(MBP dictionary) Offal
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the entrails and internal organs of an animal used as food
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I grew up with a saying or joke that’s supposed to be said by the rest of the Chinese people about Cantonese speakers:
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The Cantonese will eat anything that has four legs except a table, and anything that flies except an aeroplane.
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Prince Philip’s version, repeated on a visit to China, was that it was about the Chinese people as a whole. He got criticised for making a racist joke/comment.
I’m not quite sure why it should be considered racist. It could be a matter of “half full or half empty”.
One could interpret it as: that saying/joke could be praising the Cantonese/Chinese as being eco — economical (frugal) and ecological (not wasting).
Given China’s food history, with the famines and frequent floods (the Yellow River bursting its banks with all the silt brought downstream, just to name one) causing hunger and hardship, it’s terribly wasteful to be so selective about food.
I was in a long distance relationship with a Swiss chap in the late 80s. On my first visit to Zürich, he took me out to a restaurant, and asked what I’d like to eat. I said, “Traditional Swiss food, of course!”
Turned out, surprisingly, to be offal.
Why surprising? Because Switzerland is a Western country, and my experience of Westerners in general is that they don’t tend to eat such things, considering them not “proper” food, even if not downright “disgusting”.
Also, I’d always associated Switzerland with money, being a country of numbered bank accounts (rich people hiding their identities and all that), and therefore wealth, which implies the people do not have to eat foods that are fairly typically considered undesirable (for their image and status, I feel, more than because of the actual taste of the items themselves).
So why is offal traditional Swiss food? They were a country of peasants historically — think cows and alps.
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