Pen Vogler

Cold turkey: is a Christmas tradition coming to an end?

Two turkeys enjoy their final days of free-range freedom as Christmas approaches (Getty images)

When I recently asked younger work friends about the prospect of turkey for Christmas dinner, it was greeted with grim fatalism. Nobody said that they liked it (though the accompaniments and the leftovers got some enthusiastic thumbs up). One cosmopolitan European colleague even said she felt like ‘the Grinch who stole Christmas’ after suggesting to her horrified British in-laws that they have goose instead.

For how much longer will the tradition of eating turkey last? A sense of heritage keeps it, for now, on the Christmas table, particularly in rural Britain. But our cities are younger, more multicultural, and it isn’t uncommon today for some families to have turkey alongside dishes from other national traditions, or eschew it altogether.

Then there are, of course, a growing number of vegans and vegetarians in a generation horrified by the thought of tortured farm animals and the prospect of environmental catastrophe. For some, eating any kind of meat is déclassé, and a meat that has been tainted by the Turkey Twizzler scandal seems particularly uncivilised. 

A hundred years ago, only cranks ate nut roast on Christmas Day, but that’s no longer the case. Many youngsters will be having vegetarian Christmas dishes alongside their parents’ and grandparents’ meaty ones. Over time, the proportion of wholly veggie Christmases will increase, as more and more people take up vegetarianism or veganism. Today, the proportion of vegetarians and vegans is growing fastest among the under-25s, and the number of vegans in Britain has quadrupled in recent years. This trend hasn’t gone unnoticed by recipe writers and food manufacturers, who are expanding options away from the classic nut roast, with dishes such as the vegeducken, the beefless Wellington, and the Tofurkey roast.

We were a nation of roast beef worshipers until Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol

Turkey is also out of step for another reason.

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