Offal
internal organs and entrails of a butchered animal
Offal (), also called variety meats, pluck or organ meats, is the internal organs of a butchered animal. Offal may also refer to the by-products of milled grains, such as corn or wheat.
Some cultures strongly consider offal consumption to be taboo, while others use it as part of their everyday food, such as lunch meats, or, in many instances, as delicacies. Certain offal dishes—including foie gras and pâté—are often regarded as gourmet food in the culinary arts. Others remain part of traditional regional cuisine and are consumed especially during holidays; some examples are sweetbread, Jewish chopped liver, Scottish haggis, U.S. chitterlings, and Mexican menudo. Intestines are traditionally used as casing for sausages.
Depending on the context, offal may refer only to those parts of an animal carcass discarded after butchering or skinning. Offal not used directly for human or animal consumption is often processed in a rendering plant, producing material that is used for fertilizer or fuel; in some cases, it may be added to commercially produced pet food. In earlier times, mobs sometimes threw offal and other rubbish at condemned criminals as a show of public disapproval.
Etymology and terminology
The word shares its etymology with several Germanic words: West Frisian ôffal, German Abfall (Offall in some Western German dialects and Luxembourgish), afval in Dutch and Afrikaans, avfall in Norwegian and Swedish, and affald in Danish.
The public source identifies “Offal” as internal organs and entrails of a butchered animal. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Offal, internal and organs.
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Datasets, specimens, observations and peer-reviewed methods provide the appropriate test for the technical claims summarized here. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q157484. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Offal” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.