][1]Earlier this week, a press release about the Enjoy England Awards for Excellence 2010 drooped into my inbox. Alongside the usual categories for best small tourist attraction, best B&B and so on was a new award called ‘Where else but England?’ This category is designed to showcase some of the more eccentric English attractions. Among the entrants are Lancastrian gravy wrestling and asparagus fortune telling in Evesham.
It got me thinking what Scottish food events might be thought of as eccentric. We don’t seem to go in for cheese-rolling, oyster-eating competitions or indeed gravy wrestling. The rest of the world might think that the annual Golden Spurtle Porridge World Championship is bizarre but it doesn’t seem that weird if you live here.
Of course, if you believe writers such as Ross Anderson writing in the UAE’s The National newspaper then many uniquely Scottish dishes are already strange enough and incoporating them into events won’t make things any weirder. I have stumbled across sporadic sightings of haggis hurling competitions but it is a sport that seems to be more enthusiastically pursued by Scots Americans than people living here.
If there was an Only in Scotland award that covered strange food-themed events, what would you nominate?