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Recently I’ve been corresponding with a gentleman from Memphis, Tennessee, who asked me: “Why are there no restaurants with Scots cuisine?” It’s a good question, but one which can be quite easily answered. Americans reading this might want to have a go themselves. Would you ever go to one? Haggis and oatcakes and porridge aren’t particularly exciting. Most people, when they go to a restaurant, want to eat something that tastes nice.

There is, of course, a lot more to Scottish food than offal and cattlefeed. We have some of the best beef in the world; excellent lamb, game, and seafood; more fresh vegetables than you can shake a green leafy stick at; and there are more things that can be done with whisky or redcurrant sauces than you can imagine. But the popular perception is that we’re all a bunch of skirt-wearing haggis-eaters who can’t talk properly (thank you, Robbie Burns), and popular perceptions are what keep restaurants open.

Incidentally, for the benefit of anybody who hasn’t tried it, haggis is fantastic. It’s just a spicy mince made with the cheaper cuts of meat. There’s nothing wrong with it unless you look at the ingredients list.

I was in Linlithgow yesterday, and it reminded me that the last time I was there, I made a fool of myself in a pub. Not in that way. I’d ordered the chicken Balmoral, which was listed on the menu as “chicken breast stuffed with Chieftain haggis”. “Chieftain haggis” doesn’t mean anything, but the haggis in question was delicious—rich and moist, perfectly complementing the chicken it was served with.

So naturally I’d asked the waitress who their supplier was. She ummed and ahhed for a while and tried to avoid the question before admitting that it was Grant’s. That’s the cheap stuff that you buy in cans in lower-end supermarkets. And it makes perfect sense—for stuffing into a chicken breast you want something reasonably cheap and filling, with some added moisture to make sure that it fills all the gaps. Using artisanal haggis from an upscale butchers would have been a waste of time. The most expensive haggis in the world is still composed of the bits of pig’s lung that nobody else wanted to eat. It doesn’t help to get pretentious about it.

Sometimes there’s a case for splashing out on the expensive locally-sourced foodstuffs, and sometimes there isn’t.

I’ve waxed lyrical in the past on the value of locally sourced food. I like it because it tastes good, but I’ have no illusions that it tastes good because it’s local. The air in Scotland doesn’t magically turn cheap pigs into premium specimens. We don’t have special soil. And it’s not as if the farmers have been trained from birth with specialist farmers’ knowledge, any more than anywhere else—half the people at the Edinburgh Farmer’s Market are accountants from Milton Keynes who woke up one morning a few years ago and, faced with the prospect of another daily commute, thought “fuck this, I’m going to run a farm instead”.

I’m pretty sure that the difference is that local producers actually give a damn about what they’re producing. They’re smaller companies run by people who eat food, not by Human Resources and Marketing departments. (Marketing employees don’t eat food. They’re fed a rudimentary bio-nutritive paste that sustains their organic systems during the company-sanctioned maintenance cycle.) As a result, you’re getting food from someone who cares, which is far more important than where it’s come from.

Or have I missed something?

We’ll be talking a lot more about local-sourcing over the next couple of weeks. Wednesday’s episode covers Part One of our epic journey into the Fife Diet. What will we find therein? Find out on Wednesday.