Maybe we should ban McDonalds in return? (Hmmm… not a bad idea, come to think of it…)

The importation of our national dish, the haggis, has been banned by the US Department of Agriculture since 1989, ostensibly as a response to the BSE crisis. So for nearly two decades, US consumers wishing to celebrate Burns Night (or indeed their Scottish heritage on any old night of the year) have had no choice but to track down a locally-sourced alternative.

Now the problem with this, of course, is that the haggis itself is a native species, found only in the high mountains of Scotland. This three-legged zoological oddity with its clockwise (or is it anti-clockise, I can never remember! Which side is the shorter leg on?) running pattern when escaping the herders, whose age-old tracking techniques have gone down in mythology, has never been successfully bred either overseas or in captivity. And there lies the rub. American-made haggis, disgracefully, is little more than an overblown sausage or pudding, a pale imitation of the real thing concocted from ingredients like oats, offal, onion, and seasonings, all boiled (would you believe) in a sheep’s stomach!

And there lies the confusion. The US food-safety zealots appear to have imposed this ban on the presumption that the real wild beast was the same as their domestically manufactured product! This outrage is thankfully being taken up by the Scottish government, who say they would “consider engaging the US government on its haggis export ban”. The famous haggis makers, McSweens, hope to see the ban overturned. “The market is massive because there are so many expat Scots there and once Americans try a good quality haggis, they can’t get enough of it, said Jo McSween.

So remember all this on the 25th, as you sit down to your free-range organic haggis (in Scotland) or butcher’s pudding (in the US). And whichever you can find, let’s all raise a toast to this Great Chieftain of dishes. Enjoy.