Swap my sausages for lentils? YUCK!

The veggie army – including his three siblings – are on the march, but QUENTIN LETTS blasts back for meat lovers

CHANGE, sometimes, can be literally hard to swallow. For years I’ve disliked avocados, or ‘avocado pears’ as they used to be called, and dodged and weaved to avoid the beggars. That oily, green, milk-flavoured flesh; the rhino-skin outer layer; the fat, slippery stone: yuck!

Now, we learn that global avocado sales have doubled in the past decade. Closer to home, urban sandwich bar chain Pret a Manger says it used five million avocados last year, and sales of avocado items rose by a quarter in the same period.

Pret’s chi-chi clientele plainly can’t get enough of Persea americana, to give my old enemy its proper name.

As with Caractacus in chains in the forum at Rome, Hereward’s Anglo-Saxons in the year 1071 or hopeless Aston Villa’s goalkeeper in recent months, it may be time to shrug and concede: OK, the other lot won.

Yet this triumph of the avocado may be only part of a wider trend.

Pret a Manger announced this summer that it would ‘trial’ (unpalatable verb) an all-vegetarian menu at one of its London outlets, in hipster-rich Soho.

This week, a major study by scientists suggested that replacing sausages with lentils — containing ‘plant protein’ — could add years to our life. Wherever you turn, there appears to be a shift away from meat and bread in our national dietary habits.

Pret a Manger customers are certainly all a-quiver for meat-free foods. In recent weeks they have been buying more beetroot, squash and feta salad than chicken and salmon options. The veggie-only Soho shop has been such a roaring success that some at the chain are talking about making one in four of its shops veggie-only.

Meanwhile, vegan princess ‘Deliciously’ Ella Mills (nee Woodward) is the toast of the publishing trade (make that a wholemeal toast, no doubt). Her bestselling healthy eating cookery books are full of floaty utopian waffle and Boden catalogue-style pictures of twentysomethings with perfect teeth and slender waists.

Up to 20 per cent of teenagers and students are said to be vegetarian. Supermarkets are even selling vegetarian wine.

SHOULD the British carnivore hold up his red claws in surrender and admit that veggies are in the vanguard? Is Britain, once the realm of chop-chomping John Bull, traditionally the kingdom of beef dripping, bangers and bacon butties, in sway to the polenta and green smoothie brigade? It certainly looks that way. I come from a largely vegetarian family. All three of my siblings gave up meat decades ago and our suppers at home always had a vegetarian option. My mother was not much of a woman for steak and my late father had the appetite of a butterfly (though he did love kidneys, provided they were cooked in sherry and lashings of cream).

As a greedy meatie, I felt very much in a minority. In the Seventies, my elder sister, at that time a Spare Rib magazine-reading veggie complete with CND badges and a copy of the Guardian rolled under her hairy armpit, would take me to vegetarian cafes in Oxford, where she was a student.

They were untidy places, driven more by politics than by grub.

I have a hazy recollection of bare floorboards, unmatching and uncomfortable chairs and vast bowls of beansprouts, kidney beans and fizzy coleslaw.

Those vegetarian restaurants were run by women whose boobs swung braless (as a prep school boy I was quite cheerful about this) and by men with runny noses.

I would sit there listening to my sister talk about feminism and South Africa and so forth, and prod my fork at unpromising bowls of lentils or a slice of mouldering carrot cake.

My morale would dip and I longed for Birds Eye crispy cod fries or a beefburger.

Today’s vegetarian prospects are markedly better.

The omnivore can happily trough without feeling under attack or succumbing to hungry rumbles from below decks.

Quite apart from Pret, with its chana chaat flatbreads (not bad at all), most urban sandwich shops and, indeed, swankier restaurants offer meat-free dishes.

At home, though we still place a weekly order with Glyn our local butcher, I often cook meat-free meals for my family.

My wife is probably keener on meat than I am. To see her attack a lamb cutlet is to be reminded of Neanderthal woman sinking her teeth into a mammoth bone. If Britain is losing its taste for meat, we are only catching up with other parts of the world.

In Middle Eastern countries, at street markets and in food shops, you have always been able to find magnificent mounds of hummus and coriander-flavoured salads.

How they manage to get by without those little vegetarianfriendly signs, or labels saying they have been approved by the Vegan Society, Lord only knows. India has for centuries had millions of vegetarians, many of them kept plump and happy on vegetable curries. The spice can help to disguise the lack of savour from the absence of meat stock.

There is also a celebrated painting of the philosopher Pythagoras advocating vegetarianism, so we know that veggies trod the soil of Ancient Greece. That painting was done by Rubens, by the way, so there is a lot of flesh on display.

There used to be a rather tiresome notion that meat-eating was essential for manliness.

Perhaps it has not entirely disappeared (builder friends of mine in Leominster continue to regard veggies as namby-pambies), but meat is no longer accorded the status it carried in the Victorian era, when defenders of the British Empire were portrayed in cartoons as round-hatted, ruddy-cheeked yeomen sitting down to a table groaning with a baron of beef.

More recently, children’s comic character Desperate Dan always dined on a vast cow pie (complete with protruding horns).

Were you man enough to eat a T-bone steak? That sort of macho approach can still be found in parts of America, where redneck guys think it de rigueur to chow down quadruple burgers.

Barbecues still bring out something of this butch mentality, the chaps of the house loading their plates with lumps of ex-animal. You can hardly barbecue an avocado, can you? What a dreadful thought. What has gone on to bring about this change?

In part it is politics and ethics. Vegetarianism in Britain started in Salford more than 200 years ago when a clergyman called (of all things) the Rev Cowherd told his congregants they should stop slaughtering animals.

Animal rights are now, for good or ill, a big thing in politics and have been taken up by actors and pop stars as a way of burnishing their images.

Linda McCartney’s veggie burgers were unusual at the time (and pretty disgusting to eat), but we have reached the point where it would be more surprising for a celebrity to sit down to a plate of steak tartare than to endorse vegetarianism.

Lord spare us from such creeps and their veggie halos.

Weight-watching has also played its part in the drift to this Britain of nut cutlets and falafel burgers. The theory has developed that meat is bad for you. This is unfair.

Many veggies still look decidedly unhealthy. If you want to see a truly seedy-looking, pallid, just-crawled-out-from-under-a-stone specimen of modern humanity, go to a vegetarian kitchen.

Claims of weight loss may also be exaggerated. My wife and I went on a Deliciously Ella diet for a weekend. It made me feel sick. My wife, in addition to being ravenous, put on a few pounds.

Processed meat, with its high salt and sugar content and injected nasties, is, indeed, pretty unhealthy, but fresh meat, roasted or baked, is perfectly good for you, even when marbled by lovely fat. There remains something mesmerising about the whiff of broiled meat, though. Bacon on the breeze? Mmmm!

When beef on the bone was banished a decade or so ago, many of us fell prey to the most desperate yearning for illicit joints of prime Herefordshire beef.

ALTHOUGH we have generally moved on from the Victorians’ fondness for ‘pluck’ (sheep lungs and entrails), there remains a great deal to be said for a well-stewed oxtail casserole or a piping hot faggot.

A brown-fried sausage sets up cries from the children of ‘snorkers for tea!’

The problem is that the butchery trade has failed to spread that message and meat is, I fear, increasingly unfashionable.

I find myself largely unfazed by this rise of the veggies, but there are rivers that should not be crossed.

For instance, it is becoming more and more difficult to find a salad unpolluted by avocado or my other sworn foe, celery.

While we’re about it, add the herbs dill and fennel, both of them an utter menace.

As for olives, particularly when blended with capers and anchovies to make tapenade, I find them bitter and irritating.

At Pret a Manger, they go big on coconut yoghurt, which tastes like cheap sun cream. Red peppers seem to be taking over and tend to bring with them frightful onsets of indigestion.

In Ella Mills’s cookery book there is an almond soup recipe that’s so watery, I swear it must have been composed by a Liberal Democrat.

It contains grapes, which no selfrespecting chef should countenance in a soup or any other hot dish, save perhaps sole Veronique.

For my part, when I cook veggie dishes, I’m afraid I invariably cheat a little and use a chicken stock cube. They just seem to lack muscle otherwise.

But our culture is no longer one of meat-and-two-veg. It is more likely to be two veg, a salad, fruit smoothie and the occasional furtive bite of Quorn, with meat twice a week.

John Bull is still with us. It’s just that nowadays he is as likely to fill his fine belly but with bullets of pomegranate and a variety of pious pulses as with overcooked beef. C’est la vie. C’est la veg.