host an organ eating party

no but for real

Yesterday, my best friend Caleb and I hosted an organ eating party. The party was the culmination of many hours of effort, but all of it was simple. The weeks before, we had sourced our meats, talked over recipes, coordinated pans and dates, and sent out a really provocative email to the dorm.

part of the email we sent out

Starting at 1 PM, I picked up a bunch of our frozen organ meats and started prepping them with Caleb. Here’s a tiny sliver of that process:

a very protein dense delivery

duck testicles

duck tongue

elk osso buco. yummy yum yum

At 5 PM, people started coming. We met a lot of people we’d never seen before, and also got to catch up with people we wanted to know better. People were really pleasantly surprised by how good heart and duck tongue were, although they didn’t find the bison liver pate or the testicle very good.

cutting into the elk osso buco

all the friendos

bison heart, bison liver pate

This is one of those events where all the insights I’d write would fall a little flat, because most of the reward — getting to provide people with novel experiences, finding that there exist others who love organs too — has to be experienced in the moment. So here’s a call to action for you instead:

This month, host an event that you’re curious about hosting. It might be scary, but chances are, you’ll take away something really valuable. Maybe you haven’t seen some friends in a while and want to get everyone to go to a restaurant together.

Or maybe you want to do something a little more out there. Go on a walk with someone you’d like to know better now that the plants are out, and see how much you can forage from the landscape around you. Host a writing or reading day, and see if you can get your friends to come.

If you want to host an organ eating party, feel free to ask me for input :)

Thanks to Justin Chen for some of the photos!