\n<\/p>\n
None of this is to say that caution about offal is unfounded. Blood and organs, if improperly handled, carry real health risks, from bacterial contamination to diseases such as Hepatitis E.\u00a0<\/span>Singapore\u2019s ban on animal blood products<\/span> was triggered by a Nipah virus outbreak among abattoir workers in 1999.<\/span><\/p>\n Nor should every culinary tradition be preserved without question. Some foods, such as shark\u2019s fin or turtle soup, are increasingly difficult to defend on environmental and animal welfare grounds, no matter how rooted they are in culture or how delectable they may be. To embrace nose-to-tail eating, then, is not to preserve tradition uncritically.<\/span><\/p>\n Eating offal is not a silver bullet to resolve rising food costs or the climate crisis. But it does offer something more immediate: a way to close the distance between what we eat and where it comes from. And with a bowl of pig organ soup, with its slivers of kidney, folds of stomach and quivering cubes of blood, that reconciliation is sobering, but\u00a0also grounding.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n