My last recipe was a grass-fed beef liver recipe for a reason. Liver has gone out of favor with most Americans, many of my peers have never even eaten liver, and it seems that we have replaced liver and other non-prime cuts with chicken nuggets. This is something that gets me pretty upset, but in all fairness industrially-farmed livers should be avoided. In many cases they are unavailable to us because they have been stripped from our butcher and supermarket shelves due to safety issues. 60 percent of antibiotics are used on livestock in America, not to mention the amount of growth hormone and strange things that are added to feed (rendered animal byproducts, chicken manure and discarded factory food as bizarre as gum!).
If our animals are being fed antibiotics, hormones and suspicious feed, what does that say about their livers? The liver is an animal’s cleaning system; it is also one of the most nutritious, delicious and low-fat cuts of an animal. Rabbit, chicken, and pork liver are some of my favorite foods, but I prefer pasture-raised livers because I can trust that they are healthy and safe. When my family has animals butchered we ask for the liver, heart and tongue, and the processors are always skeptical, saying, “We can only give livers back if they pass inspection.” This is because so many cows’ livers are now bloated, diseased and filled with lesions because they have been eating food that damages their systems. We know we will get our livers back and that they will pass inspection because they are grass-fed. A grass-fed liver is dark red with a shiny skin; that is what a healthy liver looks like. It is also free of antibiotics, growth hormone and feed residue.
The exciting thing about pasture-raised livers is that they are available and extremely reasonable. I was raised to respect farm animals, to savor and eat the whole animal, and eating the liver is about cherishing the whole animal. With grass-fed meats, we can have it all; we can eat the whole animal, trusting that it was treated well and that it in turn will make us healthy.
