HAGGIS LIGHT COMES TO CANADA.
HAGGIS SOLD IN CANADA NOT QUITE TRADITIONAL
For the first time in 46 years, Canadians can legally buy a made-in-Scotland haggis.
The imported haggis, unveiled this week complete with bilingual labels, was specially crafted for the Canadian market by the meat wholesaler Macsween of Edinburgh. Scotland even sent over its Economy Secretary, Keith Brown, to talk up haggis on a Canadian trade mission.
“As a Government, we … will continue to support Scottish companies in unlocking the significant opportunities to be found in this fast-growing market,” Brown said in a statement issued from Toronto.
There’s just one problem. Due to a controversial Canadian import law, the haggises all had to be crafted without one of their most signature ingredients: Sheep offal, or lung.
Haggis, the national dish of Scotland, typically consists of oatmeal, spices and various animal byproducts wrapped in a lamb’s stomach. Under a Canadian law reportedly first passed in 1971, however, traditional haggis is not legally considered food because it has been “adulterated” by animal lungs.
While Canadians are allowed to eat most parts of a sheep, lungs remain in a federally verboten category that includes genitals, udders, spleens and “black gut.”
The lung ban is mirrored in the United States, where authorities have similarly mandated since 1971 that “livestock lungs shall not be saved for use as human food.”
Macsween of Edinburgh was forced to circumvent this regulation by making their Canadian haggis with sheep heart, rather than sheep lung. The company also needed to have their facilities approved by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.
“It’s as close as we can get to the original recipe using different meats, because the oats and spice mix are the same,” Macsween commercial director David Rae told U.K. media this week.
The North American lung bans have been a persistent irritant in the United Kingdom, where truckloads of offal are eaten every year without incident.
If there was a reason behind the 1971 lung bans, they appear to have been lost to history.
No mention of offal exists in Canadian parliamentary records at the time of the ban. In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration reportedly banned the organs without so much as assessing their safety. Given the tiny U.S. market for edible lungs at the time, it was likely deemed to be not worth the trouble.
A 2014 article in Scotland’s Daily Record claimed the bans were motivated by trumped-up fears over “scarpie,” a degenerative illness that is a close cousin of mad cow disease.
As a result, purists maintain that superstition alone is causing North Americans to be sold fraudulent, lung-free haggis.
Scottish columnist Alex Massie has been one of the most vocal supporters of “Free the Haggis,” a pressure movement urging the United States to drop their lung ban. In 2015, Massie viciously decried the efforts of companies like Macsween to develop lung-free haggis for export.
“Mammon is a harsh mistress, right enough, but there are some acts of national abasement in the pursuit of exports that are too humiliating to be worth the lucre. This is one of them,” he wrote.