THERE are, when life boils down to its essence, just two types of people.
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There are those who eat offal and those who see eating animals' guts as the most revolting, debauched practice ever undertaken by even history's most barbaric savages.
There's no overlooking the fact that a brain is a brain when it is sold as a brain, no forgetting that the kidney is a kidney when it is presented as a kidney. We're much happier eating beef, yearling and veal than we would be cow, even happier eating pork, ham and bacon than we would be pig, and I'd say lamb would be much more palatable and popular if it had its own euphemism. Neither goat nor kangaroo will become standard fare while we're eating goat and kangaroo. Those who eat brains have no such sensitivities, of course.
Almost as nauseous as offal eating are the offal eaters themselves, especially within a digestion cycle of the eating of offal - in other words, when the guts of another animal are in their own guts.
And it's not just their offal eating that warrants our detestation.
I mean, where would an offal eater draw the line in other practices? If they're prepared to eat offal we must assume they're bottom feeders in every other field.
Any man or woman who salivates over a steaming sheep's head, for example, will have similarly shocking cravings for pursuits between meals.
There's no denying a plated sheep's head is a sheep's head, and indeed with the staring eyes and the shrunken tissue revealing the teeth and the skull it is more sheep's head than the head of a live sheep.
Some offal eaters are in denial, and so they will try to disguise their eating of offal. They prefer to refer to the glands they crave as sweetbreads and the lungs as lights!
The menu will list lamb's fry, not organ charged with filtering blood, not, even, liver. And the offal eater will order lamb's fry please.
The chef will cut the liver so that it doesn't look liver and cover it with onion gravy so it doesn't smell liver, but the stench leaves no one in the room in doubt that a dead animal's innards are among them.
I believe the stench of cooked liver and kidney is nature's way of warning us against eating them.
That's one of the problems with offal, isn't it? There's no overlooking the fact that a brain is a brain when it is sold as a brain, no forgetting that the kidney is a kidney when it is presented as a kidney.
We're much happier eating beef, yearling and veal than we would be cow, even happier eating pork, ham and bacon than we would be pig, and I'd say lamb would be much more palatable and popular if it had its own euphemism.
Neither goat nor kangaroo will become standard fare while we're eating goat and kangaroo.
Those who eat brains have no such sensitivities, of course, and they'd be delighted if the brains were served in skulls.
A Chinese chef told me some years ago that he had seen, but not tried himself, people in special restaurants in China eating live monkey's brains - a monkey was strapped under a table with its head protruding through a hole in the table, the top of the skull was cut off and the diner tucked in.
It was not, he said, a Hollywood invention.
Strapping lambs into such tables would be a hit among offal eaters here.
Those who eat tripe are spared the identification of cow's stomach lining but, really, I don't think that would deter a tripe eater, people who seem to revel in the horror of it all.
An abattoir worker has told me that the sight of unwashed, untreated tripe would sicken even a tripe eater, and I'll post a photo on the blog for their benefit if I can find one.
In fact, tripe is so confronting that it is, I believe, sometimes treated with lime or other substances and partially cooked before being offered for sale.
Naturally a butcher would not exhibit a heart in his window, or eyes or testicles, but offal eaters arrange the purchase of such organs in whispered negotiations at the deserted end of the counter.
It has all the shame of a sexual fetish.
Like all countries Australia has some dark patches in its history, and we can be thankful one came to a belated end 25 years ago.
Until then a dressed chicken came with a bag of the chook's internal organs, including heart, liver, gizzard and anything else that would be regarded today by civilised Australians with revulsion.
These were known as the giblets and their disappearance was a step in the evolution of the modern Australian.
There are still, as I said, two types, but thankfully the offal type are hiding in the kitchen closet.
This column was initially published in December 2011.
jeffcorb@gmail.com
