EVEN if you don’t understand a skinking word of the Address To A Haggis, most of us can at least appreciate the spirit of the poem, which will again be recited at Burns Night suppers across Scotland and around the world on Tuesday. This national dish has both historical and nutritional value.
Warm-reekin’ haggis has been providing Scots with sustenance for so long, we can’t even remember where we got the recipe . . . the Vikings might have brought it over, but some say it was passed down from the ancient Greeks via the Romans.
“Haggis contains a good mix of proteins, iron and fibre from the meat and the oatmeal, ” confirms Dr Ann Payne, head of nutrition and dietetics at Glasgow Caledonian University. “It is high in animal fat, but when you have it with neeps and tatties, you’ve got quite a solid, healthy meal.”
Neeps, of course, only became a common field crop in the early 1700s. And, while the turnip has never been celebrated in verse, it was the first root vegetable, and the first vitamin C, made widely available to many Scots. Tatties became a vital staple shortly afterwards, saving the poorest Highlanders and islanders from economic ruin and fatal malnutrition before the Clearances and the potato blight took their toll. Throw these ingredients together with cullen skink, cranachan and oatcakes, and your Burns Night supper – most people’s most “Scottish” meal of the year – might also be your most well-balanced. Traditionallyspeaking, and as oxymoronic as it sounds, there is such a thing as a good Scottish diet.
“The unhealthy Scottish diet is in some ways a 20th century phenomenon, ” says Payne. “If you go back 200 years or so, Scots were living on a very healthy diet of local produce. Lots of oats, root vegetables, kale, dairy products, fish, a bit of meat, berries in the summer. And they were living to a good old age.”
Not Robert Burns, obviously, who died in 1796 at the age of 37. “True, ” says Payne, “but he was a strapping lad when he was alive, and it wasn’t his diet that killed him.”
In his day, besides his lyrical affection for haggis, Burns described porridge oats as “chief of Scotia’s food”. His English contemporary Dr Samuel Johnson – who was no particular fan of Scotland (“Though God made it, ” he once wrote, “God also made hell.”) – was prepared to concede the obvious benefits of the oat- heavy diet.
“Such food, ” he observed on one visit, “makes men strong like horses, and purges the brain of pedantry.”
In the mid-1980s, American scientists identified oatmeal as a kind of “miracle food”, containing soluble fibres which release slowly into the body, regulating the level of fats and sugars in the blood and reducing the risk of heart disease. That knowledge has gradually made porridge popular again, despite years of negative associations with prison-food. The slow energy-releasing properties of oats give them an ideal low score on the Glycemic Index – the “GI diet” being the fashionable health plan of the moment. And this week there was a rare positive dietary statistic to report in Scotland – porridge is now the UK’s second-favourite breakfast cereal. Around [pounds]79.6 million worth of oats are sold every year: a little less than Weetabix, a lot more than Corn Flakes. Admittedly, much of that is packaged into synthetic, microwaveable, snappy-titled brands like Oatso Simple.
“I’m very glad that more people seem to be eating porridge oats, ” says Maisie Steven, author of The Good Scots Diet. “They do terrible things to it these days, cooking it in the microwave and mixing it with sugar and tinned fruit, but it’s a good start. A great deal of money has been spent on providing schoolchildren with free fruit and that’s great, but it’s a bit ineffectual if the rest of their diet is pure junk. I would rather see them get a bowl of free porridge and milk in the mornings.”
Steven originally wrote The Good Scots Diet: Where Did It Go? as an academic report in 1985, when she was Payne’s distant predecessor as lecturer in nutrition and dietetics at Glasgow Caledonian (then The Queen’s College). It has only recently been re-edited and reprinted, without the despairing subtitle, for the modern healthbook market. As much a study of social history as nutrition, her book also identifies the late 18th century – after the dark days of endemic malnutrition, when many Highlanders had struggled to survive on nettles, grass, snails and cattle blood, but before the Clearances, the blight, and the industrial revolution – as the high point of Scottish eating habits. The Scots of circa 1800 were, says Steven, “exceptionally vigorous, with an infinitely healthier diet than we are used to today”.
Don’t go thinking it was a golden age.
“There was still an unacceptably small range of fruit and vegetables available, ” she says. “There was scurvy, and typhoid, and rhuematic fevers, which killed a lot of children. [Modern doctors have suggested that Robert Burns himself died of bacterial endocardtis, a heart-weakening after-effect of the rheumatic fever he suffered as a child. ] But the survivors tended to be incredibly hardy.”
Source materials bear this out. The statistical accounts taken by local clergymen and magistrates of the period record Perthshire farmers working 14-hour days without complaint at the age of 103.
“Generally speaking, we live longer now, ” says Steven, “but there are amazing stories from that time of millers and crofters still going strong at a remarkable old age.”
Steven has equated the Scots of that period to the Himalayan Hunza tribes studied by Sir Robert McCarrison in the 1930s – indigenous people living long, healthy lives on a similar and limited range of local wholegrain cereals, dairy products and small amounts of meat and fish.
“Obviously that traditional Scottish diet was still deficient in certain ways, and very boring. But with the immense choice and variety available today, think how much we could be improving on it.”
Any expert will tell you that diet is a complex issue. “And in Scotland, ” notes Payne, “it can be a particularly emotional subject.” Modern Scottish eating habits are creating palpable health problems – over 50per cent of the population is overweight, one in eight people admitted to Scottish hospitals is undernourished; and the Scottish Executive, the World Health Organisation, and independent researchers seem entirely disunited over root causes and solutions. But whether Scots eat too much salt, fat and sugar for behavioral, educational or economic reasons, the diet that has made so many “fat, toothless and constipated” (as Steven puts it in her book) isn’t Scottish at all. But for historical and political flux, we’d still be living on whatever produce we could grow or kill for ourselves.
“Scotland is like a lot of societies, where indigenous people could eat very well on local produce, ” says Dr David Morrison, an NHS consultant in public health medicine for Greater Glasgow. “Certainly we have the basis of a healthy diet with the food available to us – the root vegetables, game, fresh fish, oats and so on. And in some ways it’s the loss of those foods from our diet that has done us damage.”
Most agree with Steven that “the great downward spiral” began with the industrial revolution, when Scotland’s rural population was cleared out of the Highlands and packed into cities, living and working in poverty, consuming cheap factory products rich in refined flour and imported sugar.
“That’s basically when we forgot our traditional eating habits, ” says Payne, “and developed our taste for refined carbohydrates.”
“When conditions were that bad, ” explains Morrison, “and the working day often involved very heavy physical labour, people would eat any food that could get the calories in and the energy up. Nowadays, what we expect from our diet has completely changed – we’re living longer and we’re worried about chronic diseases, hence the concern over calorie intake.”
Morrison argues that any serious change in the Scottish diet will have to happen “with considerable difficulty, in a marketplace”.
But if porridge oats can make a profit for the modern food industry then there must be some hope. The increasing popularity of organic produce, home gardening and farmers’ markets are all small positive signs.
And last year the G1 Group – the corporate chain of Glasgow style bars and restaurants – opened their new venture The Bothy, with a menu full of basic, classic native dishes such as Scotch broth and barefit stovies.
“We open 10 restaurants a year, ” says executive chef Gary Maclean. “We were looking for something different. And believe it or not, a Scottish restaurant in Scotland was almost a novelty. But the turnover has been quite dramatic. I think you’ll be seeing more places like it, more people shouting about how good Scottish food can be. We’ve got some of the best stuff in the world.”
Maisie Steven, long since retired from academia to her Perthshire home, says a return to a good Scots diet is entirely possible – “the ingredients and the recipes haven’t really been forgotten”.
“The irony, ” she says, “is that we seem to eat best when we don’t really have a choice.
The two healthiest times for the Scots diet were before the industrial age, and straight after the second world war when sweets and flour were rationed. Now we have all this variety and we don’t seem to be able to make good use of it. ” So next Tuesday night let’s toast the menu as well as the man. May ye live braw and weel on traditional Scottish food, and langer than poor deed Rabbie.
The Good Scots Diet is available now from Argyll Press, (6.99)
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