This article is taken from the October 2022 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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Blood puddings and arcane offal are often on my table, because I like them. But if carnivorism were an ideology, instead of just a habit, I should denounce it. Some -isms are morally indifferent, like autism or somnambulism. Some are good: criticism is beyond criticism in these pages. But the suffix usually denotes a nasty tendency on adherents’ part to bully the rest of us.

I therefore reject the well-intentioned challenge from my beloved colleague, Daniel Johnson, who, in the May issue of The Critic, detected inconsistency in my revulsion from veganism and my praise of potatoes. I can devour vegans’ dishes while detesting vegans’ doctrines. Similarly, I can favour public ownership of a motorway or a metro while condemning communism, or savour sauce diable while damning diabolism.

If I thought a slaughtered shrimp were sacrosanct, I should show equal respect to an uprooted artichoke or a cleft cauliflower

I have two complaints against veganism and preachy kinds of vegetarianism: their moral snobbery and their false claims. If I thought a slaughtered shrimp were sacrosanct, I should show equal respect to an uprooted artichoke or a cleft cauliflower. My father-in-law swore he could hear carrots scream in his vegetable patch.

All creation is sacred according to its proper use: I should not privilege a snail over an oak or an ant over an aubergine. I give equal thanks for all life that sustains my own, just as an Australian aboriginal will pray leave of the spirit of the nardoo before he consumes it.

I want to conserve the whole world we inhabit — including the species that veganism would condemn to extinction. The only future for cows on a planet without abattoirs or dairies would be as stuffed relics or domestic curiosities, like freaks in Bedlam. I value cows too highly for that. For the planet’s resources, there is more menace in mining chalk than in making cheese. The latter is renewable.

I want clearer air and an unclimactic climate: therefore I want more pasture. “If England is a garden,” sang Noël Coward, “we ought to have more manure.” Grazers’ extrusions enrich the Earth; their eructations do not seriously gas the atmosphere. Assertions to the contrary are — in scientific terms — unsound. Or in ordinary language — claptrap.

Vegans’ moral claims are reminiscent of cannibals’, who also think their diet morally improving: a means of decently disposing of their dead, or appropriating the qualities of their enemies. Similar superstition led Shelley to think that vegetable menus would abate tyrants’ cruelties. The inventors of Kellogg’s Flakes and Graham’s Flour hoped to promote chastity and abolish lust. But human vice is as well fed on starch as on steak.

Carnivorism, by contrast, is commendable on incontestable grounds. Meat makes us human and humane: our hominid ancestors began to eat it perhaps 3 million years ago, to judge by the evolution of our teeth and colons (if my friend, Richard Wrangham, whose Catching Fire I admire, is right). In consequence, because of the energy proteins provide, humans’ brains outgrew those of rival predators.

We are still the only seriously carnivorous primates, as chimpanzees and bonobos, whom we have driven to hunt by restricting their range and usurping their food, get only a tiny proportion of their nourishment from meat. Good shepherds are models of love. My niece, who makes sublime yoghurt, takes better care of her cows than most oligarchs bestow on the human fodder of capitalism.

Here is the ultimate carnivore’s recipe: olive oil, dropped slowly and stirred into minced, raw, fillet steak

So, because I want a world in which creatures are cared for, air improved, nature respected, and human nature properly nourished, I eat meat.

Here is the ultimate carnivore’s recipe. Olive oil, dropped slowly and stirred into minced, raw, fillet steak — with a little of the juice from crushed garlic cloves, an adventurous pinch of cayenne, and a few crystals of salt — makes a chewy, coarse paste, which vodka, added equally sparingly, will thin slightly and enliven a lot.

Chilled, in a mound on an iced platter, with a raw egg yolk in a hollow on top, the dish is, I think, best garnished with chopped spring onions, capers, tomatoes, grainy mustard, pickled peppercorns, olives and crisp peppers, all arrayed in a garland of colours, with parsley leaves lavishly sprinkled over the beef’s rather glaring nakedness.

Diners can mix the flavours experimentally or according to taste, whereas conventional recipes, which call for all the ingredients to be mixed, enhance the waiter’s tableside theatre but strip the steak tartare of glamour and fun.

Even beyond carnivorism, my most favoured -ism is Catholicism. I pray to defend it, but not to impose it. May the ideologues of carnophobia show equal restraint!