Referring to organ meats, also known as variety meats. Types of offal include:

• Sweetbreads
• Tongues
• Heart
• Tripe
• Brain
• Liver
• Gizzards
• Headcheese
• Lung
• Spleen
• Intestines
• Cheek
• Oxtail

and more. To be clear, this is not an exhaustive list but just an attempt to give you an idea of what offal can be. More technically, they are the organs of a butchered animal. Some dishes that use offal may have more regional appeal or appeal may mostly be known in regions outside the United States of America. Other dishes that use offal, such as foie gras, may fall into the category of fine dining.

An aversion to offal is most often associated with the USA in the modern era. Specifically, the cultural aversion stems from an association of offal with those living in poverty. As a result of this longstanding aversion, a lot of people that might want to experiment with offal don’t know where to start on account of there being a deficit of cultural knowledge in the United States of America (depending on the region you are in).