Your haggis is fake: Why the signature dish of Robbie Burns Day is illegal in Canada
Haggis #Haggis
Today is Robbie Burns Day, the day when Canada’s millions of Scots and Scot-adjacents traditionally celebrate their ancient homeland of Caledonia. But as haggises are stabbed open across the country, they conceal a terrible secret. Three years ago, the National Post reported on why every haggis sold in Canada is technically not a haggis at all. That story is reprinted below.
For the first time in 46 years, Canadians can legally buy a made-in-Scotland haggis.
The imported haggis, unveiled in October, 2017 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 an official 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 “scrapie,” a degenerative illness that is a close cousin of mad cow disease.
“There is no scientific evidence to indicate that scrapie poses a risk to human health or indeed evidence that it has ever passed into our food chain,” claimed the Daily Record .
As a result, purists maintain that superstition alone is causing North Americans to be sold fraudulent, lung-free haggis.
A 2014 Telegraph editorial held that “haggis without lung is no haggis at all.” In late 2015, a Conservative politician complained to the U.K. House of Commons that their haggis producers were being forced to sell their product to the United States with “bits missing.”
Naturally, North America’s generation-long offal ban has spawned a vibrant black market for haggis.
Retailers in Scottish tourist areas report regularly encountering Americans who vow to smuggle their haggis purchases back home. In 2016, the food blog Food52 spoke to Lou, a New York haggis smuggler who hinted at collusion with U.S. Homeland Security.
As a guard handed Lou her passport he said “enjoy your sausage.” She reported “I realized later that he must have been Irish or Scots-American.”
The typical culinary criticism of lung-less haggis is that it’s too heavy and sausage-like, and lacks a nutty flavour.
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.
One of the more outlandish denouncements, however, belongs to the House of Lords, where Scotland’s Lord McColl of Dulwich proposed that legal haggis could help fat Americans lose some weight.
“The United States Government is depriving 24 million American Scots of this wholesome food, which satisfies hunger very much more than the junk food the Americans consume,” the former surgeon said in January, 2015 .
Pride aside, Scottish haggis makers have good reason to try and get their product across the Atlantic. The North American Scottish diaspora dwarfs the population of modern Scotland, and even niche demand could dramatically expand haggis production.
“There are some communities where the population is bigger than Scotland and to get haggis into them could make us millionaires, it could be our saviour,” Scottish butcher Lindsay Grieve told Britain’s ITV in 2015.
U.K. Environment Secretary Owen Paterson shouldered the hopes and dreams of Scottish butchers when, in 2015, he travelled to the United States promising to overturn the haggis ban.
The Americans would end up slackening import restrictions on Scottish lamb, but the lung ban remains. Similarly, in 2015 Canada opened the door to lung-free imports like the Macsween haggis when it rescinded a ban on British meat first imposed at the height of the mad cow disease crisis.
Although lungs from Canadian sheep cannot be eaten, their sale and transfer is legal, where they’re typically sold as pet food.
Thus, any enterprising haggis dealer can conceivably obtain a shipment on the sly and incorporate it into an illicit haggis.
One Canadian haggis vendor contacted by the National Post did not want his name used, but reported that he indeed had a contact for “authentic” haggis made with offal.
However, the vendor said he is never quite sure if the finished product includes sheep lungs or some other mix of sheep and cow organs — which he noted is probably as authentic as it gets. “Haggis was originally supposed to be made out of whatever you had left from the slaughterhouse floor,” he said.
Todd Panchuk is the owner of Edmonton’s Old Country Meat and Deli, a butcher that sells upwards of 5,000 pounds of haggis each year.
His haggises don’t contain lungs, but he says it’s purely a culinary decision and that much of the traditional obsession over lungs can be chalked up to “mythology.”
“Lung is terrible; there’s no way to make it good,” he said. “You can make a nice-tasting, popular haggis without putting absolutely all the organs that you can think of in there.”
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