This aims to be a platform for showcasing, celebrating and, dare I say, ‘educating’ whoever decides to explore it, what I believe to be the wonders and the significance of alternative ‘food bits’. 

 

Offal is a key touchstone, as a personal fascination of mine that feeds (prepare for inevitable puns throughout) into a number of my other ideas and pastimes. One of these in the past 6 months alone has been a change in career from the art world to start my butchery apprenticeship in at Meat Jon, an independent whole carcass butchers in Ladywell, SE London. 

 

Unsurprisingly, immersing myself in 'animal parts' as a culinary, intellectual and genuinely artful endeavour, felt a very natural and organic decision to make. Much like the consumption of offal, butchering is a dying craft associated with past generations and not akin to our fast-paced convenience culture of today. I would like to provoke some alternative thought and action in this through what I am doing. 

There is a multitude of ways to relate and apply these ideas to our modern lives, which I feel is important to communicate, and is why #floffal has been created. Over some time I've sought to compile a 'triple-threat' approach, as follows: 

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• offal as a genuinely delicious, nutritious meat-source; cooking it the right way and beginning to learn what other day-to-day ingredients can pair deliciously with it. Many offal products, cooked and prepared in such a way, is like a ‘hit’ of the very essential taste of the animal it came from. Quantity to flavour ratio can be really intensified. Most offal products also have a mere fraction of the amount of fat (saturates) that other meat products do, yet simultaneously are packed full of more protein, vitamins and iron than them, too. 

• offal as a sustainable meat-source; no additional animal is being bred, farmed, killed, transported or processed in order to obtain these ingredients, therefore it has no contribution to the harmful impact of these processes and consumerism. Using as much of a single, whole animal as we can is more resourceful, and in my opinion, satisfactory and justifying for killing the animal to eat in the first place.

• offal as a much more affordable meat-source; offal products are always a fraction of the cost of other more ‘desirable’ cuts of meat. With the inevitable and immediate rise of cost of living, this alone makes consuming offal a positive, helpful alternative for still being able to eat meat, if one chooses.

 

This won’t at all be exclusive to offal, though - I hope to cultivate ‘FLOFFAL’ as an approach and an applicable concept for how we source, savour and sustain our eating and consumer habits when it comes to food. 

 

One of another very important ‘F’-alliterations to this is also FUN. I have fun doing all of this, and I feel it is equally important to remind ourselves to find fun in food and what lies in our inherent human nature - being foragers, fixers, and embracing the ‘feral’.