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While Canadians are allowed to eat most parts of a sheep, lungs remain in a federally verboten category that includes genitals, udders, spleens and “black gut.”

The lung ban is mirrored in the United States, where authorities have similarly mandated since 1971 that “livestock lungs shall not be saved for use as human food.”

Macsween of Edinburgh was forced to circumvent this regulation by making their Canadian haggis with sheep heart, rather than sheep lung. The company also needed to have their facilities approved by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.

“It’s as close as we can get to the original recipe using different meats, because the oats and spice mix are the same,” Macsween commercial director David Rae told U.K. media this week.

The North American lung bans have been a persistent irritant in the United Kingdom, where truckloads of offal are eaten every year without incident.

If there was a reason behind the 1971 lung bans, they appear to have been lost to history.

No mention of offal exists in Canadian parliamentary records at the time of the ban. In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration reportedly banned the organs without so much as assessing their safety. Given the tiny U.S. market for edible lungs at the time, it was likely deemed to be not worth the trouble.

Photo by Mike Hensen/The London Free Press/QMI

A 2014 article in Scotland’s Daily Record claimed the bans were motivated by trumped-up fears over “scrapie,” a degenerative illness that is a close cousin of mad cow disease.