WE’LL eat meat again, don’t know where, don’t know when. The grisly red stuff was put out on a platter for the media to digest after a United Nations report said we must eat less of it if, once we’d had a think, we wanted the planet to survive.

According to the UN, food production now causes a third of greenhouse gas emissions, and meat is the worst offender. If we must have so much protein, then we ought to be eating insects, they say. I see.

The report doesn’t go so far as urging us to become vegan or vegetarian, but converting to a more flexible – or “flexitarian” – diet, where we eat more fruit and veg and locusts or whatever and less red meat, which would go a long way to help cut emissions.

Needless to say, farmers have a beef with the report and claim that importing vegetarian alternatives from around the world would hurt the environment just as much. Andrews Loftus, a beef farmer and commercial director at Sellmylivestock, said: “People need to be cautious they’re not substituting UK-produced meat, some of the most efficient and low-greenhouse-gas meat in the world, with a product such as soya or an avocado, which has been shipped from South America from a former rainforest.”

I will be relatively candid with you here and confess I’m not keen on avocado – it’s right mushy, if I remember rightly – and I don’t eat soy because amateur experts online say it turns you into a woman. I’ve nothing against the female sex, but I’m not ready to join them just yet and hope to see out the rest of my days as an admittedly inadequate man (when people ask me what I’d like to be reincarnated as, I say: “Next time, I think I’d like to come back as a proper man”).

I should also say that I was vegetarian for a few years, though I did take the pisces, so to speak, and indeed, to make up for the lack of meat, would consume whole shoals of fish.

I just sort of drifted into vegetarianism and drifted back out of it. One day, I couldn’t thole another Quorn sausage roll (even if, like Greggs vegan sausage rolls, they’re better than “proper” sausage rolls).

I always liked comedian Count Arthur Strong’s take on vegetarian sausages. He didn’t understand the concept and said the only way he’d ever buy them would be as the veg to accompany proper sausages. I’m not a great cook, and don’t eat dairy for other health reasons (not lactose intolerance), so my choices had becoming boring and limited, and I drifted back into eating mangled bits of beastie.

I’m sure we’re all having a think about our scran. The authorities in some places are starting to get bullish about animal flesh, with German legislators proposing to raise the sales tax on meat from seven to 19 per cent, with the aim of reducing numbers of livestock, who don’t help matters by farting all the time.

Germans are notoriously fond of sausages, so you can imagine that the proposal has given some headbangers there a fit of the vapours. Christian Lindner, leader of the Free Democrats, fulminated: “Whoever wants to be a vegan is free to do so, but the rest of us shouldn’t be banned from eating our schnitzel.”

Schnitzel? Bless you. In other nosh news this week, laboratory-grown chicken was offered to a favoured few in yonder America, with reports suggesting it was pretty decent, if lacking somewhat in texture.

This is undoubtedly the way forward. Food without cruelty, and produced with little effect on the environment beyond the carbon footprint of vehicles to transport it. The question is: will it tempt some vegetarians back to meat?

I don’t think they like eating sinews and tendons and, you know, gross stuff like tongues and hooves anyway, so perhaps not. But, like everything else these days, nothing is simple. More and more of us will drift in and out of meat.

All of which is making me hungry so, following Count Arthur’s advice, I think I’ll have a steak pie accompanied by a Greggs vegan sausage roll.

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BRITONS don’t know much about Britain. In a poll of 2,000 alleged adults for National Express UK Coach, almost half failed to identify Edinburgh Castle. Sixteen per cent didn’t know Edinburgh was the capital of Scotland.

It’s like us not knowing that Manchester is the capital of England. Ridiculous. Oddly enough, 61 per cent were able to identify the Albert Dock – the what now? – in Liverpool, and two thirds happily recognised Bristol’s Clifton Suspension Bridge, the poor man’s Forth Road Bridge.

I jest, of course. Even I could identify and appreciate these, and I don’t get out much. I certainly know Hadrian’s Wall, having waddled along beside it, pretending I was patrolling my country against southern barbarians. But one in six in this survey couldn’t identify it.

Of course, we’re all as bad as each other. Like 57 per cent, I wouldn’t have put Milton Keynes in Buckinghamshire (didn’t even know Buckinghamshire was still a shire) and, like one in seven, would have put Portsmouth in Devon, rather than in Hampshire.

Who can we blame for our woeful ignorance? It must be Trump or Boris or the First Minister of Scotland, whoever he is. Certainly nothing to do with us.

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SEAGULLS have been much in the news. We’d never paid them much attention before until they started stealing our chips. They should have known that would provoke us to war.

However, this week, it was reported that the unprincipled scavengers are big fearties and will back off if you just stare at them. Not sure you want to go around doing that, right enough, or you could attract the attention of the authorities, but if they’re after your chips all’s fair in love and war.

University of Essex researchers put bags of chips on the ground in Cornish seaside resorts and, out of 74 gulls who thought it was their birthday and Christmas rolled into one, only 27 came anywhere near when a staring human stood near by.

Perhaps, just as people said of the war against the Nazis “not all Germans”, perhaps it’s “not all gulls”. I’ve seen well-mannered ones standing by politely, trying not to steal envious glances at your fish supper.

Much of the time, indeed, their restraint is remarkable. If I was starving and you had a fish supper, I’d be whimpering at your feet and would probably make a grab for your haddock tae.

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AT last, other voices are speaking out against the Edinburgh Festival and Fringe.

True, I don’t think their concerns are the same as mine. Basically, I don’t like to see people enjoying themselves. The words “fiesta” and “party” scare the bejasus out of me. I prefer my Edinburgh douce, grey and stoney.

The new critics oppose corporate corruption of the festivals, “gentrification” and the Old Town’s transformation into “a gaudy theme park”. But we’re on the same page, and it reads: “The truth is the Edinburgh Festival has got f*** all to do with the people from Edinburgh.”

So says filmmaker Bonnie Prince Bob who, in his YouTube video “There’s no Edinburgh in the Festival”, says the event is “not something done by Edinburgh but to Edinburgh”.

Backed by Irvine Welsh and funded by the Citizen campaign, BPB bemoans folk from London “making jokes about Jocks and haggis”. Noting the lobster and Pimm’s stalls, he says: “[When] the scran starts to resemble that of Wimbledon, you can only assume the punters do too”.

This is meat/Quorn and potatoes to me. And, as what the film calls the “annual occupation” gets under way, more voices will speak out against this bourgeois Bacchanalia.

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