A vege-ful Xmas

It’s beginning to look a lot like a meat-free Christmas Day if New Zealand’s Google searches are anything to go by. We’re well into planning for the festive season, with Google reporting a 600 per cent uptick in searches for ‘‘Christmas recipes’’ in the last fortnight. The Christmas food-related search term that has seen the biggest jump in New Zealand over the past seven days is ‘‘vegan Xmas recipes’’, with ‘‘green salad recipes’’ at number two. In the lastweek, among the 10 Christmas-related food searches to see the biggest traffic spike in New Zealand, what Google calls ‘‘trending’’ searches, only three specify meat: ‘‘Christmas ham recipe NZ’’ is in third place, with ‘‘Christmas butterflied lamb’’ at number seven and ‘‘Moroccan lamb steak’’ at nine. But we’re keener on a ‘‘vegetable medley Christmas lunch’’ – it’s in fourth place – while fish fans have put ‘‘gin-cured salmon’’ in sixth spot.