Scotland Wants US to Lift Haggis Ban

As world trade disputes go, the American ban on Scottish haggis is not very important. But as the world prepares to celebrate Burns night on Friday, one should pause for thought. The UK’s problem with mad cow disease, which is linked to the human brain illness Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, is the pretext for the ban. Surely, though, there are ways around it.

For the uninitiated, haggis is beef heart, liver and lungs wrapped inside a sheep's stomach lining along with some oatmeal and suet. This is then boiled for 4-5 hours and served piping hot. One recommends a strong ale, red wine and/or Scotch whiskey to help with digestion. It is about as good as it reads, proof that the Scots probably should have stopped with golf and Scotch when it came time to invent things.

Still, there are those who disagree. Robert Burns, whose Scots poetry is a delight once one gets the cadences and some of the vocabulary sorted out, wrote in “Address to a Haggis,” “Fair fa' your honest, sonsie face,/Great chieftain o the puddin'-race!/Aboon them a' ye tak your place,/Painch, tripe, or thairm:/Weel are ye wordy of a grace/As lang's my arm.” Any dish worth a grace as long as one’s arm must have something going for it.

Reuters reported yesterday, “’The Scottish government will consider engaging the U.S. government on its haggis import ban ... It is safe or we wouldn't eat it here,’ said a spokeswoman. ‘We think there is a large market for it amongst expatriate Scots there’.” Perhaps, and yet, perhaps those Scots left in search of a good bowl of chili, fried chicken or a proper pizza.

Still, there’s no reason for the ban if the Scots can provide proof that the cows used in the making of haggis were not part of the infected population in the first place. Maybe buying some American cattle as an initial stock would help.





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