Valentina Raffaelli first questioned her stance on meat consumption five years ago, when she was asked to butcher six chickens during her job at a restaurant.
She and her husband, Luca Boscardin, with whom she relocated from Venice, Italy, to Amsterdam for work opportunities, pored over books, articles, and documentaries, educating themselves about intensive livestock farming and its harmful effects on the environment.
Most of the resources proposed one answer to our environmental crisis: Veganism. “An ethical and respectable choice,” Raffaelli and Boscardin call it, but a hard sell for two people who grew up eating bollito misto and rabbit with polenta in northern Italy.
“Not eating meat, for us, meant cutting off all the culture that we learned in cooking meat and fish,” says Boscardin, an illustrator and toy designer. “Maybe there was another solution.”
They thought about their nonne, who grew up on small farms, and other rural Italians who were raised to kill animals only when necessary and never wasted a single scrap. These people knew how to consume meat respectfully and sustainably, they thought, eating tripe just as appreciatively as they ate tenderloin.
And so began Scarti d’Italia (Italian Scraps): A Culinary Journey Where Nothing Is Thrown Away, Raffaelli’s and Boscardin’s Italian-English cookbook about the often-rejected offal. For one year, the duo toured Italy’s “forgotten” food traditions, traveling via camper van from the north to the south of the peninsula and its islands in between, consulting with chefs, butchers, farmers, and everyday eaters about what is known in Italy as the quinto quarto (fifth quarter), or scarti, scraps.
An illustration of a chef making morzello by Luca Boscardin, co-author of the book Italian Scraps.
“It’s not about the pleasure of eating weird stuff, it’s really about respecting the animal,” says Raffaelli, a cook and food writer. “When we decide to eat meat, it’s a waste to eat only the filet or the spare ribs. It’s respectful to eat also the secondary cuts. They are good; there are recipes that can make them better and actually very delicious.”
Scarti d’Italia, published in 2020 by Corraini Edizioni, begins as a glossary of Italian-style offal. It covers all four of a cow’s stomachs, the differences in taste between various animals’ livers, and all the terms you would need to decipher a quinto-quarto menu in Italy, from diaphragm to sweetbreads. Callu de crabettu, a Sardinian cheese aged inside the stomach of a young goat, and ficazza, a Sicilian salume made from tuna scraps, are just a couple of the treasures to be found along the way. (See a recipe for morzello, the Calabrian cow offal stew, from the book.)
The book continues with illustrated maps of the towns where Raffaelli and Boscardin researched, recipes from all 20 regions of Italy, and stories that point to a central argument: The meat available for our purchase should be determined by supply, not demand.
The authors recall Giuseppe Zen, a Milanese butcher who buys one grass-fed cow a week and doesn’t replace it until all of its parts have been sold. A customer may visit Macelleria Popolare to find that her bistecca is gone but leave with the “special burger” (made with house-aged beef offal) and new cooking knowledge bestowed by Zen instead.
It’s easy to see why some interpret eating offal as a way to appreciate animals, but can it really help the environment? A 2019 study published in Environmental Science and Technology found that if German consumers substituted muscle meat with offal once a week, greenhouse gas emissions from the country’s meat industry could fall by 14 percent. If the demand for cow tongue, for example, were more even with the demand for ground beef, then “fewer animals would need to reared overall,” one of the authors told Carbon Brief.
Ruaraidh Petre, Executive Director of the Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef, says the issue is more complicated than that. The beef industry produces relatively little waste, as most offal ends up in pet food or exported to other countries as inexpensive meat. If high-income countries were to buy more offal and drive up its value, the environmental effects would depend on what happens next. “If you were to remove offal supply from a low-income country, what would they be replacing that protein with and what would the environmental [impact] of that source be?” Petre asks.
Still, he says, if people ate more offal, “that would probably be a good thing. Organ meats tend to be very densely nutritious.” To make sure that you’re purchasing sustainably sourced meat, offal or otherwise, get it from a butcher who can tell you about where it comes from, Petre suggests.
The couple visited Italian regions in search of offal dishes.
It’s easy to find good offal in Italy — even as a tourist in well-trodden destinations, Raffaelli and Boscardin say. Trattoria Trippa offers daily offal specials in Milan. World-famous butcher Dario Cecchini’s Solociccia, just outside of Florence, celebrates nose-to-tail dining. And then there’s Rome, where many trattorie still serve trippa alla Romana, coda alla vaccinara (oxtail stew), and rigatoni con la pajata (calf intestines still containing the mother’s milk).
If you want a show with your meal, southern Italy is the place to go. Raffaelli and Boscardin reminisce about Palermo, where street vendors proudly shout to advertise their offerings of pani c’a meusa (a spleen panino) and stigghiole (spring onion wrapped in lamb or kid intestines and grilled) through clouds of fragrant smoke.
The authors laugh when they remember the spectacle they created, squeezing their camper van into the piazzas of tiny villages in search of meat. If locals were puzzled at their arrival, then they were immediately interested when they learned about their project. “Oh, you want to know about this salume? You should talk to my cousin,” they would say. This enthusiasm for old offal dishes and the eagerness to share them, Raffaelli and Boscardin say, made the couple feel hopeful about the future of food.
“We are what we eat,” they write in the book’s opening. “What about what we throw away?”