Image Credit: Michael M. Santiago / Staff / Getty Images 
On Friday, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told Americans they could eat steak every single day, so long as they started choosing cheaper cuts of meat—which in any case are more nutritious and taste better too.
Kennedy was speaking at a MAHA Action event when he made the comments in response to a query about rising beef prices.
“This is true all over the country,” he said.
“There’s a lot of good food in grocery stores that goes away. Most of the cheap cuts of meat are very inexpensive.”
Media outlets and fact-checkers rushed to take issue with RFK’s response, as they do whenever he opens his mouth, whether he’s talking about autism, aluminum in vaccines or the worms that live in his brain.
The Hill, for example, reminded us that President Trump said beef prices were falling in his State of the Union address, but actually the average cost of a pound of ground beef is now “the highest on record,” at $6.75, up from $5.54 when he took office.
The Hill also told us that it’s hard to get cheap cuts of meat in the US.
“Beef liver is not a commonplace food in the U.S., with the industry-funded marketing and research program Beef Checkoff noting in 2022 that there is ‘very minimal demand for beef variety meats like tongue, lips, liver, heart, kidney, stomach and intestine here in the U.S.,’ with most of the demand for those cuts coming from international consumers.”
Demand may not be what it used to be—although the US has never really had a nose-to-tail eating tradition like in Europe—but it’s really not that hard to get the kind of cuts Kennedy is talking about. You might have to hunt around a little bit for heart and intestine, but you don’t have to look far for organ meat like liver or kidney or fattier cuts.
When I was in Los Angeles a couple of weeks ago, I managed to get a hold of some very high-quality beef shin “osso buco”—with a marrow-rich bone through the middle—as well as some oxtail to make a ragu for a dinner party. It was almost like being back home in the Westcountry, where beef shin and oxtail practically grow on trees.
In any case, the market responds to demand. If more people start seeking out things like liver, shin and oxtail, those cuts will become easier to find. You have to start somewhere.
In the spirit of starting somewhere, I thought I’d provide a little primer on liver in particular and give you some simple and delicious recipes you can start enjoying regularly at home.
Liver may well be the most nutritionally dense food there is. It deserves the moniker of “superfood” far more than kale or chia seeds or whatever plant-based product so-called “nutritional experts” are trying to push this week.
In traditional societies, liver was so highly prized it was often taboo to handle it like other foods.
The Nuer of Sudan, for example, believed the liver possessed a special sacred character, being the seat of a person’s soul. As a result, wrote Weston A. Price, “a man’s character and physical growth depend upon how well he feeds that soul by eating the livers of animals. The liver is so sacred that it may not be touched by human hands. It is accordingly always handled with their spear or saber, or with specially prepared forked sticks. It is eaten both raw and cooked.”
It’s only been in recent times people have preferred lean cuts of meat, especially things like filet mignon, to organ meat. The natural choice of our ancestors was organ meat. There are numerous accounts of groups like Native Americans greedily consuming the organ meat from a deer or elk and then leaving the lean meat for their dogs.
Why?
Our ancestors didn’t know that organs contain superior nutrition to lean meat. They didn’t know that liver is probably the best natural source of vitamin A and all the B vitamins, nor did they know that it contains folic acid; the most bioavailable forms of iron; essential trace elements like copper, zinc and chromium; the nutrient CoQ10 (vital for proper cardiovascular function); and purines, nitrogenous compounds that are essential precursors for DNA and RNA in the body.
Liver also contains an anti-fatigue factor that scientists have still been unable to identify; although its effects are well established. The scientist Benjamin Ershoff described those effects in a laboratory experiment involving rats. Ershoff divided laboratory rats into three groups. The first ate a basic diet, fortified with 11 vitamins. The second ate the same diet, along with an additional supply of vitamin B complex. The third ate the original diet, but instead of vitamin B complex received 10 percent of rations as powdered liver.
A 1975 article published in Prevention magazine described the experiment as follows: “After several weeks, the animals were placed one by one into a drum of cold water from which they could not climb out. They literally were forced to sink or swim. Rats in the first group swam for an average 13.3 minutes before giving up. The second group, which had the added fortifications of B vitamins, swam for an average of 13.4 minutes. Of the last group of rats, the ones receiving liver, three swam for 63, 83 and 87 minutes. The other nine rats in this group were still swimming vigorously at the end of two hours when the test was terminated. Something in the liver had prevented them from becoming exhausted. To this day scientists have not been able to pin a label on this anti-fatigue factor.”
Our ancestors’ preference for organ meat was not scientific. It was deep intuitive knowledge, stretching right back to the dawn of human history and probably to more ancient forms of hominin. According to one recent study out of Israel, our more distant ancestors were “hypercarnivores,” deriving the vast majority of their nutrition from meat, for a period of at least 2 million years. These deep preferences for the most nutritionally dense foods—the kind of foods that would support, over thousands of years, the development of a massively enlarged brain—would then have been reinforced by spiritual taboo, as shown in the example of the Nuer above. Our ancestors simply wanted organ meats, especially liver, but over time codified beliefs and practices that told them why they wanted them and also dramatized and dignified that need.
Humans know what they should be eating, and have known for the vast span of our history. Unfortunately, within the past century, we’ve been trained out of eating intuitively, and have come to surrender more and more control of what we eat to corporations and the novel products—ultraprocessed foods—they have created. I could give a long account of how and why that happened, but that’s beside the point here. The truth is, most people today have little or even no experience of eating organ meat. For most, the taste and texture will take a certain amount of getting used to, which is why it’s important to make organ meat as palatable as possible.
So here are two delicious recipes, and also some further suggestions for adding liver to your diet in ways you won’t even notice.
RECIPE ONE: SIMPLE LIVER PATE
Ingredients
Two eggs
400g chicken livers
Sea salt and black pepper
An onion, finely chopped
100g of butter, plus more for frying
Soft boil the eggs for 4-6 minutes.
Shell the boiled eggs and cut them in half.
Rinse the livers under cold water, then fry them in butter for no more than 90 seconds, just to color them on the outside (if you’re squeamish about rare meat, you can cook them fully—3-5 minutes).
Remove the livers from the pan and set to one side.
Fry the onion in butter on a low-medium heat for 5 minutes, stirring constantly. You only want to soften the onion and gently caramelize it.
Put the livers, eggs, fried onion and 100g of butter in a food processer and whizz till smooth.
Spoon the mixture into a bowl or tin and refrigerate for at least 3-4 hours, but preferably overnight.
Serve on toast with a garnish of friend onions and parsley, or with breadsticks or even slice carrot sticks.
RECIPE TWO: LIVER STROGANOFF
225g lamb’s or calf’s liver
1 medium onion (approx 125g)
100g small open-capped chestnut mushrooms
200ml crème fraîche or thick cream
75ml dry white wine
1 tsp olive oil
2 tsp butter
Salt and pepper
Freshly grated nutmeg
Slice the liver into thin strips. Peel and slice the onion thinly, and then slice the mushrooms thinly through the stalk.
Add the teaspoon of oil to a medium-sized frying-pan and allow it to get really hot and beginning to shimmer. Add the onion then turn the heat down to medium and cook (keeping it on the move) for five minutes. After that add a teaspoon of butter and when it’s foaming add the sliced mushrooms and cook these for a further five minutes or so.
Then remove the onions and mushrooms to a plate and keep warm. Next add the other teaspoon of butter and when it is melted and is foaming turn the heat up to high and add the strips of liver. Cook these very briefly – about one or two minutes – tossing them around, then add the wine and let it bubble a little before returning the onions and mushrooms to the pan.
Now season and add the crème fraîche or cream along with a good grating of nutmeg. Stir everything to blend evenly, then serve as soon as possible. Don’t let the liver overcook and become dry.
RECIPE THREE: LIVER IN BURGER MIXES
Another way to get liver into your diet is to go to the butcher and ask for them to make you a special burger mix with added liver. Ask for 10% liver or thereabouts (e.g. if you buy 2 kilos of burger mix, 200g will be liver). This is a very easy way to smuggle liver into your diet and you won’t even notice you’re eating it.
RECIPE FOUR: RAW LIVER
In many traditional societies, as we’ve seen, organ meat including liver is eaten raw, often at the moment when an animal is slaughtered. You absolutely don’t have to eat liver raw to enjoy the many benefits, but if you do want to try, you must ensure the liver is absolutely fresh. I’d recommend visiting a butcher and talking to them to ensure you get a fresh batch. If liver comes in on a Monday and you want to eat it raw, make sure you go in on a Monday, not a Friday. I once ate a batch of old liver raw and gave myself gastroenteritis. It wasn’t fun. I could tell the liver was bad (it stank and was slimy), but I went ahead anyway. Trust your nose.
One thing you can do, if you want to eat raw liver, is freeze it beforehand for two weeks to ensure any pathogens and parasites that may be present are killed.
You can grate frozen liver easily and add it to milk or juice. You can also cut liver into pea-sized pieces before you freeze it, so you’ve got “pills” you can swallow easily. This is a very easy way to consume raw liver. You won’t even taste it.
A compromise between raw and cook is to flash-fry the liver as quickly as possible, just to sear the outside and kill any pathogens on the surface, leaving the inside raw.
For more detailed advice on nutrition and how to eat more like your ancestors, head over to Raw Egg Nationalist’s Substack and read his series on Ancestral Eating. His new book, The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculity, is out now via Amazon and at all good bookstores.
