Lingering over breakfast this morning I noticed that the butter packet I had just opened carried the words “Suitable for Vegetarians”.

This puzzled me. Since when has butter, a product made from the milk of cows, been a vegetarian option? By no stretch of the imagination can you call a cow a vegetable. So how can butter be vegetarian? No, go away with your silly definitions and versions, lacto-vegetarian, vegan and the like. If you call yourself a vegetarian, you should be eating only PLANT material. That is what vegetables are. Any other name is just an excuse to give a fancy label to your personal appetite.

I understand that some people do not like the taste of meat. I know that people’s opinions on what is acceptable as human food vary wildly. My farm-reared children have sometimes asked “who” they were eating and then happily carried on with their ox tail, liver or chops; at work I have joined in a lunchtime discussion that ranged from one person’s dislike of the texture and flavour of meat, to whether a second person would really eat witchetty grubs, to a third’s considered opinion that if stranded in an air crash with no food, one should eat the babies first while they are still nice and fat. I do understand that to the people for whom the idea of eating meat provokes the same reaction as eating babies, being vegetarian is the only option.

What I don’t understand is the logic of the philosophy. As an example: I will often take the “veggie option” in a canteen. That only makes me a person who prefers not to eat re-heated meat; it doesn’t make me a vegetarian. But I have met self-styled vegetarians who say, “they don’t eat meat” but when you watch them, do eat fish; and others who say, “they don’t eat meat” but who eat cheese and milk and butter and eggs; I even knew one who ate chicken. That is not being vegetarian – that’s just being picky. Super-picky was the bloke who was veggie but got cross if the canteen offered him tomato dishes.

Fortunately, most humans instinctively behave as they are designed, as omnivores – albeit greedy ones who are inclined to eat too many things they shouldn’t.

Often, vegetarians will cite man’s cruelty and exploitation in keeping animals to kill for meat, as the reason for their dietary choices. There is sometimes an implication that if one is not vegetarian one is barbaric and cruel. It would be more sensible to accept that vegetarianism is just a personal indulgence; the squeamishness of an over civilised culture.

I suspect most of the people who say they are vegetarians have never worked on a farm or met a live cow or indeed any animal larger than a pet dog, and almost certainly never been nearer to an abattoir than the other side of their television screen. Leaving aside the townie’s perceptions of a farm as either a totally inhuman meat-or-grain factory or an incompetent muck-and-smell factory, the lack of logic in vegetarianism confounds me. Here we are in a small island suppporting more than 60 million people. Arable land, what there is left of it, has its limitations for food production. For example, despite climate change we have only recently seen maize being grown successfully on a large scale (ironically for this argument, in strains designed for cattle consumption). Large orchards and high volume vegetable production still need kinder climates than anywhere north of the Midlands. Cereals and vegetables get damaged and flattened by typical northern and western rain and wind. But what Britain does superbly well in its higher and wetter areas is to grow that ultimate survivor: grass. Now, as humans can’t eat grass, we need to process it. We do this through the animals that thrive on grass. Cattle eat grass; we eat cattle. This is a simple food chain that schoolchildren at Key Stages two and three are expected to understand.

What I don’t understand are the benefits the veggies think they are conferring on farm animals by not eating them. Vegetarianism is not practical or even logical in most of its thinking. Were it not for the majority of meat eaters making a buffer zone round it, vegetarianism could not be carried through. Just as an exercise, I’m imagining a Britain populated entirely by vegetarians, who have been persuaded en masse to adopt it as a national ethos, with all the recidivist meat-eating villains either eliminated or reduced to living in scraps of relict woodland, competing with the foxes for a rabbit or two.

As the whole nation now doesn’t want animals to be eaten, there is no point in keeping cows, sheep, deer or pigs; no salmon or any other fish, no ducks or hens (to say nothing of the ostriches) are farmed. The lacto-vegetarians might have argued to keep the dairy herd for butter, cheese and milk, but since these are only obtainable as by-products of the cows having calves, there was an outcry against killing the little calves that can never be eaten, and the financial burden of keeping them only to look at soon shot that option down in flames. Therefore the veggie nation has no milk, no butter, no cheese, no eggs, in fact no access to protein of any kind other than that found in vegetables. The trouble is, I seriously doubt if there is enough land available in Britain to grow protein for 60 million vegetarians. All farms not growing hazel nuts have had to go under the plough for cereals, peas and beans, because it isn’t warm enough for soya; and as a further result, the only domestic animals that their children see are kept in zoos. Where the rest of the population of dairy and beef cows have gone I leave to your imagination; you can decide, too, where the sheep flock of over 35 million had to go. I have no idea what the tens of millions of carnivorous pets are going to live on. Vegetarianism doesn’t really seem to have done a lot for these animals, does it?

Leather artifacts such as shoes, and woollen clothes of any kind, and duck- or goose-down duvets, will become museum pieces. Everyone has to wear cotton or synthetics. Greenhouse gas levels are going to be – er – inflated by the methane production from 60 million bean eaters, though perhaps the disappearance of the dairy herds will balance that. Gardens and the remaining farms now have to be fertilised solely by inorganics from the bag, or the sludge from sewage farms, because the natural cycle of manuring the crops with animal muck has been broken. Fertilizer firms will make millions, but the Soil Association will soon have to give up; they simply haven’t a chance of maintaining organic food production.

And I bet you that, almost all the time,  the veggie Britons will actually choose to live off the greater variety of imported foodstuffs that could not be grown in Britain, the produce of warmer climates: soy beans, tomatoes, avocados, pineapples. There’s an end to our independence as a country. Oh I forgot – the Government is hell-bent anyway on sacrificing agriculture to business and commerce, and the country’s food independence is not on the agenda.

Curried grass, anyone?