass in their mouths, standing quietly on the land where they were born.
We eat every part of the animal from the nose to the tail, including the organ meats.
In this post I'll share some of what I've gleaned about the nutritional benefits of eating organ meats, how modern people came to stop eating them, and finally some tips for starting to eat them again.
Lets start with the "superfood" lable -- are organ meats really as nutrient dense as people say they are?
(Please note that in this post I'm talking about the organs of animals who have eaten their natural diet, and lived a natural lifestyle. The profile of organs from animals raised in confinement and on unnatural diets might be significantly different, not to mention the importance of the "happy meat" factor that I wrote about in this post. )
Are organ meats really as nutrient dense as people say they are?
Organ meats, especially liver (and shellfish) rank alongside dark leafy greens as the most nutrient-dense foods available.
Measured in terms of nutrients per calorie, leafy greens (especially wild leafy greens) score higher for some vitamins and minerals (especially vitamin K, vitamin C, fiber, and carotenoids). Organ meats on the other hand score better for others (especially fat-soluble vitamins, CoQ10, heme iron, B12, and essential fatty acids).
According to research (see sources down the bottom), our ancestors considered organ meats to be essential, sacred foods.
For us modern people, organ meats might be even more crucial because the quality of the food available to use from the industrial agriculture and food systems is so depleted.
One thing I'm sure of -- I would trust mine and my family's health to organ meats and dark leafy green vegetables with far more confidence than to powders and pills.
But if they're that nutritious, how come we stopped eating them?
Why don't we eat organ meats anymore?
What happened to turn organ meats into "offal"?
I don't know for sure, but I think the answers probably have a lot to do with industrialization and supermarkets.
Industrialization and supermarkets changed the way we eat
When industrialization and factory farming of animals allowed for production of large quantities of meat, cheaply, it was suddenly no longer necessary to be thrifty and respectful and make careful use of every part of a hard-won carcass.
In comparison to muscle meats, organ meats are delicate, fiddly to process, and don’t keep well. Not what you would describe as the ideal food for a system that produces on a massive scale, transports over huge distances, and needs food to be “shelf-stable” (read, “so unnatural that micro-organisms don’t want to eat it”).
The solution for big meat processing companies has been to downgrade organ meats to pet-mince status.
And then there are supermarkets. Before there were supermarkets, there were specialty shops. Specialty butcher shops provided a huge range of what would now be considered “weird” cuts, including organ meats, along with advice on how to cook and eat them.
When supermarkets with convenient in-house delis, supplied by factory farms, took over from small locally owned and operated butcher shops, the loss of skills and knowledge needed to prepare and eat organ meats accelerated.
So now, with all that said, lets take a closer look at the nutrition available in some individual organ meats.
(Or if you're done with the nerdy stuff, you can jump to the section on how to start eating them.)
Nutrient profiles of organ meats
Heart
Heart meat is a very concentrated source of Coenzyme Q10 (CoQ10, important for cardiovascular health and also found abundantly in kidney and liver).
Heart meat also contains an abundance of Vitamin A, Vitamin B12; folic acid, iron, selenium, phosphorus and zinc, and is the number one food source of copper.
Heart also contains about twice as much collagen and elastin as regular muscle meat (which means it is rich in the amino acids glycine and proline). These are essential for our connective tissue health, joint health, and digestive health.
Tongue
Tongue has a nutritional profile closer to that of other muscle meats, meaning it’s a good source of iron, zinc, choline, vitamin B12, other B vitamins, and trace minerals. But it’s also much higher in beneficial fats. 65-80% of the calories in tongue are fat calories, with the balance as protein.
And this is a good thing because…?
Well, besides being very tender and flavorful when properly cooked, tongue contains very high concentrations of monounsaturated fatty acids, particularly oleic acid – the same health promoting fatty acid found in nuts and olive oil.
(Oleic acid is also found in high concentrations in bone marrow, which is another significant source of high quality nutrition too often overlooked in our culture.)
Tongue is also high in stearic acid – one of the saturated fatty acids which lowers blood cholesterol levels.
Kidney
Kidney is particularly high in Vitamin B12, selenium, iron, copper, phosphorus and zinc.
Liver
Liver is one of the most nutritionally dense foods in existence and nature’s most concentrated source of vitamin A (which, unlike synthetic Vitamin A, you cannot overdose on).
In addition, liver is an outstanding source of Vitamin D, Vitamin B12 (and other B-Vitamins), choline, copper, potassium, magnesium, phosphorous, manganese, iron (in a form that is particularly easily absorbed and used by the body), purines and the good kind of cholesterol.
All organs
All organ meats also contain high amounts of essential fatty acids, including arachidonic acid and the omega-3 fats EPA and DHA, and have some of the highest concentrations of naturally occurring vitamin D of any food source.
To sum all that up in simple terms: small amounts of organ meats from healthy grass fed animals, eaten regularly, are a cheap way to stack in some seriously concentrated nutrition.
And now, with that established, how do you eat them?
3 Ways to get started with eating organ meats
The key words from that last paragraph above are "small," and "regularly."
Forcing yourself to eat a slab of fried liver, and being so traumatized by the experience that you don't go near it again for a year, is not the way to do it.
With that in mind, here are 3 reasonably painless ways to get started eating organ meats. We'll focus on the two that are the easiest to start with - heart and tongue, and the one that is the most nutrient dense - liver.
How to eat heart meat
Heart is a good organ meat to start with. Its technically a muscle, so its closer in appearance and texture to the muscle meats we are used to.
My kids love it cooked rare just like a steak, in butter, well salted, for lunch. Eat it hot right out of the pan; don't let it cool down.
Or you could combine it with minced (ground) beef, in which case they won’t even know it's in there. Any dish you make with ground beef can have ground heart added to it.
How to eat tongue
Tongue is another good starting point, because it too is a muscle, and it has that incredible fat profile mentioned above, making it much more palatable (once its sliced on a plate and no longer looks like a tongue) than any of the other organ meats.
I haven’t forayed into fancy tongue dishes, mainly because there is one tongue per animal we butcher, and we never get tired of our very simple version: simmered in water and then served with gravy.
Simmer for an hour-ish for a small pig tongue, up to two hours for a larger beef tongue. If in doubt, check with a thermometer - it should be around 80 degrees Celsius in the thickest part. When its done, lift it out and let it cool enough to handle.
I used to peel the skin off it, but now that my kids are teenagers, I dont even do that. They enjoy removing the skin themselves after it's sliced and served with gravy or mashed potatoes and veggies.
The kids ALWAYS ask for more, and they love it cold the next day, too. Although, as they grow, there is less and less left for the next day.
How to eat liver (aka, how to hide liver so no-one knows it's there)
Liver. The organ meat that everybody loves to hate. I dislike the flavor of liver as much as anyone, and try as I might, I could never find a way to get past.
So now I’ve given up trying to prepare it in a palatable way. Instead, I hide it.
I freeze it in pieces about 6 to 12cm long by about 2 to 4cm thick (those are extremely rough measurements).
I get a piece out of the freezer whenever I have something to grate it into. I take it out of the freezer and grate it, frozen solid, into gravies, stews, soups after they are done, then heat and stir for a minute or two longer, then serve.
Believe it or not, liver added to your meaty meals in this way will enhance their flavor, so long as you grate it reasonably finely and you don't use too much. Start with smaller amounts and work your way up to find the magic ratio.
I even grate it very fine and put about 2 teaspoons of it into a 2-liter chocolate milkshake (along with several raw, fresh-that-day, egg yolks).
I promise you won’t taste the liver in the milkshake. You’ll just have a super nutritious, extra foamy, milkshake. So long as you grate the liver finely, you’re more likely to notice the eggs than the liver.
Let's get them back on the table
Organ meats didn't fall out of favor because we learned something new about nutrition. Quite the opposite. They fell out of favor because industrial food systems found them inconvenient.
Modern nutritional science confirms what our ancestors understood: it's a missed opportunity to eat anything less than the whole animal. Let's get the organ meats back on the table.
Sources
Nutrition and Physical Degeneration
Rediscover Ancient Wisdom With Organ Meats
The Case For Eating More Organ Meat
Why Organ Meats are Making a Comeback
Your comments are welcome...
Do you eat organ meats? Have any tips to share?
You mentioned stearic acid, did you know your heart can use this nutrient molecule to help fuel cardiac cells? Cardiac cells are the only cells in the body where this (large) molecule can pass through the cell membrane.
A tasty way to eat liver is to marinate it in red wine vinegar, coat it with seasoned flour it and pan fry until just cooked through. The vinegar neutralises the taste.
Hi Jayne, no, I didn’t know that about stearic acid. But I find that kind of thing fascinating — every time I learn something like that I feel reminded that Intelligence is everywhere, including in our cells. Also thanks for the liver tip! I’m not sure I could convince my kids to swap out their crumbed steak for marinated crumbed liver, but maybe I’ll try 😉
I am a keen watcher of wildlife programs and it is interesting to note that many predators (cats big and small, foxes, wolves, orcas, etc) are often seen to go for the organ meat first sometimes leaving the rest of the kill.
I agree, Redkite. Thanks for commenting 🙂