Commentary: Pork blood and offal aren’t only delicious, but nutritious and sustainable
With Singapore reversing a decades-long ban on pork blood, food writer Pamelia Chia weighs in on why offal triggers revulsion in some diners.
by Pamelia Chia · CNA · JoinRead a summary of this article on FAST.
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SINGAPORE: When Singapore approved the import of a pork blood product, ending a decades-long ban on animal blood delicacies, it did more than restore a single ingredient to supermarket shelves. It resurfaced a question many diners would rather avoid: What parts of an animal are we willing to eat, and why?
I grew up appreciating offcuts, thanks to my mother and her side of the family. She believed everything should be tried at least once and introduced pig intestines to me as “Chinese chewing gum”, preparing me for its springy bite.
When we ate out, she ordered braised duck tongues and chicken feet. I became adept at stripping the tiny bones in my mouth before spitting them neatly onto my spoon.
At weekly gatherings, my grandmother often cooked bak kut teh. For me, the best part was never the spareribs but the pig tails bobbing in the broth. Over time, I began ordering my own bowls of pig tail prawn mee soup and requesting gizzards with my chicken rice.
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Unlike the way offal is framed in reality TV shows like Fear Factor, nothing about these foods feels like a test of courage to me - they are simply delicious. But for many, the idea of eating innards triggers immediate revulsion. When I host friends and ask about dietary restrictions, several explicitly ask me not to cook offal.
In much of Asia, including Singapore, nose-to-tail eating is simply an extension of a waste-not-want-not approach to cooking. However, as diners have grown more squeamish, dishes like kway chap - long defined by a generous assortment of braised innards - are increasingly stripped down to more mainstream cuts like pork belly or duck breast. This is not just a shift in taste, but a reflection of our growing distance from our food.
THE DISAPPEARANCE OF OFFAL
Part of the distance is practical. Offal is unforgiving: It must be fresh, cleaned thoroughly and cooked with care. Anyone who has had a bad experience remembers the stench of a poorly cleaned intestine or the chalky texture of overcooked liver.
One of my earliest kitchen memories is of my grandmother teaching me to clean a pig’s stomach by squelching salt deep into its folds. Today, as people work longer hours and spend less time in the kitchen, that kind of knowledge is harder to pass on.
But the shift is also psychological. For some, offal is a relic of hardship - a reminder of a time when people had no choice but to eat everything. Rejecting it can feel like progress: We can afford better now; we no longer need to use an animal down to its hooves.
Modern food systems reinforce that instinct. Supermarkets present meat as clean, uniform cuts - breasts, tenderloins, steaks - that bear little resemblance to the animals from which they come. Offal resists that illusion. It is unmistakably visceral, confronting us with blood and tissue, and the reality of an animal’s death.
THE CASE FOR OFFAL
The case for eating the whole animal is not simply nostalgic. Offal is often cheaper than premium cuts of meat. They also deliver tremendous nutritional value - gram for gram, they typically offer more vitamins and minerals than the muscle cuts that dominate modern diets. It is little wonder that, in the wild, predators tend to go for the organs first.
Offal-eating also encourages a more responsible way of eating. For much of human history, when an animal was killed, it was used in its entirety - for food, clothing and shelter. To eat offal is to honour the animal by wasting less of it.
But perhaps the most persuasive argument is the simplest: Offal, when prepared well, is delicious, boasting textures and flavours that expand what meat can be. The firm, cooling bite of Teochew pork trotter jelly; the gelatinous softness of braised beef tendon stewed in sambal; the marrow of sup tulang slurped through a straw - these are not fallback foods, but expressions of craft refined over generations.
A CRITICAL APPROACH TO EATING
None of this is to say that caution about offal is unfounded. Blood and organs, if improperly handled, carry real health risks, from bacterial contamination to diseases such as Hepatitis E. Singapore’s ban on animal blood products was triggered by a Nipah virus outbreak among abattoir workers in 1999.
Nor should every culinary tradition be preserved without question. Some foods, such as shark’s fin or turtle soup, are increasingly difficult to defend on environmental and animal welfare grounds, no matter how rooted they are in culture or how delectable they may be. To embrace nose-to-tail eating, then, is not to preserve tradition uncritically.
Eating offal is not a silver bullet to resolve rising food costs or the climate crisis. But it does offer something more immediate: a way to close the distance between what we eat and where it comes from. And with a bowl of pig organ soup, with its slivers of kidney, folds of stomach and quivering cubes of blood, that reconciliation is sobering, but also grounding.
Pamelia Chia is the author of the cookbooks Wet Market to Table and PlantAsia, and writer of the Singapore Noodles newsletter.
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