Why soon we’ll all be vegetarian

I know some lovely vegetarians but could never imagine joining their ranks. Something about a life fuelled entirely by plants fills me with dread. The veggie’s world is a pale planet, an insipid facsimile of the real thing. Think of the fear all true carnivores have of finding out at a dinner party that veggies are present or, worse, in charge; the wondering if at least there will be cheese, the troubling knowledge that those who deny the flesh often go the whole hog (mustn’t think of hogs… can always have a bacon sarnie when we get home) and so there possibly won’t be wine either.

Vegetarians have often been on the wrong side of history. Muggeridge, Hitler, Paltrow. It is interesting how veggie activists like to co-opt the great and the dead to their cause. Einstein, Darwin and Shakespeare are often included in the veggie listings despite there being little or no evidence that they eschewed meat at all.

The trouble is, they are right, those etiolated salad-munchers. They may be missing one of the great pleasures of human existence, the sheer, feral joy of ingesting a lump of charred amino acids, myoglobin and pure animal fat, the sating of human meat-hunger, a hunger that probably led to our ruling the world (the primatologist Richard Wrangham thinks that when our ancestors learnt to cook meat rather than eating it raw, the flood of extra nutrients enabled our brains to double in size) but no matter, they are right.

They are right because of the cruelty, the terrible waste, the planet-blighting dreadfulness of the meat industry. You may think you know what goes on in abattoirs, you may get free-range this and organic that, but you don’t really; don’t know, that is, about the torture, the suffering, the agonised screams of calves and fowl, the broken legs, slit tendons; the despoiling of forest and diverse savannah to make way for the dull, uniform thud of hooves.