If Americans are getting into eating organ meats, it makes sense that they’re doing so in a really showy way. The shock value of eating buffalo brains in a parking lot in front of a journalist you’ve just met has to be part of the thrill for these “dark nutrition” believers, recently reported on by Sophie Haigney. I don’t think any true offal lover—an eater of trippa alla Florentina or tacos de lengua—would do such a thing; they’d simply eat their food, as part of eating all the rest of their meals. But these dark nutrition people also want a pat on the back, it seems, for their wildness.

Eating animal organs is something that people in the less offal-icious nations have long associated with adventurousness, a way to differentiate themselves from the bloodless eating of their compatriots. See how Bourdain introduced himself as a food writer? “Good food, good eating, is all about blood and organs, cruelty and decay.” The dark nutrition eaters are after something similar, but different: They seek both attention and some kind of healing, of the sort that traditional recipes from around the world clearly cannot provide.

I’m a pleasure-seeker when it comes to food, not a nutrition-head: Were I eating organ meat, I’d be firmly in the Guts magazine camp of slurping the nice soups, not joyously squealing over the sight of skull bits. When I first went vegan and didn’t know how to feed myself so ate bits of kale, beans, and brown rice for every meal, I felt high off the change. I could’ve associated this with a clearing away of the fogs of industrial food except that I hurt my back and it wouldn’t heal. I had to admit what I’d always known to be true: Many things tasted better than skinny felt.

To eat nothing but rare steak and butter from grass-fed cows is a means of finding control in a world that is increasingly chaotic, yes. There are many who find the same type of control in strict vegan diets. From the preacher Sylvester Graham’s promotion of whole-grain bread to the domestic scientists to the emergence of industrial foods so that no one but the workers had to get their hands dirty, the dominant culture in the States has long been trying to figure out how to “fix” food, to wrangle it into something simple and easy. When I see an AI tool being built out to remove room for human error from recipes, I see it as part of the same impulse toward clean, sleek, mechanized control. Do you need a robot to teach you that spinach wilts faster than kale? The domestic scientists would’ve loved it!

“Domestic scientists were inspired by the nutritive properties of food, by its ability to promote physical, social, and, they believed, moral growth,” writes Laura Shapiro in our recent book club pick Perfection Salad. “The flavors of food were of slight, somewhat anthropological interest. They did understand very well that many people enjoyed eating; this presented still another challenge. Food was powerful, it could draw forth cravings and greedy desires which had to be met with a firm hand.” 

While the “dark nutrition” folks express a sort of sensuality in their consumption, as we discussed in our book club meeting, it’s not sexy; it’s grotesque. It is, indeed, performance rather than something related to the act of eating as almost anyone else would recognize it—something pleasurable, convivial, rooted. It’s freakish, garish, distinctly American. There are so many examples of eating the whole animal from around the world to draw upon: Why this?

They’re looking for food to fix ailments and illness, and I empathize with that: There’s a lot that is clearly rotten in the food system and health care in the U.S. Making videos about drinking raw eggs isn’t going to do anything about it, though, and for what it’s worth, M.F.K. Fisher would’ve hated it: “In America we eat, collectively, with a glum urge for food to fill us,” she wrote in her first book, Serve It Forth, and she might have been talking about the filling of both bellies and souls. “We are ignorant of flavor. We are as a nation taste-blind.”

In Nepal, I read, they sauté the buffalo brains: “The amber-stained mixture looks like hard-scrambled eggs, but tastes slightly metallic, reminding one of the iron-rich nature of the cerebral cortex.” This seems more reasonable than raw, in a parking lot. But it wouldn’t have made quite as striking an impression.