It might not speak to our sense of identity politics but, when it comes to eating meat, moderation is the key

YOU may have realised right now that you have a choice this January – sorry Veganuary. Either cling to your genuine pork-product sausage rolls or get on board the plant-sourced movement and go with the new Greggs vegan sausage roll. For this has been the week in which Greggs lobbed its new vegan offering into the stramash that is contemporary dietary politics and watched the food fight commence.

Of course, the food world has far more to offer than these two pastry products but, if you were to watch social media, you would think that this key issue – where you stand on the sausage roll – said everything about a person. Show sympathy for the vegan option, and you would quickly be marked as a moraliser who failed to grasp that we built – to paraphrase a well-known pop song – this city/society/masculinity on sausage rolls. Side with meat, and you are a climatechange exacerbater – even if pork is not the type of ruminant red meat whose production produces most emissions.

At the heart of this battle is the fact that a lot of people don’t like to give things up, and the more it seems like their lack of abstinence is seen as some kind of moral failing, the more they dig their heels in. At the same time, food has become a tribal thing, linked frequently to politics, and so mired in suspicion.

We are assaulted with often contradictory messages. MP Caroline Lucas last week proposed creating a tax on meat as one means of avoiding the worst impact of climate change. But we’re also hearing that butter’s not the demon once made out, and the obesity epidemic that now grips us is being increasingly linked to non-animal-derived foods like refined wheat, corn syrup and sugar.

The result is, clearly, that we’re dealing with something complex.

Yet, the answers given are frequently overly simplistic. Often, they involve elimination or banning or switching to some alternative.

But what happens if we replace, for instance, locally-produced pulled pork with the latest on-trend replacement, jackfruit, flown in from southeast Asia? What happens when someone ditches milk from grazing cows for soy milk? Or butter for coconut oil?

Of course, it’s possible to do vegan in an entirely low-impact, lower-carbon way but a lot of the vegan foods I see right now are also intensively produced. It’s clear to me that what we need is food production that is sustainable and driven by a national policy, rather than by the whim of consumer choice and the market.

There is still a great deal of debate around what place meat might have in a future sustainable agriculture, with some experts saying that grazing animals can perform a vital role while others, like environmentalist George Monbiot, say that just three million hectares of the UK are all that would be needed to feed the country if we dedicated them to vegetables. Right now, either seems an out-of-reach dream. We’re also a long way from even being able to discuss diet and food production without it sounding like just another identity politics battle.

In the midst of this, I believe, the message that gets drowned out is the one of moderation. My own feeling is that we in the UK should cut down on meat – my household included. The average person in the UK eats double the global average, around 70g a day, and I imagine most of us could slash that back without too much pain. Of course, telling people to moderate their intake isn’t a headlinegrabber. Even the word moderation feels like a bit of a drag. But, nevertheless, it seems to me that’s what we need.

No, you don’t have to stop eating meat altogether, but would it really hurt if you cut it by half? And, if you do feel the need to indulge in the occasional pork-product sausage roll, don’t beat yourself or anyone else up about it.