Scots should reject anti-meat ‘food correctness’ and stick up for real food

Now – if leaked reports about the draft UK Government National Food Strategy are true – another confident and well-connected man from the same privileged background, Henry Dimbleby, will tell us to reduce our consumption of meat and dairy foods.

Henry Dimbleby is, of course, a scion of the eponymous dynasty. A highly successful food businessman, I didn’t carp when he was simply handed the role of ‘Food Tsar’, another of those jobs-for-mates appointments.

Read more Joanna: Take back control from Covid-obsessed politicians

All I hoped for was an improvement on Lloyd Grossman, the prince of processed pasta sauce, who was crowned ‘Hospital Tsar’. He emitted enough celebrity hot air to warm the planet another degree or two, but no discernible improvements ensued.

A mother who gave birth last week tells me that the food in her post-natal ward was rock bottom abysmal: sub-airline meals standard.

But I was more optimistic about Henry Dimbleby because, initially, I liked Leon, the takeaway food chain he founded with John Vincent. For a period of time it evidenced the belief that there is a popular market for healthy, well-sourced food.

I parted company when Leon ditched its free-range chicken and seemed to be modelling itself on global fast food chains.

Weren’t its profits then quite chunky enough to satisfy their entrepreneurial appetites?

These days, with its “carbon neutral (sic) vegan cheesy loaded fries” and more of that ilk, Leon more resembles a poshed-up Wendy’s. I walk right by.

Leaks now suggest that Dimbleby wants to introduce a shoppers’ tax on processed meats: burgers, bacon, ham, sausages, and chicken nuggets, on the basis that this will help tackle climate change.

This recommendation appears to draw no distinction between the nastiest ultra-processed, industrial meat products and good quality equivalents made from sound, often local, grass-reared meat, by the best butchers.

Apparently Dimbleby has warned Johnson not to introduce the meat levy just yet, for fear that an exasperated post-pandemic public will react with Gilets Jaunes-style protests.

In that event, I’ll join the demonstrators piling the cow pats up against the Downing Street barricades.

Well-made butcher’s sausages, for instance, are a great way to use up, not waste, secondary meat cuts. They constitute a nutritious, affordable meal that’s much appreciated by millions of people who don’t share the Eton set’s wealth and privileges.

Whatever twisted metrics anti-animal food evangelists bandy around in the name of planetary wellbeing, you’ll never convince me that a burger, consumed in Scotland, made from Scottish meat – the only ingredient strictly required being beef – is worse for the climate, or our health, than one of Leon’s 21-ingredient Vegan Sweet Carolina BBQ burger, a food technologist’s concoction of water, pea protein powder, sugar, synthetic substances and chemical additives.

Walk in the Scottish countryside and observe for yourself the devastation wrought by agriculture. You’ll see monocultures of wheat, barley, rape, potatoes, and other ‘plant food’ crops that are regularly sprayed with fossil fuel-derived fertilisers and pesticides, where the soil is dead and wildlife has deserted.

By comparison, land grazed by livestock – because no other food can be produced from it – is a wildlife and environmental paradise.

And Dimbleby wants to tax meat?

Why not tax all that sugar in his cloying Carolina BBQ burger instead?

It gets worse. A reliable source tells me that at some point, Dimbleby is likely to recommend fake meat over real meat on (fallacious) sustainability grounds.

Dimbleby should know better. His mother Jocelyn is a very fine, highly respected cook and recipe writer. The young Dimblebys surely learnt good food at their mother’s apron strings.

But once a businessman with an eye for a niche market, always a businessman with an eye for a niche market. For the moment, fake meat is the venture capitalist’s Shangri-La.

I can’t wait for the day when Mr Dimbleby, perhaps in the company of his old Oxford and Eton mates, is caught on CCTV, tucking into a leg of lamb, a rib of beef, or a juicy steak, while the proles are told to do their ecological bit by eating up their plant-based, multi-ingredient miscellanies of fakery.

Several vegan celebrities have been outed for such hypocrisy, like blogger and influencer Rawvana, who was snapped in a restaurant eating fish.

To be fair, it’s always possible that Dimbleby has been persuaded that we must eat less animal food if the UK is to meet its climate targets. But I can’t see how he might arrive at that conclusion.

Read more Joanna: The real reason kids are getting fatter

Emissions from cattle and sheep account for just 3.7 percent of total UK emissions, once the carbon sequestration effects of pasture are taken into account.

And that 3.7 per cent figure is before you take into account all the co-products that grazing animals provide us.

Wool and leather, for instance, both biodegradable, sustainable alternatives to artificial fibres and plastics that pollute our waters and land for hundreds, if not thousands of years.

Measuring the impact of food production requires a rounded, holistic perspective that approaches the task in all its complexity.

In Scotland, a land renowned for its beef and lamb, I hope the tartan equivalents of the Gilets Jaunes refuse to go along with this modish anti-livestock ‘food correctness’.

Although the National Food Strategy focuses on England, Dimbleby shares its thinking with teams working on food strategy in the devolved administrations. So we mustn’t be blasé or we’ll get saddled it.

Before this wrong-headed policy gets set in stone, Scotland must stick up for its livestock farmers, its traditions, and common sense and reject this confused eco-claptrap emanating from south of the border.

Our columns are a platform for writers to express their opinions. They do not necessarily represent the views of The Herald.