Haggis

I know that everyone else already knows what haggis is, and if you’re someone that is willing to eat it or, heaven forbid, actually enjoys it, then you’re clearly at peace with the idea of eating the most revolting combination of foods encased inside of a stomach, which is more than I will ever be able to say for myself.

Explaining why I would never try haggis seems pretty unnecessary: it’s organs stuffed inside of an organ, and one is supposed to put it inside of their organ, and then wait for it to come out of another organ (at which point it is presumably recycled into more haggis. And honestly, the idea of eating human feces might be less horrific to me than the idea of eating actual haggis, so I think I’m okay with this last step). The closest I have ever come to eating haggis is that time that something got through our back fence and decimated all of Huxter's sheep that had been grazing there and left all of the sheep remains scattered across our field. I found a sheep stomach and threw a piece of bark at it to ascertain what state it was in. The stomach was rock hard and the bark bounced right off of it. A shiver of horror ran down my spine.

Admittedly, I don’t know anything about the Scottish; I have always imagined them to be a breed of Irish, only less culturally relevant (no one cares about Robert Burns). But now I’m really interested in them, because can you imagine the depths of depravity a race of people have to fall to before they consider eating haggis? I am always so surprised by man’s desire to live, because I know that if I were in a position where we had eaten all the (acceptably) edible parts of our sheep and still we were starving, and someone said, “What if we gathered up all these organs and put them inside of the stomach and ate that?” I would say: “No. I do not want to do that.” And if I starved to death, then so be it. Because sometimes (read: always) dying is better than living with the knowledge that you just ate haggis.

Thank God I cancelled my subscription to haggis alerts. I never knew it would hit so close to home.

Obviously I am not going to include a picture of actual haggis. I just looked at some and I thought I was going to vomit. I guess the least visceral--I mean that in the literal viscera way--comparison I can think of would be a swollen bagpipe. But then I remember that that bagpipe would be made out of a stomach, and instead of being filled with air, would be filled with minced organs. Like, body organs. Not the music organs. And that's just all too visceral for me.

Haggis is one of those foods that is so vile that some of my readers might think that I would have tonnes and tonnes to say about it. But I don't. In fact, I shouldn't have to say anything at all. The only people who need to be explaining themselves here are the people debased enough to actually eat this.

Poetry has one simple duty:

To speak of truth and to speak of beauty.

But because haggis is ugly, vile, and wrong

It is impossible to sing of it in song.