Modern grocery stores discard roughly half of each animal, while hunter-gatherer societies like the Sami use 96-98%. Eating the whole animal—liver, heart, kidney, blood—cuts waste, costs less, and gives ranchers extra income. It's better for the environment, your wallet, and nutrition.
In a modern American grocery store, 55% of a pig and 50% of a cow by weight end up on the shelves. Only half of it is available to go into our diets, which doesn't sit right with me. When you look at hunter-gatherer groups, especially people like the Sami in Scandinavia, upwards of 96, 97, 98% of that animal is used to nourish themselves and their families and their community. From a sustainability perspective, same sort of thing, right? We have all these calculations on, okay, well, to raise this cow, it takes this much food and this much water, and you only get this much in return. Well, all those calculations are thrown to hell when you actually are eating the entire animal. And then the final piece is the economic part of it. The liver, heart, kidney, spleen, blood, fat are a lot cheaper than ribeyes and filet. From the consumer perspective, it's more economical, but also for the rancher or the farmer, you now have a market for putting more money directly into their pocket for the same work they're already doing. I mean, that is a win-win all the way around. Everything changes with a full whole animal approach.
