Gizzardology

When I was a kid my parents didn't have any trouble getting me to eat my vegetables. Or any of my food, really. Of course, like every other kid, there were a few exceptions. It was a lost cause putting lima beans on my plate. And any type of stroganoff dish required a little coaxing before I would even taste it. Although lima beans and stroganoff were served on an at least semi-regular basis, another dish that wasn't served regularly which would have certainly been on lima bean status was gizzards. I mean, does any family actually sit down to a meal of gizzards in the 21st century? In the days of the neighborhood butcher this may have been standard fare. But surely in our era of Tyson and Stouffer's lasagna, gizzards are a thing of the past on American dinner tables.

"You know what that is, don't you?" a guard named Hoffman asked me last night as he was passing out the dinner meal, indicating the tray he'd just handed me.

Opening the lid and beholding a pile of dubious breaded meat pellets, I informed Hoffman that I did not.

"Chicken gizzards," he told me. "Real chicken gizzards."

I was a little unsure of how to react to this unsolicited information. These same supposed gizzards had just been served the week before and, although I wasn't happy about it, I ate the mystery meat.

It then occurred to me that I didn't even know precisely what a gizzard is. A gizzard doesn't sound like something exceptionally appetizing, but we've all been warned about judging a book by its cover.

giz·zard \ˈgi-zərd\, n. : The muscular second stomach of a bird.

Perhaps I'm being closed-minded. Perhaps I'm being childish in my tastes. Whatever the case may be, when it comes to my meat consumption habits, I tend to draw the line at anything involved in the digestive or reproductive processes. On "Whitney Smith's Inedibility Scale," gizzards rank somewhere just below tripe yet still quite a bit above Rocky Mountain oysters. Escargot is somewhere right around there too. By the way, can anyone tell me if there's any difference between escargot and snails other than a language barrier?

Sitting down in my usual dining space (the toilet seat), I quietly lamented what I had unknowingly ingested the week before when I had assumed the mystery meat was only some sort of chunked chicken-fried steak. Overcome with grief and a barely controllable urge to vomit, I once again held my tray out to Brad, offering him my gizzards. His own having already been scarfed down.

The poor kid's mom must have whipped him with an extension cord anytime he tried to give food away as a child, because once again I was fixed with that deer-in-the-headlights look.

"Just take them," I said.

"But you ate them last week and they didn't hurt you," he almost pleaded.

In an attempt to convey to him my absolute disgust for this particular dish, I posed to him a hypothetical situation in which Hoffman returns to our door and confesses that as a joke he used his genitals to stir the mashed potatoes Brad had been spooning happily into his mouth. The first few bites he had taken obviously weren't awful tasting, but would he bother finishing the meal after such a revelation?

This seemed to satisfy Brad, because he grabbed the proffered chicken stomach and munched away.

He never finished his mashed potatoes, though.