Ground Beef Hearts

This is surprisingly difficult to look up and I haven't succeeded. However, reasoning backwards from articles on offal, variety meats, sausage and hot dogs, I believe the answer is no. The definition of "sausage" appears to include offal--internal organs--whereas the others don't. "Hot dog" meat is created by "advanced meat recovery," which only scrapes the bones and does not take the organs. For "variety meats" you probably need to check the package, or a dictionary. Many common butcher shop items like bologna, pastrami and salami are simply various types of sausages. So my considered opinion is that anything that is marketed simply as "beef" or "ground beef" (or for that matter pork, lamb, chicken, etc.) contains no offal. But I will happily defer to anyone who knows more about this subject. My father worked in the Chicago stockyards during the Great Depression and knew all that arcane stuff, but he's too dead to interview. (Ashes, not meat and offal.

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That's a little oversimplified. 22 amino acids are essential to human nutrition. Our organs can synthesize 14 of them--the ones we require the most of--by digesting meat (or milk or eggs). But the other eight must be ingested as is, in the right proportions.

The easiest way to get our proper ration of amino acids (roughly 40 grams total per day) in the right proportions is to eat animal protein. This doesn't have to be meat; eggs and milk are fabulous sources. All animal tissue has approximately the same amino acid makeup, even bugs, shellfish and worms.

So ovo-lacto-vegetarians--people who avoid meat but eat milk and eggs--have no trouble getting a balanced diet. But vegans have to plan their diet very carefully. The only plant tissue that has an appreciable protein content is the seeds. These fall into two categories from a nutritional standpoint. Grains, the seeds of grasses, have one set of amino acids that is incomplete for human needs. Nuts and the things we normally think of as "seeds," like pumpkin seeds and sunflower seeds, have a different incomplete set. (Legumes like soybeans, lentils, pintos, alfalfa and peanuts fall somewhere in between, I'm not going to get into that.)

So in order to put together a perfectly balanced diet with no animal tissue, we have to very carefully balance our grains, legumes, nuts and seeds to get the right amino acids. I.e., an all-soybean or all-wheat diet with salads is going to turn your body to mush.

This is made more complicated by the fact that in addition to protein we need vitamins and minerals. Once again, since our bodies are made of meat, the easiest way to get those in the right proportion is to eat the meat (or milk or eggs) of some other creature. Vegans have to be amateur biochemists to make sure they get enough of all the right vitamins and minerals--or just take supplements, making sure they weren't derived from animal tissue. And remember, our acids and enzymes can't break down the cell walls of raw cellulose, so the vitamins and minerals locked in raw vegetables are mostly useless.

Before we developed our modern understanding of nutrition, our ancestors figured all they needed to survive was calories and protein. As the population expanded during the Iron Age (1500BCE-1800CE), grazing land became scarce so people ate more grains and nuts and less meat. In the Early Stone Age, when people ate a lot of meat, the life expectancy of a person who had survived the illnesses of childhood was in the low 50s; by the Roman Era, it had dropped into the 20s.

And while we're on the subject of cooking, there's one more thing. While the amino acids in nuts and sunflower seeds are readily available for digestion, all the protein in grains and legumes is locked inside cellulose. The only way it's possible to even contemplate creating a fully balanced vegan diet is to cook the grains and beans. This means that until controlled fire became widespread about 100,000 years ago, making cooking possible, humans had to eat meat to survive. We are the only species of ape who lack the digestive system to break down cellulose.

Other organ meats are commonly eaten. Even Americans eat liver. Kidney is popular in England, the Scots eat sheep stomach, Jewish delis sell tongue, everybody uses conveniently-shaped intestines for packing sausage, and tripe is called menudo in Latin American and "chitterlings" or "chitlins" in the American South.

The original meaning of "tender" is "soft." "Soft-hearted" is a common expression meaning "kind, forgiving."

 

You can buy beef in India??? Doesn't that make you rather unpopular?

 

I don't care for veal or lamb. I love goat but it's hard to find in America, at least in the places I've been. Some of the Mexican restaurants back in L.A. had it. Venison is pretty good too. My favorite meat is pork, but I like a porterhouse steak or a good hamburger. And corned beef, of course. I like tongue too, sliced for sandwiches. The Jewish delicatessens all carry it.

My Indian friends insisted that it's pretty unusual to encounter beef in a restaurant in India, although you can buy the meat if you know the right butcher. Of course two of them were vegetarians, so what would they know?

Are those real Kobe-style beef restaurants, for wealthy people? The cattle are fed beer and given daily massages. The meat is really expensive. We stopped importing authentic Kobe beef from Japan several years ago, during the epidemic of "mad cow disease." That stuff costs more than $100 per pound.