Though drovers and whisky-makers no longer roam modern-day Scotland, haggis is still eaten year-round – you can even buy it in tins or from fast food shops. Though haggis is Scotland’s national dish, similar foods – offal quickly cooked inside an animal’s stomach – have existed since ancient times.

Haggis, the national dish of Scotland, a type of pudding composed of the liver, heart, and lungs of a sheep (or other animal), minced and mixed with beef or mutton suet and oatmeal and seasoned with onion, cayenne pepper, and other spices. The mixture is packed into a sheep’s stomach and boiled. Haggis.

As weird as the concept of haggis is, it’s still meat. Meat is delicious, so it shouldn’t be too big a surprise that the legal iteration of haggis is actually pretty good. The haggis cuts easily enough, but also falls apart. This makes it very easy to eat.

The reason we eat haggis on Burns Night is likely down to the man himself, Robert Burns. In his lifetime, haggis would have been a highly nourishing and very cheap meal for poor families to prepare.

Haggis was invented by the English before being hijacked by Scottish nationalists, a leading food historian has claimed. Catherine Brown has discovered references to the dish in a recipe book dated 1615, The English Hus-wife by Gervase Markham.

It is not illegal to eat lungs in the US. It is illegal to sell them as food to people in the US. The reason for this is that lungs and other offal are internal organs that are prone to decay quickly and also prone to harbor disease. The regulatory bodies that make our food safe have deemed them too big of a risk.

The reasoning behind the USDA’s ban on lungs is generally couched in terms of food safety. Fluids—specifically, ones that might make you squeamish, including stomach fluids—sometimes make their way into the lungs of an animal during the slaughtering process.