The much-maligned deep-fried Mars bar is coming under attack again. Photograph: PA Photograph: Danny Lawson/PA

by Chitra Ramaswamy

Birthplace of the World Famous Deep Fried Mars Bar,” the banner announces. It’s vast, proud, and under threat.

Welcome to The Carron Fish Bar in Stonehaven, Aberdeenshire, where 20 years ago – so the legend has it – two pupils from the local academy challenged each other to eat a load of random battered stuff, resulting in the Scottish delicacy (or culinary embarrassment, depending on who you talk to) known as the deep-fried Mars bar.

Aberdeenshire council refuses to share The Carron’s pride and has demanded the banner’s removal. Lorraine Watson, the Carron’s owner, remains unapologetic and tells me the deep-fried Mars bar tastes “like a warm millionaire’s shortbread” and is going nowhere.

The Carron currently sells 150-200 bars a week. “The council are now saying it’s the banner that’s the problem, not the fact that it’s about deep-fried Mars bars,” she says. “Well I’m sorry, but there are thousands who come here from all over the world to buy one. It’s an icon for Stonehaven.”

Does she think the deep-fried Mars bar, which boasts its own Wikipedia page and has been featured on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, has been unfairly blamed for Scotland’s record on obesity and ill-health?

“Yes,” she says. “It’s really for tourists.

And everything is bad for you if you do it enough. People come here to go to Dunnotter Castle and then have a deep-fried Mars bar as a wee treat. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.”

Read on via ‘I’ve got judges who love them’: in defence of the deep-fried Mars bar | Chitra Ramaswamy | Life and style | The Guardian.