Nutritional Benefits of Organ Meats and Cooking Tips | Pantry Chat

hey you guys and welcome to this week's episode of The Pantry chat Food For Thought this week I have another really special guest here with me I'm really excited about what we're going to talk about today because we're going to be talking about um something that's kind of near and dear to my heart can you tell that's a pattern for these like we we do interviews on things that get me excited and that are really near and dear to my heart and that is deep nutritional eating by eating um nose to tail on the whole animal and talking about eating organ meats and I have somebody who as soon as I saw his biography as soon as I saw what he did and what he's created I got so excited because I feel like it is a key to getting organ Meats into our family's diet and um you know really really boosting the nutrition which is so needed in today's world so welcome to Chef James Berry welcome hello welcome to the pantry chat and thank you for being here today oh thank you for having me I'm so so excited to talk with you so when I enter introduce you as Chef James very you are seriously a chef like you are a professional private Chef is where your background lies is that correct yeah I know it's even hard for me to believe sometimes I I grew up where the smoke detector when it went off we knew dinner was ready so I my mom is still to this day kind of shocked that she has a chef for a son but yeah I went to culinary school New York and um I know I went specifically to be a private Chef I I never wanted to work at a restaurant I I and you know it's coming out a lot in the news lately I've been finding but I've never found restaurant the environment within the restaurant to be conducive towards Health it's just it's I call Chefs in restaurants like the pirates of the modern world it's it's a really hard life and they are a unique subset of their own and I just knew I I was like no I want to be a private Chef I want to really support People's Health so that's what I focused on yeah yeah restaurants are kind of brutal places I worked in one for working through college high school and college and it was a lovely restaurant and it was low stress but even the low stress kind it's uh it's not the kind of place that is necessarily good for your health um especially on stress levels so yeah totally understand that now you are like most of us in your childhood like you grew up with maybe not the best food so talk about your childhood a little bit and what's your experience I say what got you from there to here yeah I grew up in the early 70s but I it it's funny like I feel like I was eating very 50s diet you know it was like frozen peas um bake shake and bake chicken or pork or something like that you know just but shake and bake if if you're old enough to know that stuff and then like a baked potato you know it was like it was so kind of just restrictive and just I don't know I look back at it and I and I realized how kind of plain it was on a certain level and I think actually most most Americans are kind of raised with very kind of a very standard American diet very kind of plain palette and um that's that's kind of why I'm so excited as I've you know stepped into adulthood over the years and and kind of got more adventurous with my palette now I'll I have to say I'm still a slightly picky eater but but I I've definitely improved but I yeah I grew up very rich like we ate meat but very specific cuts of meat um did not explore like I didn't have my first Taco till I was in college you know I didn't explore a lot of ethnic foods I was just I was like the ultimate picky eater yeah uh and it you know what we're finding on the other side of that of a whole generation of people who are raised that way essentially is that um turns out we were actually lacking a lot of nutrition right like our body needs those other things that we didn't eat or we weren't raised on luckily I my mom did not ever fall into any box whatsoever of the way people did things around her and so she was feeding us liver and um she had a garden and we had like Swiss chard every night right out of the garden so we were very blessed but the people around us did not think the way we ate was normal let's put it that way now see you you actually willingly ate it you it wasn't a fight for the kids to eat it when you were growing up there are stories about me um I'd get fussy as a baby right at dinner time and so when I was very young they would just stick spinach and liver and whatever they were having for dinner into a blender and she talks about getting a bottle because they didn't have sippy cups back then really like real ones like we have now and she would get a hot needle and just open up the the nipple on the bottle so that you could suck more stuff through it and so the earliest stories of me eating or me eating liver and spinach smoothies for dinner and how much I would like that so I'm I'm a rare case I don't think I'm a normal in the that particular experience yeah I mean as you know I mean most people I mean particularly here in America we we I look at the palette sort of like a color like colors of a wheel you know and so if we were to you know we have our four established flavors we have our salty sweet we have our bitter and our sour and then there's a fifth called Umami those are the five kind of identified flavors or tastes that we have in our in our palette and um in America we really skew towards salty and sweet you know if you think about it almost everything is salty or sweet and so that's where you find people you know kids particularly we gravitate towards those things I remember um and maybe maybe this was you too or definitely people listening I'm sure you're going to identify with this but I grew up like eating Skippy peanut butter like it's Skippy if you if you transition to eating regular peanut butter that doesn't have sugar and everything else in it um you realize how much like Skippy is really like candy it's like truly it's just so sweet but when you're that's all you're doing and people that only drink sodas will identify with this when you when you transition as something that doesn't have that sugar in it let's say for people drinking soda they suddenly go to water or for me for with Skippy going to her Laurel Laurel shutters I think that was the natural peanut butter then um it it all tastes so plain and you're like why is this this is so gross and and it's really it's not because those foods are gross it's because our palate is so out of whack you know and so much of what I did um when I was first starting out as a chef was I was supporting people and recalibrating their palette to actually get them to taste the way you know taste food is it really tastes versus in those Ultra processed skewed you know flavor flavor modes that were all acclimated to that it and that's a real process to actually go through and I know that I remember the first time I drank kombucha and I've told this story a few times somebody had randomly like a a checker at the grocery store and said hey I've been drinking the kombucha you know just having random conversations with people I you should try it it's really good and so I went and I got this and I took a sip and I was like oh my gosh it's gone bad like you know I thought there was something wrong with it and then I I put it in the fridge and I had another sip the next day and by the next day I was like I don't know why but I kind of want a few sips of that thing and by the third day it was like my body recognized that has something in it that you need and you want it but it took a while to convince my palette and my tongue that I wanted the nutrition that I needed yeah well and you're tapping that sour right like kombucha basically you know anything cultured is going to kind of bring in a little bit more sour to your diet from yogurts to uh cultured veg to kombucha and um absolutely you know that but yet you you know you mentioned it took a while but really it was just a few days right it's like I think that's really important for people to realize is you can change your palette within a like two weeks like I've literally gotten people off sugar in two weeks and their entire palette changes they go from you know maybe drinking three glasses of wine a night to barely being able to finish half a glass all because their pallets change and now they're realizing how sweet that wine is so it's a really um it's a really important process I mean I think that that we really need to focus not only on our own palette but particularly as we're raising kids is to really expose them to as many of those flavors as possible which kind of I didn't know this when I was creating pluck um which is the in organ based seasoning that is Umami so it has that fifth unique taste that I mentioned earlier when I created pluck I didn't know that's what it would do but I'm continuing to get more and more reports of people parents telling me Oh Yeah my kid was so picky and then I started putting pluck on their food and now they're becoming more adventurous and I'm like oh yeah we're we're changing them through their palette that is uh just so interesting and I've seen that with my own children too that you know you can really make these adjustments um and you can change their their taste basis and it's really interesting change their palette but let's just jump right in and talk about pluck because this is how I met you is actually finding this product and um I it was a product that I knew I could get behind as soon as I saw what it was like I got excited about it but I gotta say I was so skeptical that it would taste good but this is essentially um a seasoning blend that has been made out of uh organ Meats right yeah sorry yeah so I took the freeze so we already had freeze-dried powdered organ Meats that's a technology we've been using to preserve foods and the freeze-dried powdered Organics are already shown up in capsules but see I'm a big fan of so obviously I'm a big fan of whole animal nutrition but I'm also a big fan of eating our nutrition versus swallowing it and the main way that people have been really eating organ Meats within the last I don't know last 50 years is they've either been literally eating the ornaments you know uh bloody organ means cooking them or whatnot or taking capsules and it seemed to be more and more skewed towards doing capsules and I was like I just feel like we're missing the point here um not only are we not eating enough water mates but then we're swallowing that nutrition versus eating it and when we swallow nutrition it's a delayed response so when you eat food or any you know anything you're basically working with the the the natural digestive process you know you get saliva It Coats the food it starts to get your stomach ready to digest just when you when you actually start chewing you're breaking down the foods the saliva helps to digest and your body the minute it even touches your tongue your body is saying I want more of this or less and we can all identify with that when you think of salt right if you put salt on your tongue your body will say yes give me more or we'll say no no no this doesn't taste good you know no more and that's really your body communicating to you that I need more sodium or I don't need more sodium right but when you take a salt tablet maybe 20 30 minutes later you get a delayed response why am I feeling so bloated oh I got too much salt so one is working immediate communication and working with your body and the other is guesswork it's like uh how much of this do I really need I don't know let's just swallow three tablets oh or three capsules oh now I'm feeling nauseous maybe I got too much or something I didn't you know what I mean so I'm I'm just all about you you work with what we're given and the more natural we can be the better that's why I'm always like you know with all the trends I've been in this business over 18 years and Trends come and go but you know which which Trend doesn't come and go which is constant it's eating real food like and that's the message right you eat real food like that is bottom line what we should all be doing moving as much as we can away from these Ultra processed foods from you know looking for magic pills magic diets it's like just just just it's life is hard enough you know stick to real food um but so organ Meats though were key and we weren't we're not eating them um and sort of identify three main issues you know we think they're gonna taste icky uh because most of us didn't get raised with them like you did and if we and and then those that did were forced to eat them so there's a lot of trauma around it you know which is interesting and then there's the sourcing like I don't know where to Source them and then the third is um I don't know how to cook them like like they they seem intimidating and so I was really out to a get these nutrient dense foods into people's diets to help people because we are a nutrient deficient Society but we're not a calorie deficient Society which is a really important distinction we're getting plenty of food it's not like we're you know in Ethiopia you know if you remember those commercials from back in the day and you're seeing these emaciated people those people did not get enough food they're not getting the food we are getting plenty of food if anything we're an obese Nation so it's like how do we fix the food choices we're making and that's where I came up with pluck it was like okay how do I um how do I get these organ Meats in your diet but get them into easily and deliciously and that's where the seasoning concept kind of came into me so excuse me of not only like having this as a way of getting the the nutrition into you but as a way of helping you change your palette because you know a lot of us some of us as homesteaders we've got a freezer full of liver like literally it's sitting there and we just are like it's just not going down you know it's not happening the kids won't eat it nobody will touch it most of us aren't drinking smoothie and liver milkshakes for breakfast um you know and so we actually we need that step of transitioning from what we're used to into that and so I love the idea of actually being able to use the uh this as kind of part of that nutrition to um that transition to to start signaling our brain that actually this is what I want like give me more of that uh but I find that very interesting because honestly I don't taste liver when I taste this like I don't what what is in we've got uh what's got dried powdered liver kidney heart and pancreas yeah five organs and um so you know that's pretty amazing that uh you can get all that into here and have it taste so good and help us transition into something that we like um before we jump too far into that though I do want to talk about the organ meats and some cooking tips because some of us do have all of these organs in the freezer and I want to jump into that first and then I want to come back to the pluck idea because I think it's just it's phenomenal and it's every bit as good I've now been eating it quite a bit and we've gone through bag after bag of this stuff even though we do have the liver and we are eating the liver it's like I'm still putting this on everything and I'm really liking it but um what would be your best tips as a chef for cooking organ Meats in a way that the family would actually like do you have thoughts on that like let's start with heart because we are actually a big heart eating family we love heart in our family which is good yeah um to me it tastes just like really good steak especially when it's fried up in butter with some salt um but do you have any special ways that you prepare it that you find that people like it if you're just like pan cooking it yeah well I love that you brought up heart first because I think heart is one of the easiest organs to kind of jump into mostly for what you said I mean it's the closest to a muscle meat you know and flavor and now I find that um the the kind of easiest entry point of heart is chicken heart so chicken heart is even milder than the beef and it really is like it's small you can cut it up like you would a mushroom that's what it makes me think of as a mushroom and and I always recommend it's really with organ Meats it's it's all about not kind of like measuring at what point do you get overwhelmed so because there's that unfamiliarity factor right so for me like for example if you get a most usually when you get organs they're frozen usually when you buy them so you get that let's say like that beef liver it's big you know sometimes about this big and the idea of a defrosted beef liver is incredibly overwhelming so what I always recommend people is just get to the point before it's overwhelming so like for example with beef liver I recommend you don't unfreeze it you keep it frozen and then you just grate it use a box grater and Grate it into your ground meats and then put it right back in the freezer and so yes you're using a little bit more at a time but honestly you don't need that much you mean we don't need to be eating an entire liver every you know week it's like you just put a little bit when you make any kind of ground meat and you're good you know um so that's kind of I I always recommend them with any organ that's frozen try to keep it in that Frozen stay so it's not overwhelming with hearts um because the other thing that we have to be aware of is so one is texture really and kind of that overwhelm of how volume the other thing is is just our association with organs you know like when you see something that's shaped like a heart like it kind of sometimes brings up that icky thing in people you know you just feel a little bit like I don't know if I want to do this and and so what I recommend also is and why I like chicken hearts is because you can immediately chop them up and now they don't even look like hearts like so you you try to remove whether it's the look the texture you just try to change it up so that it doesn't look like the thing that you that it is um and so like with chicken hearts you know anytime you're making a spaghetti sauce just treat it literally just like mushrooms so like usually when you buy some chicken hearts they're in a container you get probably about I don't know 12 to 15 maybe even 20 in a container and just pull out like four or five you know not too much keep the ratio you know so it's not dominant but like keep a nice ratio and then chop them up like you would a mushroom and throw them in that sauce no one will know and and and it won't bring up this like I I think that's probably my my my simplest direct kind of recommendation is when you're easing into organ mates don't let them be the center of the the plate like let them be a contribution to the play you know an ingredient to the to the bigger meal um but that said like for example with with beef heart you can make beef heart jerky you know what I mean and then it's like yes it looks like a strip of meat but it's so tasty and you can really like uh like adjust the flavors based on what you marinated in you know so I'm a big fan of that we have lots of recipes for organ Meats on our website at eatpluck.com highly recommend people check them out they're not all from me that I curate them from really talented other you know chefs and cooks and they do a great job um so yeah I would start with heart now the other one that is another kind of go-to for me is tongue tongue beef tongue is also more of a muscle than an organ even though it's classified as an organ um it's it's intimidating because of that skin that sheath that's around it but I always like to kind of make light of certain things that might feel intimidating like so I don't know if you're someone that is intimidated by tongue what I would do is in like maybe as a family you know like when you get that tongue you like hold it up to your mouth and pretend you're Gene Simmons from kiss you know like like make light of it like have fun with it so it doesn't feel like so serious like oh my God we're gonna have tongue tonight and I don't know you know how it's gonna go but but basically when you braise that tongue and you can even just do it in a you could boil it it doesn't it's not you don't have to complicate it too much but as soon as you boil it for like an hour or an hour and a half that skin that hard that kind of tough outer skin completely peels away and then underneath you have this really delicate kind of almost stringy muscle meat and it's delicious like what I do there is I then like take it and I sometimes Fork it and string it like I would like Carnitas or something like that I I put some salt on it or some pluck and I just stick it right under the broiler and I um I let it just kind of crisp up a little bit not too long because you don't want to burn it but just a little bit and it's so good we have it for taco night all the time tongue is another one that's really favorite in our house but I remember the first time we were actually butchering our own well we had a butcher come to our house to um butcher our own steer that we had raised and unfortunately it was right when I was pregnant with somebody I can't even remember and already had morning sickness and I thinking I'm gonna be this big Homesteader Macho I didn't even know what homesteading was back then but we just were doing what we were doing and I was like oh you know we're going to use all the parts of the cow and so I asked him can I have the tongue and I didn't realize that it in the case of that particular butcher that did not mean it was going to go away with the animal and come back in nice white packages some butchers do now do that but he literally came in the back door plopped something in my sink and said the tongue's ready for you you just have to scrub it up and I was I was not prepared for that in any way at all to have that just like you said that the sheer size was overwhelming to me to start with I was like I had no concept of how big a beef tongue is or how much it feels like a tongue even when it's the texture on the outside it's it's really that yeah the look the kind of black and pink you know look of the tongue and then that sheath that skin is really tough you realize how um that you I mean it is it is so delicious it is so good and we always do that initial braise with like some peppercorns and some you know a little bit of uh like uh cloves thrown in and some mustard and all these you know lots of bay and lots of these great spices and it just the smell is so amazing and it's so delicious when you get to eating it that I think you're very right that initial psychological reaction to just the substance and the size can be a little bit Yeah the key the key is just kind of um try to dissect that or kind of like offset that with with making it more manageable whether it's like I said the texture cutting it up so it doesn't look as much or not don't unfreeze it so then that way it's not overwhelming right but once you start to get past those hurdles and and really to your point once your palate starts to get acclimated to those in more Umami flavors that organ Meats provide you'll find you're actually you start craving it like that's what's so cool you actually start to want those those parts of the animal and what's really exciting uh from my money because one of my missions as well is to try to make Health like affordable right to actually make it so that you don't have to be rich to be healthy but like it's like everyone has the opportunity to be healthy and what I love about the organ Meats of the animal is like you could have the same 100 grass-fed cow okay the same one that's selling you know a rib eye for 24.99 in the grocery store well guess what that tongue from that same cow is only like 6.99 you know what I mean or whatever it is hopefully you're getting a cow share so it's even cheaper but like point being that you can get the organs for a lot cheaper than the muscle meat and yet you're they're more nutritious in most cases they have more flavor like the tongue the tongue actually tastes better than most of the muscle meat and it's more nutritious and then and of course it's cheaper so it's it's just in my money before my money it's a win-win yeah that would make sense okay now one that I have not cracked the coat on is kidney like I have not been able to get myself like steak and kidney pie sounds like it's probably great but I cannot get that thing I've tried marinating it in milk and I've never even gotten past the marinating it in milk because the smell is still so strong that I'm like I don't think this is a go does it smell very urine yes yeah yeah so once again I would I would treat it like I would the liver is if it comes to you Frozen just do a little bit like don't do too much and I would even like I would even not just soak it specifically in milk but I would do buttermilk okay because buttermilk is more acidic right and you can even you can do either lemon juice as well but something that's a little stronger is going to kind of help to you know kind of affect that flavor a little bit and kind of pull out some of that stuff but you're right I mean now there's a whole other topic that that is I think worth bringing up is is that at what point is it the organ that that is kind of challenging and at what point is it maybe your body is just telling you you don't need this right you know what I mean so I think that's a constant kind of balance that we are all we all should in I recommend that we strive towards which is listening to your body and what it needs you know now granted if your body's like I want ice cream is that because you literally want ice cream or is it because you're you know you're you're you you need some fat you know what I mean like so I know that there's there's a gray area and you need to discern it but I like to think of like whole animals so I really believe we we all should be eating a whole animal and I believe it's one of the main deficiencies we're missing in our diets but I want to add to that though it's like so if we were a tribe I mean for you you are a tribe with 11 kids but but but like if we were a tribe of let's say 35 people in our tribe and we killed one animal there's only one heart there's only one liver you know there's there's only one of so many of these parts of the animal so who's getting them out of 35 people how much are you really getting you know what I mean so I always like to look at it from that perspective of like well it's probably going to the people that need it the most it's probably going to those people that when they when they actually get it on their tongue that it tastes really good which means that they're probably needing that kidney support you know so I'm just a big advocate of like let's not worry about going all in on something and more more like let's just try to get a little bit like let's just get a little little doses micro dosing you know as much as we can and at the same time following what your own kind of intuitive eating leads you down so I love that because I I firmly believe that our bodies have a built-in intelligence and uh you know they they know um and like you said you know you're craving something that you know is not healthy for you you have to kind of discern why am I craving that I found that for me um while I did grow up with a lot of really good nutrition I also grew up eating a lot of candy and but I finally as an adult made an association that when I want fruit candy like not chocolate but fruit candy Skittles or something like that every single time I'm dehydrated I'm thirsty and I'm looking for that like fruit that would have liquid in it that would be high in water yeah right and so um so now I know go drink some water and that that just goes away but my body is still asking for something um and so you know a lot of people have to kind of discern they have to work through that on their own level what is it what is it that my body's asking for but then again like we were talking about earlier you you start getting a taste of that true nutrition and that true food and your body's gonna start going oh I really want it if you need it um but I love the concept that you're bringing up of kind of this ratio of organ meat to to muscle meat and this is something that I've always thought about when you hear people taking capsules every day of desiccated liver or freeze-dried liver and it's like at what point is enough enough and where do you hit that level of like when you can't tell and you can't tell on your taste buds I've had enough I don't need anymore because I do believe that God has created an animal in the right proportions right and there's a reason there's a small amount of organ me and a large amount it doesn't mean we don't need the organ meat it means that we need less probably because there's so much nutrition in it um and so I have heard of some people doing things like throwing all of the organ meat into their grind meat if they're raising their own animal and then every time they have ground beef or ground whatever they're getting a little bit of the organ meat in there not enough to affect the flavor and you know I think some of those ideas can be really good but I want to transition to Let's cover why eating organ meat is so healthy we're kind of just like waiting right into cooking it and eating it what is it that's in the organ meat that makes it so important for us to get yeah it's such a great question so there's this concept this it's really an ancestral concept about like supports like so the idea being that if you're eating the liver of an animal then it's going to support your liver and if you think about it what is the liver's job well the liver's job is to take toxins that come into our bodies and to basically in a sense convert them to being I'm going to give the simplest example or or explanation but it's convert them to water-soluble forms so that they can then be excreted out of our body whether it's through our pee or poop and our Sweat Right so detoxification pathways are really important when you're talking about the job of the liver and the kidney because that is what they're trying to do is get these things out of your body but get them out of your body in a way that um they that they can best get out you know in water soluble forms um and a lot of people actually get that confused they think that organs are where these toxins get stored so I want to just cover that real quick which is that it's not true they're filtering it out but really where these toxins get stored if you're elimination Pathways aren't working is in the fat so that's something to really remember and particularly if you're someone who's gained a lot of weight and who then loses a lot of weight sometimes you can get really sick because those toxins that have been in the fat that you've been carrying around as you lose that fat you're detoxifying so much it can be overwhelming and that's one of the reasons as I mentioned earlier why I'm not a fan of those capsules and the people that are taking those capsules every days because it's guesswork you don't know what your body you're bypassing that innate knowledge that we talked about and so well the reason why I'm bringing up the like supports like is because that that that organ has a job to do it and so it's packed full of the nutrients that it needs to get that job done and in many ways we call the liver but in general organs they are Mother Nature's multivitamin because when you look at what's in them like the best way to equate it is I say look at what's in a prenatal vitamin so there's like folate there's ion there's potassium there's magnesium there's vitamin A B all you know all these different minerals and vitamins right well just look at what's in a prenatal that's basically what's in organate that's very interesting and when you look back to a lot of the traditional cultures you see that the people who are getting fed primarily you were touching on this before the people who need it people who are getting fed the organ Meats a lot of times it's the pregnant women yep right at the very beginning so it's interesting you're relating that to the prenatals and what's in there is that you know uh that was a knowledge based out of our physical experience like the that intelligence that we have built into our body and I think that's just so fascinating well and what I love about the organ mates coming from a whole animal too is that you know when you take an isolated B vitamin for example you know yeah sometimes you take some vitamins and they're like oh you got to take this with food well that's because it's fat soluble right so it needs food it needs food or fat to absorb into your body better well guess what when you get it from a whole food source or like an animal just like the organ Meats it's already as nature intended it's already it's Mother Nature created so all the minerals and vitamins that were complementary that are supporting each other in their absorption uh the fat that's needed to provide it's all there you literally don't have to do much more than just eat it so that's you know that's why I was like Hey how do I support people because it's like we're not eating it and we are a nutrient deficient society and this has got to change and they've been you know the US has been tracking agriculture since I think the 50s and every decade you see the nutrient the nutrition in in produce is going down you know and there's lots of reasons for that but they're they are tracking it and they show it going down every decade so the you know the Apple the Tomato the produce that we're eating now is far less nutrient dense than the apple or produce that our answer you know our grandparents our great grandparents our grandparents age so that tells me right there we you can't just expect to get your needs met by these kind of standard Foods you know that we're all used to um you know the ones we're told are so nutrient dense like broccoli or kale or or you know or even beef or salmon it's like no we need more we need more than that yeah yeah now is there anybody who should not be consuming organ Meats like as a general class of of people or anybody who's struggling with a health problem yeah I mean I think there's there's always going to be exceptions to the rule and it is it that they shouldn't be eating organ mates or that this is more of us a red flag of that something's going on so so first for example people that have gout right so a lot of elderly people have gout and they're told by their doctors don't you know restrict how much red meat you eat um and and organ Meats because that will flare your gout and it's like well is organ meat and meat causing the gout or is there something else going on that's been on a dress for so long and now you've gotten to the point where these other things exacerbate it so I I tend to look for smoke you know like so I tend to I tend to kind of recommend that people take note of their kind of everyday ailments you know and we all have them you know whether it's puffiness you know like inflammation whether it's uh joints you know like that hurts when you move hard to get up when you wake up you don't feel alert you feel groggy um you when you eat your food you have to go take a nap like these are all these are all you know red flags or smoke showing you there's something going on you know and you need to take a look at it if your eyes are cloudy you know not bright white your tongue if you stick your tongue out and you see ridges on the side and you see all these different issues going on like these are all signs and um and so I think those are those should be cause for you to kind of check in with the nutrition check in with someone that's really looking at Health from from what you eat and and looking at Health from that functional nutrition perspective to kind of support you so that you don't get to the point where you have someone telling you you can't ever eat red meat ever again it's like that's not of that's not how it should be like you know we shouldn't be in this state of alarm you know all the time but I would say also that it goes for me it goes back to um gout is probably the biggest one and it comes up but uh there's some people you know that are they're higher in Iron you know and or they already have lots of vitamin A so it's like you know you would probably be like someone like that would be someone who they go to put that organ meat in their mouth and they're just like oh it's just too too metallic you know it's like okay well that's probably you should probably run a test and see what your your your levels are because you might already have enough like you may not need liver but it does beg to question well just because you don't need liver does that mean you don't need any organs like we got to remember like animals are not just liver you know like when we talk about organs it's not just liver like we classify organs um or awful is another name offal we classify that as anything every part of the animal except muscle and bone so bone marrow is considered part of the awful the hoofs the tongue the tail the the the lungs which is tripe um all those are considered organ meats and and so the question is is are you getting locked into one perspective which is why I always like to talk about whole animal like I'm all about not just like people focus like oh I eat organ I eat liver all the time I'm like yeah what about heart what about um what about part the certain joint muscles what about tongue what about skin you know what what about the blood you know what about all the bone marrow you know all these things they're they're to me the they are extremely important and I have not met one person yet that can't do something you know I that's um that's really important to differentiate all those different things um and I and I want to reiterate something that you said you know if you're eating something that you know is healthy you know it's good for you maybe you've been eating it for a while you like it you know we're not having this issue of I just want Krispy Kreme Donuts um but your body's craved it at some point or you've enjoyed it and then you reach for that and you get that cringy feeling like just don't eat this right now like that's your body saying don't eat it right now and we need to listen because we actually do cause ourselves problems whether we're talking about herbalism we're talking about supplements we cause ourselves problems having this perspective that will the blog post or the doctor or the something said this was good for me so therefore I'm going to take it even if I feel like my body's doing that I don't want it right now um you need to listen to that because that's your body trying to communicate with you you you know no liver right now but you know maybe kidney maybe something else maybe you know who knows what it is um and season seasonality will affect that too right We crave more soups soon stews during the winter and there's the reason for that though that's when you should be using parts of the animal that that break down more you know when you slow cook them you know things like that there's there's a reason like seasonality intuitive eating um there's a great quote that actually Dr Bill Schindler shared which um I I love this quote which is we are the only species in the world that looks to someone else to tell us what to eat right yeah I mean that says everything right there like we I really think that if if anything and I know everyone's out there spouting their diets and what they think is the next big thing but for my money it's like we got to get back to like intuitive eating we got to get back to like what does your body need what does my body need what do we what do how can we move away from these Ultra processed foods that are affecting and manipulating our cravings and get back to what is our human body need you know and for my money it is it's going back to whole animal I really believe you know particularly I've been learning more about glyphosate and farming and it's like you know gosh I just learned this I don't know if you already know this but like so glyphosate is it typically if you're buying organic it's not supposed to be grown with glyphosate but I just learned that actually it can still be that crop whether it's like a wheat or a bean or um or like a legume so grain Bean legume it can still be dried they use they use glyphosate to dry the crop and so you could still have an organic item like even oats that aren't technically don't need you know technically usually aren't grown with glyphosate but like you could have something like oats that was dried with glyphosate so that's why they're finding glyphosate in everything that it's not just organic or or conventional it's like it's in everything and so when you think of it from that perspective like who are the people who what what diet is mostly getting grains legumes and beans it's the vegan vegetarian diet so that's why I'm like yeah like whole animal whole animal which leads us right here to this this is the spicy one and I've got to tell you you know um because I believe in eating organ Meats this was exciting to me when I saw it but like I said I was pretty skeptical so I actually got the first package and to tell you the truth it sat on my shelf for you were scared of everything and I was like I don't know about this I don't know what to put it on everything yeah same with it the other other night and like liberally put it over the salmon and everybody in the house was telling me that's the best salmon ever ever that was so good um but you know for me personally I now have a four-month-old baby as we're recording this and I did something a little different in my recovery with this baby uh as opposed to all the ones that came before and I really really focused on my nutrition in my postpartum period And I actually had somebody in the house offered to like be my personal chef um it was really wonderful so I'd written out a meal plan what I wanted to eat and I was eating liver specifically every um every day for about two weeks I had a small amount of liver and my body just craved that but I found that I was asking more and more to have this put on things also and it was like I I really needed that extra boost of nutrition um and so anyways I I love this and I've got to tell you that I I'm hoping to try to replicate it in my own freeze dryer because I do have my own animals you know um in the uh that come in we we uh butcher everything every year ourselves and so I end up with all this great awful and I'm thinking oh what could I do to actually make some of my own but there's so many people out there who don't have that circumstance or like me they may not have enough uh and so this is like this is such an amazing product so how did you get from doing what you were doing before um being that personal chef even though you were concerned about nutrition for people like what was the process that gets you got you all the way to actually creating a product because that's like a change in career essentially yeah really yeah it's probably too long of a processor really encapsulate But ultimately I I was I was very much in the service industry I had a meal delivery service and and um Los Angeles and that service industry really took a toll on me my health but also I I found like I I was kind of incorrectly running a business I was trying to be a private Chef to everybody and when you have a business it like you you know you're making a meal for 100 people you can't cook it individually you just can't you can't pretend you're a personal chef to 100 people um it's it literally can make you insane in the kitchen you know trying to break down a chili for example that has you know 18 you know whatever 12 ingredients and like one person can't do peppers one person can't do onion one person can only do turkey one person is pork and beef you know it's like and you're just deconstructing that chili to the simplest form and then combining ingredients separately in the it was it was Manning so I left that world and I was like I don't want to have anything to do with service like I don't want to deal with people's like you know individual specific you know qualities and needs like I just want to create a really quality product and you either buy it or you don't you know so that's where the product interest came in but ultimately why why organ meats and why a product that makes it so easy and delicious for you to get organized it is really being a father um my daughters I have two daughters uh they're one's eleven one seven now but this was when they were both younger um I think the oldest was four or five and the youngest was like maybe one and a half two and um and basically um they both got sugar toxin which is a form of E coli and and um and it's very deadly for like young young kids and for elderly people and basically both kids couldn't hold anything down and I was just I just remember the helplessness I felt as a father and as a parent that I couldn't support my youngest because she so the oldest kind of got through it within four days but the youngest it just was like it wouldn't end and it was like going into a full week and she was like Skin and Bones it was really really scary and there's nothing you can really do you can't take antibiotics you can't do that because that will actually exacerbate that will make it worse and so I just I remember at one point she started being able to have toast like and we were like oh my God but then like she got that's all she would eat you know and then because whenever you know a kid kids can get really specific once they have had thrown up I'm sure you've known this right like if a kid throws up on certain foods they will just like a cat will they won't they'll stay away from that food for a long like they almost become now biased towards whatever the food is that didn't make them throw up and so um she became basically like a toast addict she wouldn't eat anything but that so then I was like oh my gosh like I wish I had something I could sprinkle on that toast and that would give her more nutrition because that toast had nothing you know nothing good in it except maybe the butter right but it's like I was like what could I do and that's that was the start of this and that and and ultimately what I did with pluck is I took the freezer I had powdered Organics you find in the capsules and as you mentioned already it's liver heart kidney spleen pancreas but I combine them with spices and herbs to actually make it taste good and it's no different than any other seasoning in terms of its shelf stableness but as you said you can literally just sprinkle on anything and so my kids speaking about toast they put it on their toast we put it on popcorn we put it on Meats we put I put it on oysters we put on fish we put on chicken like we put it on salads like you literally can put it on anything and not only now are you getting those micro that micro dosing of those organ Meats frequently which is cumulative effect but you're also getting that Umami and what you just said about cooking that fish that salmon I get told that all the time and I didn't know this when I created it but I get told all the time by families and they're like oh all I did this night was I just put pluck on the on the recipe and everyone freaked out and I'm like yeah I think it's Theo mommy what happens is that because it's a unique taste it makes the other taste pop it makes everything taste better it's just amazing and it really does on everything we've put it on and I can totally see having it on popcorn um you've got different flavors out there you have the all-purpose which is just good I mean it's just kind of good on everything well I have the spicy down here I know I have the garlic yeah the zesty garden now the zesty garlic is kind of unique in that it's um anyone can use it of course but I specifically made it for the people out there that can't do nightshades you know like tomatoes and peppers and eggplant they can't do nightshades and then they can't do seeds and that's called the autoimmune protocol basically AIP people um but so I kind of made it for them um because we were getting asked by a lot of AIP people like do you have anything without pepper without um you know paprika or anything like that and so I I did that for them but it's really it's just a kind of tasty zesty it kind of has a ranchy taste to it it's just so good well there's a reason why it's not here it's because it's already gone and everybody ate it yeah that one is a that one and probably all purpose yeah there I like having all three around because then then you can kind of go off your mood you know what you feel but then the fourth one um is called Pure and that's for that's just the origami so there's no salt in there there's no seasonings and for that one I tell people well that's for those people that do need more kind of that 100 nutrition kind of need to track more of what they're using but then also it's like let's say you have your favorite seasoning you can make your own pluck with it you know just take the season that your family loves and then add add as much pluck as you as the organ Meats as you want until the flavor ratio feels right to you that's really you know that's kind of why that pure exists is just to a get people to eat their nutrition versus swallow it and then B to support people of any kind of um allergy or sensitivity or diet or you know you know dietary preference I I would imagine that that would be a great product too to kind of like just dip into occasionally just in that uh helping your palette transition to absolutely checking the organ Meats better or to your point if you have like your six month old and you're starting to incorporate Foods you take a little bit of the pure and just mix it into their mashes or whatever you're giving them and now they're starting to get that flavor profile into their diet oh that's amazing I haven't even taken it that far in my mind yet but uh but yeah that is a great way to go so hey you guys um Chef James has offered us very nicely a discount for you guys for being jumping over there but even if you're not interested in buying the plug jump over and check out eatpluck.com for the different recipes and different resources that are over there and um Chef James thank you so much for coming on today and this whole discussion because it's just it's so important we've got to get this nutrition back into our bodies especially our children's body bodies get them you know formed up with that deep nutrition so that it can carry their health for a very long way so thank you for coming and chatting with us today thank you for having me I really appreciate it all right you guys we will see you real soon goodbye

Channel: Homesteading Family

Views: 33,051

Keywords: Homesteading, Homesteading Family, organ meat benefits, organ meat recipes, organ meat supplements, organ meats carnivore diet, organ meat cooking, organ meat benifits

Id: fqE5VM2XhG4

Length: 54min 21sec (3261 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 19 2023