Nose To Tail, The Hunter-Gatherer Health Revival
If you are cozy with the idea of killing and eating any animal for food, it’s at least fair that you eat the whole damned lot!
Okay…confession time. I used to buy only quality cuts of meat…fillets of everything, for my family. Always expensive, I assured myself that it was the right thing to do, to try and resolve health issues.
My husband and I come from large families by today’s standards, and we often laugh about what passed as nourishment. Meat was horrendously expensive in Scotland, and whilst we ate it most days, it was in cuisine-stingy amounts.
Still our parents believed it was important to at least have some.
I used to complain bitterly about the fat. I loathed it and my mother told me I had to eat it because she’d had to pay for the fat too. And so, I did, and the painful act of feeling it slither down my throat is still with me today.
This led me to decide with my own family, that I would never serve fatty food. To that end I bought fillets of everything, steak, chicken, pork, and lamb…all the best quick-cook cuts, and lesser cuts for roasting.
Because I was rich! Super-rich!
If only! Well, I was in many ways rich, but not in the pecuniary sense!
Anyway, that is the stuff of dreams! So, in order to buy good food, I cut back on many things that others would have spent money on, (read expensive clothes and the likes), so we could afford quality food.
One of my favorite dinner party dishes was a whole beef fillet stuffed with mushrooms and wrapped in bacon. I couldn’t afford it, but it was a great dish and I did tend to show off my new culinary skills in the early days of my marriage.
These days I wouldn’t even consider either buying a beef fillet (read, expense!) because with a lesser cut of meat I can, and do make something like a Boeuf Bourguignon, a slow-cooked much cheaper dish that is a taste sensation.
Despite that, my family got sick and I worried. I didn’t want them to be forever on the pharmaceutical industry gravy train, and I was determined to find out what had gone wrong.
I took to reading everything and anything that I could lay my hands on. And I tried anything that promised to turn their health around.
- raw food…try that in a Canberra winter!
- vegetarian food…I can tell you right now, that simply didn’t work for us.
- paleo…that was better, but I was still concerned about alternative sugars that were endorsed.
- and eventually ketogenic, coupled with fasting, which works on different levels for all of us. This is the one way of eating that I absolutely endorse, with caveats!
The fat hurdle
But this article is not about any of these particular diets, but in the real healing that occurred, for everyone, when I got over my fear of fats!
I was brought up on fat. Ours was a margarine-free zone…butter, whole-fat milk, cheese, and eggs were the staples of our eating, plus whole-grains and fatty meat (which I will return to).
Through my readings and research on bone broth, I experienced an epiphany!
I was transported to my childhood, and the twice-a-week ritual of making bone broth at least twice a week.
If my memory serves me well, there was always a pot of stock quietly cooking away on the stove. She was convinced the broth was why we never really got sick.
We would have soup made from that broth every other day, with all the meat from the bone shredded through her manual mincer, and into the soup.
In a Scottish winter, that is hard to beat.
When we had soup there was never a complaint about what we were being fed!
When she made an Irish stew, which was more like a soup, using the same broth as a base, she always chopped chicken livers and hearts through it. That was delicious!
But something else my mother made was liver and bacon. Liver was cheap so that was served once a week. I don’t recall loving it, but I ate it. We all did.
I now realize that we were actually engaged in nose-to-tail nourishment, but the term hadn’t been dreamed up so long ago.
I now realize that I had not been feeding my family as optimally as I had thought. Though I always used butter, I bought no fatty meat, I never made my own bone broth because the upmarket Campbell’s pack assured me about all the natural ‘things’ they had added to their product to make it special, and I bought their assurance!
I never cooked liver, and eggs were a little off-limits until I had an epiphany about that too!
My poor family, far from being well-fed, was probably teetering on the edge of malnourishment.
But before I go on, let me assure you that I am not here to tell people to rush out and spend the family budget on things organic, or free range. I am truly aware that there will be people reading this who think they cannot afford to change. I accept that, but even a few simple changes will help everyone to board the better-health bus!
I do worry about waxing lyrical about something that requires huge capital involvement, and dare I say, spending inordinate amounts of time in the kitchen. Believe me, I no longer spend extra money in the way I feed my family, and nor do I spend hours in the kitchen.
Where would I find time to write if that were the case?
But one thing I do want to say is, if you can become involved in the quality of your food, even if you have to eke things out with eggs, and egg-based dishes, or serving soup made with bone broth, you will experience the profound change that I saw in my family.
If you adopt some of the hunter-gatherer ideals, you will see reflected in your family, the health, energy, and vivacity that you seek.
Over the last fifty years or so, through no fault of our own, we have tended to eat what were viewed as select cuts of meat, and for the most part omitted parts of the animal that made some of us shudder. These animal parts have suffered a very bad press for whatever reason, hearts, tongue, head, liver, brain, kidney, and intestine. And, if you have ever consumed bone broth made with these (chicken feet and pig trotters) you have been to heaven.
I have friends who are appalled to learn that we now eat nose-to-tail.
‘How could you possibly eat brain?’ they ask. And yet, some cultures did, and still do, and are all the better for doing so!
As I said in my sub-heading, if you are cool with having an animal killed for your eating benefit, how audacious is it if you were to say, but I will only eat these cuts?
What do you think happens to the other ‘gross’ parts? Where do you think they might go?
A little respect goes a very long way…and an even longer way to promoting good health. ‘Consuming animals in this way and wasting nothing, shows great respect for the fundamental circle of life and death that we all participate in, and we now know that from a nutritional biochemistry perspective it provides our body with all of the nutrients we need to thrive.’
Today we have lost sight of what it takes to eat well. Eating the very cheapest cuts of meat, properly cooked, will not only make you feel good, but your body will thank you for it.
When you begin to notice the benefits of this way of eating, the temptations of ultra-processed food will wane.
‘We have traded nose to tail animal foods for ultra-processed carbohydrates, sugars and vegetable oils that invariably lead to the smoldering inflammation that underlies the rampant epidemics of autoimmunity and chronic disease we now face as a greater human tribe.’
‘When the blood in your veins returns to the sea, and the earth in your bones returns to the ground, perhaps then you will remember that this land does not belong to you, but it is you who belong to this land.’
-Anonymous