Plan B Forum

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.

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).

rubato wrote:How about a healthy snack?




yrs,
rubato

Sue U wrote:
The grasshoppers seem okay, but I don't like the look of those fat beetles.