WHEN IT COMES to matters of cuisine, far be it from me to disparage another nation's bad taste. My only criticism of foreign muck, in fact, is that it costs too much and tastes awful, particularly the Katmandu borscht flavored with yak butter.

I speak as a veteran of gastronomic disasters on six continents, during which I have had occasion to reflect that "globetrotting" can have a different, far darker meaning. Which is to say, before you tackle the jellied eels or the coquilles St. Jacques, locate and time the route to the nearest crapper.

This derailment in my train of thought coincided with the arrival of word that the World Scotch Pie championship is now under way in Edinburgh. The Scotch pie is described as "a Scottish institution." So, for that matter, is the Glasgow Home for the Bewildered.

The announcement allows as how Scotch pies are "a firm favorite with food lovers across the world" - then proceeds to describe them as having "firm crusts with mysterious gray contents." And that's it. See advice in paragraph 2 above.

Language is a good rule to follow when it comes to foreign food: If you don't understand its name, don't touch it with a 10-foot barge pole. Coquilles St. Jacques, it turns out, are scallops - but they are to the marvelous fried Boston Bay scallops about what DC Comics are to Dickens.

Alas, even a commonality of language is no guarantee when it comes to cuisine. British and Americans share more or less the same tongue, but the taste buds parted company decades ago. Delicacies in Britain now run to the likes of jellied eels, pigs' trotters and steak and kidney pudding, tripe (gah!) and things called faggots.

To a lad who grew up on tasty morsels of grits and canned salmon, Spam sandwiches, black-eyed beans, three-inch thick cornbread and buttermilk, and banana pudding with great dollops of Kay's ice cream, this British gunk leaves me faint of heart and ready to make a care package of it to a couple of ex-wives.

It gets worse as you travel east. In France, the natives are renowned for their sauces - tasty camouflage for the ghastly meat and poultry underneath. They also do everything to fish except what should be done to it, and that's to deep-fry it and subsequently smother it in proper ketchup and Tabasco sauce.

Italians feel a need to dump garlic and onions over everything up to and possibly including the family dog. Queen Elizabeth II, for one, has let it be known that on her first visit to pizzaland the smelly veggies are verboten, as are long pasta and berries (they mess up one's dress).

Garlic supposedly is good for warding off the unwanted attentions of vampires. In Katmandu, I encountered a dish that Count Dracula would have driven a stake through his own heart to avoid - a concoction of borscht and a local indelicacy, yak's butter.

This devil's brew proved that mixing vastly disparate cultures can have truly dreadful results at the dinner table. It was the work of an old Russian Cossack named Boris Lissanovitch, who fled his homeland when the Commies took over and landed in Nepal, where he ran the Hotel Royal between spells in the local lockup for producing illegal booze.

Boris developed a fixation with yak butter and used the retch-inducing stuff in practically every dish that left his kitchen. For 14 days I existed on a yak butter-based diet that seemed to reach its redolent worst in beetroot and cabbage soup. I spent the next 10 days confined to sickbed in Bangkok.

Still, essence of yak was infinitely preferable to playing a gastronomic version of Russian roulette with fugu. Fugu is a Japanese fish delicacy. It also puts a touch of realism into the saying, "food you could die for," because bits and pieces of fugu are about 1,250 times more deadly than cyanide.

From what I gather, it is wise to avoid the stomach, muscles, ovary and especially the liver of the fugu fish, lest you really pine to learn how one method of death can be 1,250 times worse than another. It seems to me that the end result is about equal, but it can put a damper on a good evening out at the local eatery.

I declined the one and only offer I ever received of a fugu feed. Nor do I dine any longer on yak-flavored borscht. Mushrooms also are proscribed, ever since the day my father used them in his own version of chicken a la king, something that even the cats boycotted.

It's not only that most foreign rubbish tastes like fried retread tire or boiled hockey puck, but it comes with a price tag designed to delight your local loan shark. At a fancy London restaurant called La Tante Claire, for example, the coquilles St. Jacques can set you back $35, a buck less than the foie gras.

What's interesting is that the scallops in the coquilles actually cost about $4.20 as raw ingredients, so you're paying a markup of about 721 percent. The foie gras is a bit more reasonable at a 433 percent markup. Take along a friendly bank manager.

There are, of course, exceptions. On one five-week stretch covering the U.S. hostages story in Iran, I was holed up in a hotel with very limited eating facilities. The morning menu was either caviar or a local variety of Spam made without meat. At the evening meal, it was caviar or mutton. Basic price $20, whichever you chose.

I enjoyed five weeks of good eating in Tehran, if not a lot else. I took another half-pound of caviar with me when they threw me out of the country and dined on it all the way to Frankfurt.

But it's been downhill since those halcyon times, and I do little traveling and less dining in foreign climes these days. When I do, I carry along an emergency kit. It consists of Spam, Heinz baked beans, corned beef hash, chocolate bars and Campbell's cream of chicken soup.

No room for the borscht, though.

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