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Comment by noobermin | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps people in cities in the US don't eat animals whole but plenty of Asian cultures eat fish whole for the most part. On my island, the brains and eyeballs of a fish are considered a choice part, reserved for the eldest member of the family.

Even in cities in Asia, animals are served in supermarkets whole. It's only in America really that there is this sort of alienation between where meat comes from and what looks like. And by "America", I mean North American cities, because most farmers I know have few qualms about eating meat knowing where it came from.

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There are a couple examples in ethno-American cusines. Here in the States, most authentic Mexican food connoisseurs have probably had beef tongue (Lengua) or beef head (Cabeza) tacos. If you have ever celebrated Pascha (Easter) with a Greek friend, you probably had Magiritsa which is a soup made with lamb entrails (if you have hung out with Greeks period, they tend to eat the whole lamb...all of it) And if you have had some traditional South American soups or dishes, a lot of them are made with livers (beef, pork, or chicken). Something else that is becoming a trend lately in some hipster restaurants is sweetbreads.

Liver (and kidney) is pretty common in the UK. Is it not in the US?

Significantly less so. You can find it, but finding someone who would go out of their way to eat it far less so.

It's associated with an older style of "white tablecloth" dining that has faded away since the midcentury. If you go to the right kind of small-town diner you'll see liver and onions on the menu.

Don't forget tripitas (intestines that have been cleaned, boiled and fried), and just for clarification, people don't eat them only because they don't want to waste or because they're cheap (actually tripitas are expensive compared to other kind of tacos at least in my city), but we eat them because we really like them.

It's largely a generational thing. My grandparents made head cheese (not actually cheese) and blood sausage. Pig's feet and all sorts of other body parts make up a lot of old traditional cuisine, but it's largely disappeared from our diet.

Part of that has to do with the fact that it was largely seen as "poor people" food, and partly because you can get a whole lot more meat than you can feet or other body parts from any given animal.

Cheek meat is often the best part of the fish (fattiest).

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