The war on meat has begun – and vegans are winning comfortably, by Jenny McCartney.

Back then, carnivores and herbivores rubbed along peaceably enough on the UK dietary savannah, with the carnivores, secure in their status as the meat-eating majority, often clumsily accommodating the herbivores’ dietary requirements while reserving the right to bore them with ‘humorous’ barbs about Hitler being a vegetarian. Now tension is growing between the two camps, with each thinking the worst of the other. It’s like Brexit — only with knives and forks. …

Veganism is rapidly becoming, like so much else, a ‘cultural signifier’, and meat-eating is being linked, with growing vociferousness, to notions of ‘toxic masculinity’. It is perhaps no coincidence that the Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, the most vocal opponent of those who demonise ‘traditional’ maleness, now eats an all-meat diet.

In contrast, woke blokes are rapidly turning vegan, with steak-eating being seen as, well, just a bit Trumpy. Peta has recently sought to rebrand veganism as sexy, with an ad featuring men prancing around waggling fake genitals constructed out of fruit and veg. It used to be said that ‘real men don’t eat quiche’ — and now they really don’t because it contains milk and eggs, obtained through systems of inter-species oppression. …

If veganism becomes too blunt a weapon in ‘identity politics’, I fear it will backfire. Still, no matter what plants they’re guzzling, the vegans are on the march: they’re sprouting muscles, and their teeth are getting sharper.

PC is becoming a totalitarian ideology, dictating every aspect of your life. Freedom will be so yesterday.