The Daily Mail in its report on the Great Veggie Debate' referred to a survey suggesting that, in the last year, more than a million vegetarians had returned to meat eating ways. And yet, just a few weeks ago, during National Vegetarian Week, we were informed that 2,000 people a week were stopping eating meat and that Britain would be 100% veggie by the year 2047 a thesis supported, as ever, by independent' research. Is all that perfectly clear?
As we all know, the agenda for public debate on food issues of the day has for many years been prescribed around the dinner tables of Islington. During the 1990s, when the BSE-CJD scare was at its peak, the media punished the meat industry remorselessly for the errors of its ways and many meat eaters went into denial.
Yet more recently, some media commentators have dared to remind us that the BSE-CJD link remains unproven. Suddenly an apologetic return to meat eating is becoming de rigeur among the chatterati' in the enlightened ghettoes of Notting Hill.
But it has not always been thus. We identified the emerging phenomenon of the closet carnivore' in the mid 1990s during the meat industry's darkest days.
Indeed, we used this very phenomenon in a campaign to dramatise the irresistibility of Danish Bacon, by playing on the legendary fondness that many vegetarians have for a bacon buttie on the quiet'.
The support for our campaign was based on results from the TNS Family Food Panel, based on 10,000 or so self-completed food diaries. Around 7% of the sample claimed that they were vegetarians, but nearly half of these people unwittingly recorded a lapse into carnivorous ways when their diaries were submitted.
So, what's actually happening in the real world? Well, quite a lot, or not very much, depending on your point of view.
Official statistics show that the overall per capita consumption of meat has grown steadily since 1990 from around 68kg to 72kg per annum today. Beef consumption suffered in the mid-90s but has made a recovery more recently, and the share held by poultry products grew strongly during the decade. Bacon may have lost some of its pre-eminence on breakfast tables, but business is booming at other times of the day.
The what?' and the where?' of meat eating is constantly evolving. Increased sales of processed meat in a more convenient ready-to-eat or ready-to-cook format and meat eaten out-of-home have more than compensated for the decline in consumption of meat in its traditional forms.
There are winners and losers, of course, but the amount of meat eaten has grown steadily in the last decade certainly not showing the dramatic swings and roundabouts so graphically presented in the media over the years.
So have we really witnessed a million vegetarians returning to eating meat in the last year? I very much doubt it. Is it really veggies in retreat or just closet carnivores' coming out of the closet? A bit of both probably.
Perhaps the real lesson for the whole of the food industry, both the veggie and more carnivorously inclined camps, is that if you choose to advance your position by exploiting the mood of the moment on the basis of flimsy and selective research, you'll eventually get rumbled.
And, who knows, as the vegetarian side is now discovering from recent media coverage, you may end up with egg on your face free range, naturally.
{{COMMENT - GUEST }}
As we all know, the agenda for public debate on food issues of the day has for many years been prescribed around the dinner tables of Islington. During the 1990s, when the BSE-CJD scare was at its peak, the media punished the meat industry remorselessly for the errors of its ways and many meat eaters went into denial.
Yet more recently, some media commentators have dared to remind us that the BSE-CJD link remains unproven. Suddenly an apologetic return to meat eating is becoming de rigeur among the chatterati' in the enlightened ghettoes of Notting Hill.
But it has not always been thus. We identified the emerging phenomenon of the closet carnivore' in the mid 1990s during the meat industry's darkest days.
Indeed, we used this very phenomenon in a campaign to dramatise the irresistibility of Danish Bacon, by playing on the legendary fondness that many vegetarians have for a bacon buttie on the quiet'.
The support for our campaign was based on results from the TNS Family Food Panel, based on 10,000 or so self-completed food diaries. Around 7% of the sample claimed that they were vegetarians, but nearly half of these people unwittingly recorded a lapse into carnivorous ways when their diaries were submitted.
So, what's actually happening in the real world? Well, quite a lot, or not very much, depending on your point of view.
Official statistics show that the overall per capita consumption of meat has grown steadily since 1990 from around 68kg to 72kg per annum today. Beef consumption suffered in the mid-90s but has made a recovery more recently, and the share held by poultry products grew strongly during the decade. Bacon may have lost some of its pre-eminence on breakfast tables, but business is booming at other times of the day.
The what?' and the where?' of meat eating is constantly evolving. Increased sales of processed meat in a more convenient ready-to-eat or ready-to-cook format and meat eaten out-of-home have more than compensated for the decline in consumption of meat in its traditional forms.
There are winners and losers, of course, but the amount of meat eaten has grown steadily in the last decade certainly not showing the dramatic swings and roundabouts so graphically presented in the media over the years.
So have we really witnessed a million vegetarians returning to eating meat in the last year? I very much doubt it. Is it really veggies in retreat or just closet carnivores' coming out of the closet? A bit of both probably.
Perhaps the real lesson for the whole of the food industry, both the veggie and more carnivorously inclined camps, is that if you choose to advance your position by exploiting the mood of the moment on the basis of flimsy and selective research, you'll eventually get rumbled.
And, who knows, as the vegetarian side is now discovering from recent media coverage, you may end up with egg on your face free range, naturally.
{{COMMENT - GUEST }}
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