Ugh. I lived in Edinburgh for a year, and absolutely loved it. And it wasn't hard at all to find good food, both in terms of restaurants (there was even some decent Mexican food to be had) and produce/ingredients for home cooking. Food was in general expensive, but it's an expensive city in an expensive country.

But I must say that the diet of the average natives was depressing, consisting mainly of large amounts of ale or lager plus heavily salted deep fried whatever-you-can-think-of. I'm not a purist, I like these things, but in Scotland it was as if every day was State Fair day, foodwise.

There was also a near total absence of the nice accompaniaments that salvage Southern food nutritionally, i.e. all those great vegetable side dishes: greens, okra, field/crouder/black-eyed peas, corn, yams, etc. The primary side-dish in Scotland is chips. Sometimes turnips.

When Josh and I spent a couple of weeks in Scotland, we spent part of it with a wonderful sort of host-grandma, a retired Phys Ed teacher - let me repeat that for emphasis, she was a retired Physical Education teacher who still walked and played golf four days a week on a course that sat at what felt like a 70% angle and which really and truly served as a goat pasture on off days.

Liz, our hostess, cooked breakfast for us on mornings we were at her place. Breakfast consisted of four kinds of sausage, a wedge of toast, and a slice of mushroom. Liz ate this herself, every day, with weak coffee. She would butter her toast, butter the slice of mushroom and then, honest to the gods, butter her sausage. She was mystified that we didn't do the same.

Liz was also in fantastic shape. She was tiny but fit as a fiddle. She could have fought a bear and won.

Ya gotta go with the Deep Fried Moon Pie.