Sheep Head

Air Baggage and egerjohann -- I watched Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern, and I was fascinated by the Hakarl. Have you ever had it?

To me, it looks good, like a smoked salmon, but I'm sure it's nothing like smoked salmon!

It was disgusting watching him eating that sheep's head. They sell that crap in a drive-thru takeaway?

"Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earth-bound misfit, I."

'Learning to Fly' (1987)

Gazman01 writes: "If you eat lamb cutlets, shoulder, liver, what-have-ya, then why would you be so disgusted about eating another part of the animal?"

Because the head holds the brain and it appears Icelanders split the head to consume that organ. Consuming the brain of another mammal is a good way to risk infection with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Elk, deer, mink, rodents and other wild animals are known to develop variants of mad cow disease that collectively are called transmissible spongiform encephalopathies. The outbreak in Britain in the late 1990s was from domestic cattle so just avoiding wild game is no protection.

It can also be transmitted via blood products and possibly through the transplanting of at least one donated cornea, which is why I'll pass on eating eyeballs too. This outside-the-brain risk is why all those British cattle were entirely destroyed and no part was cooked. Even sterilization of surgical instruments used on CJ patients requires both heat and chemical treatments.

Eating animal brains is as American as any other part of our history and though it's mostly fallen out of favor, in some parts of the country it persists. Squirrel brains are eaten in families where squirrel hunting is still practiced, mostly in the southern states. My northern-state grandparents, who raised a family through the Great Depression, ate calves' brains as did all their peers.

The idea that consuming every part of an animal is somehow a virtue about avoiding "waste" is nonsense. In the real world nothing goes to waste; insects, scavengers, bacteria and fungi gotta eat too and they eat what we toss out. The difference between them and us is that they can eat such material with no risk to themselves. One picnic's waste is another banquet's bounty.