The feces had already been scraped out. Now all that was left to do was to peel away the fatty skin.

Lynn Davis sat on a stool by a sink, holding a strand of pig intestines under a cold-water faucet, pulling it into two pieces, then dropping the halves into separate, squishy piles, one of which was destined for someone’s dinner table.

“They taste good, but you know everybody’s got their own taste,” said the 64-year-old. “But to me they’re good. Kids look at ‘em, be like, ‘Oh no, I ain’t doing that,’ from the smell, you know? The smell alone. But otherwise they’re good. Yes they are.”

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It was a Monday morning in the back room at Gourmet Food Center on Detroit’s west side, where the specialty is hand-cleaned chitlins — more formally known as chitterlings, more bluntly known as the entrails of a pig. The store’s motto is “We clean the shit out of chitlins!”

“Chitlins are hog intestines, so quite naturally you have to clean the shit out of them,” said founder Bruce Tucker, 67. “But after you get them cleaned down to that level there’s another level that has to happen, because there’s still debris and skin, an extra inner coat that has to be removed like a membrane. So that’s where the hand cleaning comes in.”

Cleaning chitlins takes a lot of work. They’re loaded with harmful bacteria when raw, along with unwelcome surprises like hair, straw and undigested food such as corn. So even after a machine removes the feces, chitlins have to be thoroughly washed and boiled for hours before they can be eaten, and any surfaces they came into contact with need to be cleaned with chlorine or bleach. On top of all that, they stink up any place where they’re being cooked.

Thirty years ago, Tucker’s wife, Cynthia, thought there might be money in cleaning them for others. Her husband thought she was nuts. But three decades later, they run a chitlin-cleaning empire of three stores and an online business that draws orders from around the country.

For centuries, pig intestines have been a staple of peasant and country cuisine throughout the world. In America, they’re commonly associated with soul food. But thanks to their origin, their flavor, even the politics underlying them, they’ve long been a polarizing food.

“There’s no gray area with chitlins,” Tucker said. “Either you love ‘em or you hate ‘em. There’s people, black or white, they’ll tell you they’ll never touch ‘em. You couldn’t put a gun to their head to make them eat ‘em. Then there’s people that would put a gun to your head and take yours. It’s just a culture thing.”

***

Tucker was a local radio and appliance salesman who’d somehow stumbled into a job as the manager of former Temptations singers Eddie Kendricks and David Ruffin and spent part of the ‘80s touring the country with the two.

“There was a lot of partying,” Tucker said. “I’ll just leave it at that.”

After another lengthy, tiring tour, he came home to Detroit to find his wife experiencing a brainstorm.

“Oprah Winfrey was on TV and she had some women on there that had started a business in their house,” said his wife, Cynthia, who worked security at an auto plant at the time. “I was getting ready to have the family over for dinner, so I was going to be cleaning 40 pounds of chitlins, and while I was cleaning these chitlins I thought to myself, boy, this is a lot of work. I need to be getting paid for this.”

Her husband was initially unimpressed with her idea. “I thought it was crazy at first,” he said. “I’m on the road, I come home, I’m tired as hell. After a few weeks with them guys, man it was rough. And so, I says, well, we’ll talk about it when I wake up. I gotta get some rest. And when I woke up, she was just as excited as when I came home.”

So she began cleaning chitlins in their basement, he helped her print up some flyers to advertise her services, and soon people were flocking to their home. It became overwhelming.

“In no time flat we had people coming to our house, all these strangers coming to my door,” he said. “Plus, the house was stinking. It’s all right in a facility, you know; you expect a few flies and gnats and the smell, but you don’t want that in your house. It’s not a good odor for the home, you know. Chitlins have a unique odor within themselves.”

Tucker found a storefront for sale on West Seven Mile near Greenfield, and opened for business in 1988, calling it Gourmet Food Center to indicate all the work they put into refining them. “The reason they’re considered gourmet is they’re one of the most expensive meats you can buy,” he said. “They cost more than steaks. They cost more than shrimp.”

Food markets throughout the region sell cheap buckets of frozen, semi-clean chitlins, but nobody claimed to clean them the way the Gourmet Food Center did. The demand was stunning.

“People would be lined from here to the corner every holiday,” Tucker said. “I mean, they would line up in the rain, snow. I had people post up almost like at a concert the night before. By the time we got ready to open the next day, the line was down to the corner, and it got to the point we couldn’t keep up.”

A second store followed, then a third, then a thriving online business. Tucker hired dozens of workers, mostly women, many of whom he’s retained for years. “You develop girls who can really clean,” he said. “I mean, some of these girls are good, and that’s why people buy our chitlins — because my girls can clean better than somebody’s grandma who cleans once or twice a year. My girls are cleaning 20 buckets a day. So they’re professionals.”

A 5-pound batch of chitlins goes for $13.99, 10 pounds for $26.99, and each comes with a recipe on the bag. Tucker said they sell 100 tons every year to Detroiters, suburbanites, out-ot-towners over the Internet, and even royalty of sorts.

“Must’ve been about five years ago. It was the holidays, it was extremely busy, the lobby is packed, and all of a sudden this limo pulled up out front,” Tucker said. The Queen of Soul had arrived unannounced.

“The limo doors open, the body guards get Aretha and bring her out. She walked through the snow, they opened the door, and everybody was in awe. There must’ve been 30, 40 customers in there. They were like, ‘The queen! The queen!’ People just couldn’t believe it. They moved aside, moved her immediately to the front of the line, and she ordered, I think, 40 pounds of chitlins. She used to be a big chitlin eater. She used to love chitlins. Naturally, we comped her, said, ‘Hey, you just take ‘em.’ She got her order, they escorted her out to her limo, and my phone rang all night, people saying ‘I heard Aretha was there!’”

***

But for some people, chitlins are controversial.

It’s long been assumed that chitlins in America had their roots in the days of slavery, when the best cuts of the pig went to the slave masters, who were thus said to be “living high on the hog,” while the worst parts of animals like pigs feet, hog jowls, turkey necks and oxtails were given to slaves. Over the years, some have said those origins should make people think twice about eating them anymore.

“There’s some truth to that, but it’s a much more complicated story,” said Adrian E. Miller, author of “Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine, One Plate at a Time.”

“Enslaved people did eat chitlins, but white people were eating them as well. In fact, if you look at slave narratives and oral histories of the era, there were quite a few references of making chitlins for the master, and eating intestines was something that was in white culture for centuries before we get to the American South. People that went on hunts would eat the intestines as prized delicacies. And you find in a lot of cultures where organ meat is considered a delicacy.”

By the 1960s, two divergent streams of thought emerged about soul food in general, and chitlins in particular. They became politicized, a symbol both good and bad.

“There were huge critics. Former Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver said eating chitlins is like going slumming, Elijah Muhammad critiqued soul food as filthy and unhealthful, and Dick Gregory equated it with racial genocide. There’s always been these kinds of debates around what soul food is, its authenticity, and what it means to eat it,” said Doris Witt, Iowa University professor and author of “Black Hunger: Food and the Politics of U.S. Identity,” which explores the history and politics behind soul food.

“But it was valorized in the ‘60s as part of the greater Black Power Movement, and it was a way of celebrating the resistance and spirit of survival and creativity that emerged despite the horrific history of racism in this country.”

For many people though, they’re simply an inherited culinary tradition.

“That’s black people’s caviar, chitlins is,” said 70-year-old Chuck Sims, leaning over a sink in the back room at the West Seven Mile store, cleaning hog maws, better known as pig stomachs, another specialty offered here. “You know, during the holidays —Thanksgiving, New Year’s, oh man we run for it.”

But some see traditions like chitlins slowly fading.

“When we was growing up our parents introduced us to chitlins,” said Bennie Ross, 66, a longtime customer, standing in the lobby before the bulletproof glass, waiting for two buckets. “The young parents, if grandmama don’t do it, they ain’t gonna care for them. Most young people I know don’t eat ‘em, like my kids don’t eat ‘em, so I know they probably don’t introduce chitlins to their kids.”

Tucker disagrees. In a city where a lot of people have Southern roots, he says chitlins have remained a popular dish despite concerns over health or history. In fact, one of his newest creations is microwaveable chitlin snacks. Millennials, he said, will love those for their convenience. And he thinks chitlins will endure not just as a symbol of ingenuity and resourcefulness, but above all as a nostalgic reminder of family meals and holiday gatherings.

“We’ve taken the discarded, worst part of the hog and turned it into an expensive, African-American, gourmet delicacy that has become a soul food specialty,” he said. “I’ll tell you this — If you ever go over anybody’s house during the holidays that’s got chitlins, there’s still ham left over, there’s still turkey left over. Chitlins are never left over. You never got enough. They are the delicacy. They’re the No. 1 thing. Because they’re delicious.”

John Carlisle writes about people and places in Michigan. His stories can be found at freep.com/carlisle. Contact him: jcarlisle@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @_johncarlisle, Facebook at johncarlisle.freep or on Instagram at johncarlislefreep