Maccattack

Brace yourself for a 14% drop in meat sales, then.

According to this article in the Guardian, Paul "Macca" McCartney (I don't know if you can remember him but he was a guitarist in a band called Wings) is launching a campaign to encourage people to give up meat one day a week.

Hmmmmmm.  As you know, normally l would get up very early in the morning to be first in the queue to disagree with anything that Sir Macca says.  Strangely this time I'm not as strongly against him as you might expect me to be. 

It isn't necessary or healthy to eat LOADS of meat - it should be regarded as the most indulgent component in a balanced diet (like the delicious fillet steak that I had at Jules and Penny's on Friday.  Yum, thanks for that). 

I am sure that once the Meatles have got their campaign underway, I will be annoyed by something about it.  They will probably say something like "livestock is bad for the planet" when in reality the planet would be better served if the more marginal soil types were in pasture and grazed as they used to be.  

The moderation of this campaign is clever.  It is much more appealing and less easily dismissed than the naive and sentimental sermonising that you would usually expect to hear from one of the elder statesmen of stadium politics.  It could be quite an effective thin wedge and this is potentially very bad news for high-quality mixed farmers in the UK. 

The problem is that a campaign like this is likely to strike a chord with the sort of middle-class folks who buy higher-quality meat.  The kind of people who eat cheap and intensively-farmed protein from the freezer cabinets (the sort of people who wear a tracksuit even when they are not doing sport) are likely to be unmoved by the argument.  Their meat is normally the cheap and yucky imported stuff, I don't see these sales being dented by the campaign.

I'm not sure which way my thumbs are going on this one yet, Sir Macca.

(Nice white trainers by the way, Macca.  Did Stella design that outfit for you?)