Petition launched ahead of World Cup for US to end 55-year food ban - despite recipe including lungs
Topics: Scotland, Food and Drink, Football, Sport
Callum Jones
Featured Image Credit: Dustin Satloff/Getty Images
Topics: Scotland, Food and Drink, Football, Sport
The US has been urged to unban a food item which has been outlawed in the country since 1971 ahead of the World Cup.
FIFA's soccer World Cup is just a matter of weeks away with 48 teams set to compete across the US, Mexico and Canada for football glory.
One of the nations heading stateside are Scotland, who are competing in their first World Cup since 1998.
Ahead of Scotland facing Haiti in their opening match in Boston on June 14, the 'Tartan Army' is calling on US officials to bring back haggis, which has been banned in America since for the past 55 years.
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Haggis, a savoury Scottish pudding, is made up of minced sheep's heart, liver, and lungs mixed with onions and is the national dish of Scotland.
Simon Howie, a butcher and supplier of haggis in Scotland, has teamed up with journalist Gordon Smart in a petition to 'make haggis legal again'.
Scottish fans traveling to the US for the World Cup are being handed flags emblazoned with 'no haggis, no party'.
Speaking of the campaign, Howie said: “Scotland football fans are widely recognised as the best in the world, and they are about to make the trip of a lifetime, but they’ll be doing it without access to their national dish. With such warmth and long-standing affinity between Americans and Scots we’re appealing to the USA to embrace this delicious delicacy and Make Haggis Legal Again.”
Meanwhile, Smart added: "For Scotland fans, summer 2026 is going to be a trip we’ll never forget. We’ll have the flags, the songs and the scarves and if this petition has anything to do with it, we’ll have the haggis too.
“Simon Howie is fighting for every Scot and honorary Scot out there, so let’s get behind the campaign and make history on and off the pitch. Because after all, if there’s no haggis, there’s no party.”
A comedic campaign video has also dropped of a Scot struggling to get haggis through security checks at Glasgow Airport due to the fact it's illegal for the food item to be imported into the US.
Back in the 1970s, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) decided to ban the Scottish favorite having taken issue over one particular ingredient: sheep's lung.
Due to the ban, haggis is essentially an unknown to many Americans, with a 2003 study finding that a third of US citizens visiting Scotland thought haggis was an animal.
Close to a quarter of those involved believed they could even catch one.