Offal nice to meat you

Despite food gurus and environmentalists telling us to eat mostly plants, local carnivores are hungry for increasingly adventurous cuts of meat. Now, thanks to a city full of chefs eager to experiment, a British trend of nose-to-tail eating has crossed the Atlantic and landed in Vancouver.

“I sold five pounds of pig’s brains in three days when I had them on the menu last week,” says British-born Neil Taylor, executive chef at Cibo Trattoria, a modern Italian dining room in downtown Vancouver. “We use calf’s tongue and ox tongue quite a lot. Ox heart we’ve got on the menu at the moment. We also do pork brain ravioli, sweetbreads, liver and kidneys."

Taylor says he was inspired to expand his menu after eating at his new favourite restaurant, London’s St. John. The cult eatery was founded in 1994 by Fergus Henderson, a chef and author of wildly popular cookbooks that encourage readers to look beyond steaks and tenderloins.

“I think it’s kind of been forgotten about,” says Taylor. “Fifty, sixty years ago, it was a necessity to eat these things, because you didn’t waste things back then. If you’re using the whole animal, that’s obviously more sustainable and more efficient than growing pigs, just taking the loin out and grinding the rest up for dog food.”

It’s also cheaper. Taylor sells fillet steaks for roughly $40, but a piece of grilled ox heart will sell for just about half that price. Health Canada is also keen to see little go to waste, with a major exception stemming from last decade’s mad-cow scare. Since 2003, federal health officials have been urging slaughterhouses to ensure “specified risk materials” don’t reach the consumer. These include brains and spinal cords from the carcasses of cattle older than 30 months, which remain restricted to reduce the risk of mad cow disease.

The regulator -- the Canadian Food Inspection Agency -- cites few safety concerns with eating the innards of animals, or, as it calls them, meat by-products. “Really the bottom line is, if an animal is healthy, if it passed inspection, there’s not much that cannot be sold for human consumption,” says Dr. Claude Boissonneault, non-ruminant species specialist with the CFIA.

Boissonneault says Canadian consumers have long been buying things like livers and kidneys. The reason one doesn’t see many tendons or eyeballs on the meat shelf is because they fetch a much higher price on foreign markets such as China and the Carribean.

“I’ve seen the export certificates,” says Boissonneault. “Sometimes the price is so good in export markets that it would be prohibitive to sell [offal] on the domestic market.”

Prohibitive, but not impossible. Back at Cibo, Taylor is always on the hunt for new ingredients. “I ring my supplier up and say can you get a hold of five pounds of lambs’ brains and he’ll go and find it.”

Taylor just added roast veal bone marrow to the menu, served in crosscut shin bones with a side of bruschetta and a spoon to help dig out the rich fatty tissue.

“If Vancouver wants to be the foodie city it likes to think it is, then it needs to get on board with eating outside of halibut and salmon,” he says. “There are good restaurants, don’t get me wrong, but [the city] is saturated with menus that look exactly the same.”