Telling shoppers that eating meat is as a bad as smoking and will bring on the apocalypse is banger out of order

IT’S an incredibly boring conversation but one I bet, like me, you’ve had many times.

And it goes like this.

Vegetarian: “Oh, you’re still eating meat? Well, let me ask you this: Do you know how terrible the living conditions are for that animal?

“And would you kill it and then cook it yourself? I bet you wouldn’t.”

Me: “No. Of course I bloody wouldn’t. Do you think I have the time to slop through the mud, wrestle a pig to the ground, slit its throat and then cut it into chunks, cure it for FIVE DAYS, dry it for four hours then slice it up, cook it and whack it between two sheets of bread?”

And yes, I’d probably add, I do know we treat animals badly when it comes to preparing them to be, er, murdered.

Like the majority of people who mostly breathe through their nose, I am not naïve enough to think the chicken I have purchased was kept in a five-star hotel and given a daily deep-feather massage.

I know what I’m getting into here so let others do the hard work in sourcing and preparing animals ready for me to scoff.

But now there could be yet another emotional blackmail hurdle to leap over before we tuck into our turkeys — this time at the point of purchase.

According to woke boffins at Durham University, we need to be reminded how terrible meat is with cigarette-style picture warnings on packaging.

And the horrors depicted should not just be limited to how unhealthy meat is but — of course — must also lecture us on how bad for the environment it is, with images straight out of The Day After Tomorrow.

“THE AMAZON IS DYING BECAUSE OF YOUR QUARTER-POUNDER BURGER, YOU SELFISH B*****D!”

Oh, stick a sausage in it. This nanny-state nonsense is not just patronising, it is also cynical scaremongering.

Demonising meat eating by lumping it in with cigarette smoking suggests it is inherently bad for you. This claim is patently true for cigarettes.

Good luck arguing that inhaling fumes from tobacco leaves has any health benefits.

Indeed, the cost to the NHS of healthcare for smokers runs at around £2.5billion a year, two per cent of its entire budget.

But for meat it is not so simple.

Eating TOO MUCH red meat is bad for you, sure, and studies do suggest that eating vast quantities of it — especially the highly processed variety (a.k.a. the good stuff) — is responsible for 18 per cent of all cases of bowel cancer.

But eaten sensibly, protein-packed meat has many health benefits.

The NHS’s own website tells us this: “Red meat provides us with iron, zinc and B vitamins.

“Meat is one of the main sources of vitamin B12 in the diet.”

Vitamin B12, just so we’re all in the loop here, helps the body to make red blood cells, which if I recall my GCSE science classes correctly, have the important task of keeping us alive.

But none of this really matters, of course, to all those nanny-state meddlers, so many of whom are hopelessly in thrall to the Greta Thunbergs of this world and to the tedious vegan zealots.

They want us, the 72-per-cent majority who eat meat, to feel bad about our choices in life because they think we’re too busy selfishly stuffing steaks into our mouths to know the effect they have on poor little creatures and the planet.

They think we’re stupid and have zero self-control. They don’t make these choices, so neither should we.

But here’s the thing.

We DO know that living on Earth comes with numerous side-effects and that a poor diet will make us ill.

But we want the freedom to decide how we will mitigate this in our own lives.

We do not want to be told off for enjoying the foods we love, that we can legally buy with our heavily taxed wages.

If the Government has any sense, it should stick this idea in the meat grinder where it belongs.

Kim, can you make my pal’s pants bulge?

SO, now even nipples can be fake.

Kim Kardashian – of course – has launched a new Ultimate Nipple Bra for her Skims range, with built-in nips so ladies can always look as if there are, ahem, freezing their t*ts off.

The advert for this innovation is so utterly ridiculous it may in fact be a load of cobblers.

“Some days are hard but these nipples are harder,” drools Miss K in what looks like something from Carrott’s Commercial Breakdown.

But true or, er, false I can’t help noticing these enhanced articles of underwear are only ever aimed at women.

When is Skims bringing out, I dunno, padded boxer shorts?

Asking for a friend.

A GAME O’ CHOO HALVES

THE only thing worse than supporting Manchester United right now is having to get there on an Avanti train.

Me and my lad made our regular pilgrimage on the World’s Worst Train Operator last weekend for the demolition derby.

And the return journey turned out to be an even bigger p***-take than the 3-0 drubbing at the hands of Erling Haaland and his Man City backing singers.

Not only were the carriages so packed they’d shock a New Delhi commuter, but ten minutes into the journey some pillock decided to make the following announcement.

“Ladies and gentlemen, tonight’s train is very crowded – it might be a nice idea to offer your seat to someone for part of the journey so you all get to sit down.”

You can imagine how well that was received by the fed-up throng of Red Devil fans.

Maybe a better idea would be to put some more trains on, perhaps driven by all those greedy train drivers on more than £65k a year who keep holding us all to ransom . . . and winning.