US To Lift 21-Year Ban On Haggis 35
Stuffed gut lovers rejoice! Haggis is about to return to the US. The daunting dish was banned out of health fears 21 years ago during the middle of the BSE (mad-cow disease) crisis. "It was a silly ban which meant a lot of people have never tasted the real thing," said Margaret Frost, of the Scottish American Society in Ohio. "We have had to put up with the US version, which is made from beef and is bloody awful."
Re:Because McDonalds burgers are so much nicer! (Score:3, Informative)
Am I right in thinking you don't eat kidneys or liver either?
No, you are not. Liver is eaten, but kidneys I think end up in dog food.
Many organ meats are high in cholesterol, and they tend to be looked down upon as something only country folk might eat because they need to use every part of the animal or something.
The original ban (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Is it really cheap? (Score:3, Informative)
Margaret Thatcher came to power in the UK on promises to get rid of or at least simplify a lot of rules hampering business.
Among these according to her (government) were the regulations on how to treat offal from sheep so as to turn it into a valuable cattle (herbivores!) feed stock.
(I don't recall the exact numbers but you'll get the drift)
Instead of treating these leftovers at 200 degC for 2 hours it now became legal to process them at 120 degC for 1 hr.
The result was that scrapie mutated and became the curse we know as BSE.
Sickening is that scrapie can be eradicated, other countries keep it outside their borders but the UK has never been interested, really a bit like that MSRA bacteria in British hospitals.
Re:Because McDonalds burgers are so much nicer! (Score:3, Informative)
The kidneys have filtration units, but seen as a whole they are more a waste separator than a filter, nothing gets stuck in the kidney filters, they just extract metabolic waste from the bloodstream and dump it as urine.
Cooked meat is just mainly denaturated proteins, the same for kidneys and livers. Then again i'm not much for livers and kidneys either, i guess western culture is rather spoiled when it comes to nutrition.