Sama Hoole@SamaHoole
Haggis is the single food item currently banned from import into the United States of America because it contains sheep's lung.
Sheep's lung has been declared, by the USDA, an inedible offal. The ban was imposed in 1971 and remains in place.
The Scottish reaction to this ban has, for fifty years, ranged from bafflement to mild amusement. Sheep's lung has been eaten in Scotland, daily, without incident, for approximately eight hundred years. It is the binding ingredient that holds the minced sheep's heart, liver, onion, oatmeal, suet, and spices together inside the stomach casing. It is the reason haggis exists.
Scottish children are fed haggis on Burns Night, 25th of January, every year. They eat it at school. At home. At pubs. At weddings. At every ceremony the national poet is toasted at.
Burns Night is, in Britain, effectively the last public occasion on which a whole generation still encounters a dish made from an animal's lungs, heart, and liver, stuffed into its own stomach, and eaten communally.
This used to be normal food. Every rural British household knew some version of it. Faggots in the Midlands. Brawn everywhere. Black pudding in Lancashire. Drisheen in the West Country. The whole animal was used because the whole animal was available and it was cheaper than buying specific cuts.
Now, once a year, the Scottish remind everyone else that this food exists. The rest of the year, it is marketed as a quaint regional oddity for tourists.
The nutritional profile of a traditional haggis is substantial. Per 100 grams: 14g protein, 22g fat, significant B12, iron, zinc, and the specific fat-soluble vitamins that concentrate in organ meat.
The Americans have been missing out for fifty years because of a regulatory decision made in 1971 on the basis of a sanitary concern that was probably already obsolete.
The Scots have been eating it the whole time.
The Scots have not died of it.
