Meat: It's What's For Christmas Dinner

Greetings America.

Christmas is coming and the goose is getting fat. What's more, this festive season we're not just cooking our goose. We're eating it too. We're gobbling down the roast turkey as well. And the ribs of beef. And the saddle of lamb.

Yes, America, here in the old country, meat is back.

Yes, after two decades of rampaging vegetarianism, it seems the European rush to embrace the meat-free lifestyle is over, or at least, slowing down. Even Madonna - now she has married one of ours and got herself a handsome home in London - is rumoured to have forsaken her once much-vaunted vegetarianism and given in to the sizzling temptations of a hot bacon sandwich.

Of course, there have been veggies in Europe for centuries. Those deep-thinking Greek guys, Pythagoras and Plato, two thousand years ago, recommended abstention from food that featured flesh. The great philosophers did their best thinking on a bowl of potato soup. And wasn't it some Roman guy who gave us the original Caesar salad? (No, it wasn't, but stay with me here.) Vegetarianism has been around since Adam and Eve and that apple in the garden of Eden, but it only really took a hold on us twenty years ago.

And over the past two decades, encouraged by the example of contemporary pop icons like Paul and Linda McCartney, the number of British veggies has mored than doubled. There are now some 12 million non-meat-eaters across Europe. The health scares, particularly hoof and mouth disease, have helped the veggie cause, but they seem to be behind us now.

And fashions change. People are wearing fur this winter who wouldn't have been seen dead in a dead animal's skin five years ago. And as the holiday season gets under way, British butchers are sharpening their knives and smacking their lips in a way we haven't seen for a long while.
by Gyles Brandreth