The UK government is making a fresh bid to overturn a decades-long US import ban on traditional Scottish haggis.
Environment Secretary Owen Paterson will raise the issue with senior officials from the Obama administration this week.
Scottish producers had asked Mr Paterson to take action when he visited the Royal Highland Show in Edinburgh earlier this month.
Haggis imports have been outlawed in the US since 1971.
The ban was put in place because the country's food standards agency prohibits sheep lungs - one of the key ingredients of haggis - in food products.
What is in a traditional haggis?
Sheep's stomach stuffed with diced sheep's liver, lungs and heart, oatmeal, onion, suet and seasoning
Vegetarian versions can be made with mushrooms or beans
Often served with neeps 'n' tatties - mashed swede and potatoes
The US visit comes as Scotch Beef is set to make a return to menus in America for the first time in almost 20 years.
It follows a move by US officials to reopen the American market to EU beef and other bovine products, following a ban put in place in the 1990s over concerns that BSE could infect the human food chain.
Mr Paterson's visit is the latest attempt by British politicians to get haggis back on American menus.
Several years ago, Scottish Rural Affairs Secretary Richard Lochhead raised the issue with the US, but the ban remained in place.
Mr Paterson will hold talks with his US opposite number, Tom Vilsack, in Washington on Monday, in an attempt to open up a market which is potentially worth millions of pounds to Scottish producers.
The haggis market is already worth about £15m in the UK alone.
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 worthy o' a grace
As lang's my arm.
The groaning trencher there ye fill,
Your hurdies like a distant hill,
Your pin wad help to mend a mill
In time o need,
While thro your pores the dews distil
Like amber bead.
His knife see rustic Labour dight,
An cut you up wi ready slight,
Trenching your gushing entrails bright,
Like onie ditch;
And then, O what a glorious sight,
Warm-reekin, rich!
Then, horn for horn, they stretch an strive:
Deil tak the hindmost, on they drive,
Till a' their weel-swall'd kytes belyve
Are bent like drums;
The auld Guidman, maist like to rive,
'Bethankit' hums.
Is there that owre his French ragout,
Or olio that wad staw a sow,
Or fricassee wad mak her spew
Wi perfect scunner,
Looks down wi sneering, scornfu view
On sic a dinner?
Poor devil! see him owre his trash,
As feckless as a wither'd rash,
His spindle shank a guid whip-lash,
His nieve a nit;
Thro bloody flood or field to dash,
O how unfit!
But mark the Rustic, haggis-fed,
The trembling earth resounds his tread,
Clap in his walie nieve a blade,
He'll make it whissle;
An legs an arms, an heads will sned,
Like taps o thrissle.
Ye Pow'rs, wha mak mankind your care,
And dish them out their bill o fare,
Auld Scotland wants nae skinking ware
That jaups in luggies:
But, if ye wish her gratefu prayer,
Gie her a Haggis
“If you trust in yourself, and believe in your dreams, and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”
GMOs - ok
Carcinogens - ok
Growth hormones & antibiotics - ok
Pesticide residues - ok
E. coli - ok
Salmonella - ok
Ammonia soaked pink sludge masquerading as hamburger - ok
Sheep's lungs - not ok
WTF do the sheep in Scotland smoke, that their lungs aren't fit for American consumption??
Shit, we barely test any of our beef for mad cow (about 1%, if that), yet the USDA misleads the American public into thinking our meat supply is safe.
Seriously, do sheep's lungs carry contagion of some order worse than the nasties we eat every day over here?
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
~ Carl Sagan
Why oh why do people have to make lights of such an important subject? I suppose humour reins.
For Christianity, by identifying truth with faith, must teach-and, properly understood, does teach-that any interference with the truth is immoral. A Christian with faith has nothing to fear from the facts
The UK had a mad cow outbreak to begin with because they fed sheep entrails to cows. (feeding entrails to a vegetarian species is disgusting on the face of it. )
I'd keep the Haggis ban as well as a ban on any sheep or cow products from the UK for the time being.
Crisis in Britain
BSE was 'almost certainly' (Kimberlin, 1992) caused by feeding cattle ground up sheep infected with an ovine spongiform encephalopathy known as scrapie (Modie, 1993). In modern agribusiness, protein concentrates (or meat and bone meal, both euphemisms for "trimmings that originate on the killing floor, inedible parts and organs, cleaned entrails, fetuses..." (Ensminger, 1990)) are fed to dairy cows to improve milk production and most other livestock as well (Flaherty, 1993; Mad, 1990). The recycling of the remains of infected cows into cattle feed has probably led to the British epidemic's explosive spread (Collee, 1993). An editorial in the British Medical Journal described BSE as resulting "from an accidental experiment on the dietary transmissibility of prion disease between sheep and cows" (Harrison, 1992). A subsequent "accidental experiment" of this kind, with humans, probably occurred in England in the late 1980's when meat contaminated with BSE entered the food chain (Harrison, 1992). The result of this experiment is awaited, "as we live through the incubation period" over the next decades (Harrison, 1992).
Sue U wrote:
The grasshoppers seem okay, but I don't like the look of those fat beetles.
“If you trust in yourself, and believe in your dreams, and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”
