The announcement has fortuitous timing, given that today is Robbie Burns Day — a celebration of the Scottish poet and day of traditional haggis consumption. But the Scottish dish isn’t the only international cultural delicacy that’s had trouble finding its way into United States. The USDA has a lengthy list of foods that aren’t allowed into the country because of environmental and safety reasons, and others are banned from a state-by-state basis.

What other exotic foodstuffs won’t you find in a grocery store near you? (If you thought the prospect of eating sheep offal was troubling, try “maggot cheese”):

Fugu:

For centuries, the Japanese have been consuming the liver of this odd-looking puffer fish. It can be turned into delicious foie gras, and laden with healthy omega-3 amino acids. Unfortunately, it’s also laced with tetrodoxin, a neurotoxin that accumulates within the fish and can paralyze or kill the person who eats it. Only one-third of wild fugu fish carry the poison, which can usually be cleansed by cleaning, but it still regularly claims victims and, even in small amounts, numbs the lips of the person who eats it. The fish is widely (if illegally) consumed in Japan, a fact that the emergence of non-poisonous breeds of the fish has yet to change.

Casu marzu:

This soft cheese is a delicacy on the Italian island of Sardinia, with a highly pungent smell, near-liquid texture, and a taste similar to very ripe gorgonzola. More excitingly, it also contains thousands of tiny writhing maggots. The cheese (also known as “maggot cheese”) is made when the critters are introduced into pecorino, and allowed to eat their way through the cheese’s fat, thereby enhancing fermentation. While the maggots are still alive, the cheese is consumed as a spread on a slice of bread (Diners are advised to cover their eyes to avoid the jumping larvae). The cheese has been banned in the European Union (and the United States) because it can cause vomiting, diarrhea — and because of the damage maggot mouthhooks wreak on stomach linings. If this whets your appetite, and you’d like to see the cheese in German-language action, check out this clip:

Wild beluga caviar:

The wild sturgeon, whose black eggs have become the cliche luxury food product, isn’t doing terribly well these days. In the Caspian Sea, where much of the world’s caviar is produced, the fish is imperiled by a pollution, overfishing, and a disappearing habitat. In 2005, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has banned the sale of wild caviar, which has helped build a burgeoning caviar aquaculture industry (particularly in California), but left gourmet caviar fans disappointed. (And. as always during a recession, our thoughts are with the caviar fans.)

Salumi (high quality European salami, prosciutto and headcheese):

The U.S. only allows the import of artisan meats that have been killed at U.S.-certified slaughterhouses. This means that many of the best meats in Europe — produced in small villages, and old, small slaughterhouses — aren’t available on this side of the Atlantic. The solution for many chefs: Smuggle them into the country. As Chef Ray Knight described in a recent Wall Street Journal article, he snuck in “pork shoulder and fennel-pollen salami” inside a stainless-steel water bottle. With the impending arrival of full-body scanners at airports, it’s a strategy that isn’t likely to work for much longer, depriving American meat lovers, chefs seeking to create their own perfect salami, and those of us who enjoy a good pork-shoulder smuggling story.

Horse meat:

The selling of horsemeat is not only taboo, it’s illegal in California and Illinois. While the meat, which is tender and low-in-fat, is widely consumed in many other countries — at street-side vendors in Austria, in Swiss fondue, and as a diet staple in many central Asian countries, for example — your craving for horse tacos isn’t going to be easy to satisfy in ban-less states either. The last horse slaughterhouse in the United States closed in 2007, and, if you happen to go public with your appetite, the peer pressure alone will likely turn you vegetarian.

Salon spoke to Ray over the phone about Indian food’s long march to popularity, the most America-ready Indian dishes — and why some ethnic foods just can’t get any respect.

First of all: Is Indian food really going to the “next big thing” in American food?

Yes and no. Yes, in the sense that it’s going to become both more popular and more prestigious. No, in the sense that Indian food is not going to be as popular and prestigious as Italian food until 2065.

Why 2065?

I say 2065 somewhat arbitrarily, but that’s about 100 years after the first wave of Indian immigrants came to the U.S., after the civil rights movement — which forced the U.S. to change the immigration laws from racial quotas to national quotas. Since then we have had substantial Asian immigration, and a substantial stream of Indian immigration.

But why will it take so long for Indian food to reach that level of popularity?

If you look at Italian immigration to the U.S., it mostly began in the 1880s and Italian American food started climbing up in prestige in the 1980s, about 100 years later. But Indian immigration also has to continue up to certain a point. There are about 2.7 million Indians in the U.S. — about half a million in New York City — and the culture won’t be able to insinuate itself into everyday culture until it’s in the range of 20 million people. Indians have to be partly as ubiquitous as Italians.

When immigrants come into the country in large numbers, their food first becomes visible in the ghettos, then outside of the ghetto, but they don’t become popular to the larger non-insider audience until almost two generations later when the ghetto has disappeared. Also, the more Indians come into the country, the more Indians will get into the restaurant business (currently many Indian restaurants are run by non-Indians, like Bangladeshis).

If population is what matters, shouldn’t Mexican food be the new Italian food?

If just numbers mattered Mexican food should be both ubiquitous and prestigious in America — but it’s very difficult for it to establish prestige in the U.S. because a substantial number of Mexican immigrants are poor. For Indian food to reach that kind of ubiquity, those 20 million Indians can’t just be poor, because then you might have popularity but not prestige.

One of the advantages of Indian immigration is that a substantial number of them are professionals. About 30 percent to 50 percent of Indian immigrants have substantial cultural capital, and many are Anglophones. The prestige of Indian immigrants gets linked to prestige of Indian food. Though, of course, there are also Indians in less professional fields.

How can you figure out how “prestigious” a food is?

I can take Zagat’s metric of average price for a meal, and add all that up for each identifiable cohort. You see Mexican restaurants falling in the bottom cluster. What’s quite remarkable is that Japanese is the most expensive type of restaurant in New York City, which is very unusual. One person also quoted in the Associated Press article, Andrew F. Smith, editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink of America, who does terrific work, says that Indian food is soon going to be like Japanese food was in the ’80s. But Japanese popularity comes from a different source. There are few Japanese people in the U.S. – which makes it a foreign food, not an ethnic food.

What’s the difference between foreign and ethnic food?

“Foreign food” tends to be more prestigious. “Ethnic food” tends to be cheap. Most people would consider expensive ethnic food to be a contradiction.

Where do other types of food fall into the prestige rankings?

I want to point out that I’m not judging these foods when I say they’re less prestigious — it’s a measure — but Mexican, Tex-Mex and soul food falls in the bottom of the rankings. Indian food falls in the middle cluster with Greek, Spanish and Vietnamese. Indian food is in the middle partly because of this bifurcated nature of Indian immigration.

But don’t some foods become trendy because they get taken up by hipsters?

Sometimes, precisely because a kind of food isn’t cool in the mainstream it will become cool in hipster subcultural groups. Something that’s perceived as inferior can break through to the top. That’s very interesting to watch — because that’s happening with Vietnamese and Latin-American food.

We try to dismiss fashion, but in a city as omnivorous as New York and in American big-city culture, we acquire cultural capital by going slightly against the norm. In New York, for example, you saw that with bloggers really playing up the Red Hook food vendors.

Do you think blogs and the democratization of food writing are going to change the way certain ethnic foods become popular?

Yes, I think they will. This is the great thing about American culture — especially with the new media. The new media is much more democratic, and it gives these people, called consecrators, an audience. People have always trumpeted rare ethnic foods but now they have a byline. I think this democratization will probably lead to an increased focus on regional food, like Bengali food, as opposed to broader Indian food.

Do you think there’s any specific kind of food that you think is poised to become a signature dish for Indian food in America? Like tacos for Mexican food?

There are a few contenders. There’s a restaurant called Aamchi Pao in New York’s West Village that interprets a dish called vada pao as sliders on a bun. Then there are wraps, like rotis and naans, and chaats. They’re portable foods and they don’t take a lot of skill to make.

Will Indian restaurants need to Americanize their food in order to make it achieve widespread popularity?

The format of vada pao, for example, is already in some ways very Americanized. It’s already finger food, on-the-run food. These are idioms that Americans understand. But the food can’t be over-Americanized, or it will lose that cutting-edge element. Indian restaurants want to build bridges to Americans but they always want to build barriers.

Do you think the spiciness will have to be decreased?

I think it’s happening. There’s less spice, increased sweetness — but not completely. Those barriers still have to exist.

Christmas is important, but Butchering, that four-day event directly after, is sacred. This is not an unusual thing where I’m from in rural Pennsylvania, although it seems families scale back more and more over the years. We definitely have: We no longer make lard; we don’t save and scrape out the intestines for sausage, buying premade casings instead; we don’t boil down the bones to make scrapple, that delightfully Dutchy, suspicious meat by-product. Family tradition is important, but it only goes so far when dealing with us practical Pennsylvania Germans. We buy our chicken at the store now, like most other Americans.

But the cow and the three pigs, whichever makes it out of the stall first, these are the constant, even more essential than the overabundance of dessert and the annual scuffle over how much coriander to put in the sausage. Five days straight of family members coming and going from my grandparents’ crooked log-cabin farmhouse, of endless piles of dishes to be washed, of grabbing handfuls of cookies with hands only perfunctorily wiped on greasy, hand-stitched aprons. It’s the time to spend time with cousins, aunts and uncles seen too rarely; a special holiday disguised as everyday life. The point is that we get a yearful of meat out of it, even as it is beside the point.

I’ve never made it out to the barnyard early on Killing Day: I’ve tried twice now, and each time get out there to meet my uncle and a cousin-in-law or two. They pick up their guns, and I say, “Um … I’ll just meet you in the garage for the skinning.” Maybe next year.

I haven’t quite figured out why I want be in that barnyard, rather than contenting myself with the meat wrapping like the other girls. Partially it’s because my uncle, the last farmer in the family, is getting older and no one in my generation is stepping up to the plate; partially it’s because I feel this is a rare opportunity to really see where my food comes from, from start to finish. Part of it is the individualism that’s been bred into me, a stubborn Pennsylvania Dutch self-reliance as ingrained as my polite-yet-distant approach to strangers, my repressed Protestantism. There’s a certain allure in saying, with certainty, “Yes, in case of the apocalypse, I can feed myself.”

It’s more than that, too. I take joy in pulling a white lumpy package of family-farm meat out of the freezer, the same way I take joy in the scarf my sister knit me, the journal I hand-bound. It’s about creating something I can use, with my own hands, and finding meaning in the process. In this way, butchering is another form of craftsmanship, just … bloody.

Back in the garage, we start at the hooves, slicing a shallow ring around the first knuckle and then drawing a line down the back of the leg toward the rump. The first time I skinned a cow, slicing and peeling, I overcame my kneejerk revulsion to delight in thinking, so this is why leather feels the way it does. There are five of us, one on each limb, with my uncle tending to the head. We haul the animal up by its back legs with a winch, finish skinning, and then stand around and munch freshly baked cookies while my uncle eviscerates it. It’s family bonding time.

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I went through a period where I was embarrassed to mention that my family butchers its own meat, knowing it marked me as the country girl I am, thinking civilized society would be shocked at an educated girl being part of so base a process. But in the past few years, after moving out and discovering what I’d left behind, I decided that the people who are shocked don’t have any business picking up those Saran-wrapped Styrofoam trays of beef at the grocery store. This is the reality of eating meat: The animal has to be killed and butchered. If we can do it ourselves, have control over the process, all the better — especially if we can make some traditions along the way.

The traditions pile up alongside the freezer packs. As steak-cutting and hamburger-grinding happens in the basement, there is an equal contingent of wrappers directly upstairs in the kitchen. We divvy up the pans of pork chops and hamburger into three- or four-person servings, passing them around to be swaddled in white freezer paper. The younger kids rip masking tape, and the youngest draw and learn to write on the packages. We mark the year, the family it’s for, and what’s inside. Often, someone gets forgetful while wrapping, so it’s not unusual to find later that year a lumpy package in the freezer that just says, “BEEF SURPRISE.”

The first of my generation to get married, my cousin Amanda, got a special treat her first Butchering as a newlywed. My aunts wrote recipes in Sharpie on the backs of the wrapping paper. On a package of round steak came a list of vegetables for beef stew; on a pack of hamburger, the recipe for stroganoff. We write notes to each other, to be found months from now: “Hi Aunt Linda!” or “LARGE T-bone, for when Susan and Ben are visiting!” Every time I pull a pack of sausage out of my freezer and recognize my aunt Debbie’s handwriting, it’s a reminder of who we are for each other.

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“Well … what do you think?” Uncle Dennis asked, rotating a large hunk of cow and squinting in concentration.

“Um,” I said.

Last year, Dennis, my godfather, lent me his copy of “Basic Butchering of Livestock and Game,” because I was so interested the year before. I called myself his apprentice, helped him haul sides of pork and decide where to cut the T-bones. I had no idea what I was doing, and Dennis, for all the times he’d done this, was not an expert. Once a year is not often enough to learn as involved a trade as butchering, and he has his crops and his livestock always on his mind. Aunt Debbie, Dennis’ wife, confided that the night before Killing Day, Dennis stayed up late at the kitchen table, poring over the diagrams, trying to memorize where to slip the knife, reminding himself how to avoid nicking the intestines.

We wound up with odd-looking hunks and tried to come up with purposes for them. My mother, checking in on us, said laughing, “Cows don’t actually have those dotted lines, do they?” When in doubt, we passed bits onward to the small army of aunts, uncles and cousins cutting these parts into chunks for grinding. What we could, we ran through a bandsaw, flecks of pink tallow spitting out. It is all unglamorous, perplexing, and makes me love my uncle even more than I already do. He steps up to do this vague thing because we need him to.

The book made even gutting seem dull, full of phrases like, “Carefully tie off the bung.” More interesting to me were the notes my uncle scrawled, trying to refresh his knowledge from 360 days ago and the varying sausage-recipe cards that fell out as I flipped through. This year we tried maple sausage in addition to the standard batch; one year we tried filling the rusty metal smokehouse with hickory wood. We fry up a few test patties when we think we have the sausage mixed properly, pass around bites, and uncles chew thoughtfully before commenting, “Could use more black pepper.” That first bite of sausage, hardly three days out of the animal, is my favorite bite of meat the whole year through, astoundingly fresh and flavorful, familiar spices tasting like childhood Sunday mornings. I am not much of a meat connoisseur, but that bit of fresh sausage alone is enough to keep me from vegetarianism.

I carefully replaced the recipe cards and returned the book, completely overwhelmed at how much knowledge goes into a hamburger. Knowing I will ask to borrow the book again in another 11 months, just as Dennis will pull it back out.

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I don’t know who will take over butchering in my own generation. That it might die off is unthinkable, which is why I keep thinking I need to step up. Without a real farmer, though, we would have to buy the animals from someone else, and small family-owned farms are increasingly rare.

I keep toying with the idea of apprenticing on the farm with my uncle, because while I know how difficult living off the land is, I know I don’t truly understand it. But I’m conflicted about being the one to actually make that life choice. My family and the farm are precious to me, even as I live 1,200 miles away from them, and Butchering is the most productive of family reunions. But there are so many things I want to do in my life, and even if learning how to butcher is one of them, I don’t think I’m ready to give up the rest. I juggle what I have made for myself, my work and my education, with my birthright. I am caught between the progression of time and the static halt to it that tradition brings, and I don’t know how to see my way out.

I am rarely on the family farm, growing in the larger world outside our valley, but when I am home, I am ruled by tradition. I submit joyfully. I want to grow older with my cousins always gathering the way we have, with their children learning to write on the stacks of white-wrapped meat, with cows always in the barn and snow on the sledding hill, with always more dessert than we can possibly eat. I go away for the rest of the year, but I want to always come back this one week, for this one sacred act, to replenish our freezers and bond over the dishwashing. And I want always to come across a happy note from a cousin jotted on a steak in the back of my freezer and laugh delightedly in the heat of July, reminded of the tether that holds me to that valley, oddly thankful it takes the form of meat.

Photo by Kristen Zeiber