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It’s the equivalent of poking Morrissey in the eye with a lamb chop. Jack Link’s, “the world’s fastest growing manufacturer of meat snacks” — and owner since 2014 of the dense pork horror-fodder Peperami and its bovine German equivalent BiFi — chose National Vegetarian Week to publish a survey supposedly revealing the many things men would rather give up than meat. These included the internet, alcohol, cigarettes, contact with their families, their Sky Sports subscriptions and sex. Men also said they’d rather shave their head, streak through town, swim with sharks, dump their best friend, get waxed, leave the UK and ...

Whoa, wait a minute? Sex? Some men would rather have a lamb shank than a shag? Really? This is the most surprising expression of a masculine either/or preference since 1984 when Boy George said he’d rather have a nice hot cup of tea than sex, leading all of us to worry about him inflicting serious burns on “little George”.

Anyway, after a shocked sit-down and a restorative bacon sandwich, I masticated for a while over the question of whether I would rather give up sex or meat and realised that meat might have the edge.

I do not say this lightly, or without having considered and even probed all the options. Some of my best friends are vegetarians, many more of them pescetarian or flexitarian, which enables me to trot out a favourite joke quite a bit: “What’s the ideal Christmas present for a vegetarian who eats fish?”

“A f***ing dictionary.”

Unlike almost 70 per cent of the men interviewed by Peperami I do not have meat at every meal. Indeed, I try to eat red meat only occasionally, like a rich peasant. Once, on a train trip from Mangalore through the Western Ghats to Goa, I went wholly flesh-free for nine days, and didn’t miss meat in the slightest — although I admit I might have felt differently if that trip had entirely marked the end of my career as a carnivore.

So I am not scared of vegetables, and I try not to dodge salads. I’m partial to pulses, lugubrious about legumes. And yet ...and yet ... some of my most vivid experiences in life have revolved around meat.

That skewer of melting duck hearts at Club Gascon in Smithfield all those years ago. Buttery Wagyu beef in a brasserie in New York’s meatpacking district — the restaurant name forgotten, the taste indelible in the memory. A succulent rotisserie chicken from the village butcher in Bargemon in the upper Var, eaten with salad and a Provençal rosé. Any bacon sandwich, ever.

My job as a journalist has given me the opportunity to taste lamb’s brains and bull’s testicles, horsemeat and the flesh of the giant African snail, camel, alpaca and guinea pig. I once got to order a crocodile sandwich and yes, of course I asked the chef to make it snappy.

Of the five basic flavour groups it is meaty umami that gets my gastric juices in a roil. I know that intensive meat farming is harmful for the environment and the animals concerned, and that too much animal protein can cause cancers and harden arteries. But overpopulation is a problem too: maybe it’s better if some of us pop off with an impacted colon or a heart attack having had a shorter life enjoying all the hooved and clawed foodstuffs that our teeth and our minds were designed to devour.

Sex, though ... It’s a hard thing to give up. But it’s also a hard thing to get right and I can see the benefits of just letting it go. In the past, pursuit of a skirt caused me anxiety, embarrassment and squirts of hot shame in a way that a skirt steak never has. People bang on about the infinite variety of sex — the Perfumed Garden, the Kama Sutra, blah blah — but apart from those tedious, preening individuals who regard it as a competitive contact sport, I’d wager most of us are still stuck with a set of pretty rudimentary rudenesses.

And if, like me, the parameters of your sexual preferences were set early on, with very little chance of you suddenly deciding to bat for the other team, and you then find yourself in a long, happy relationship as your attractiveness to the opposite sex declines, the chances — how shall I put this? — of you being surprised by sex in a way that I was by that bull’s testicle (flambéed in Crown Royal whiskey to mark Prince William’s visit to Canada, since you ask) are drastically diminished.

You may, indeed, end up having sex rather less often than you have hot, meat-based dinners, and finding that the latter is a more agreeable use of your time together. After all, when eating, you both finish at about the same time.

Sex is awkward and untidy, emotionally messy — you can’t just wipe down the countertop and set the dishwasher going afterwards. Sex starts fights. Sex wrecks lives. Sex is at the root of food-based shame, such as eating disorders, rather than vice-versa.

There is truth in Sophocles’s quote that the diminution of his libido with age made him feel “as if I had escaped from a frantic and savage master”. And in Mrs Patrick Campbell’s feeling of relief at reaching “the deep peace of the double bed after the hurly burly of the chaise longue”. We need sex to keep the species going but after that it’s a diversion that becomes an obligation, a chore and a bore. In the old people’s home, I’d rather find myself craving a cottage pie than still persecuted by the angrily rampant sexual urge. I’m sure my carers would prefer it too.

So goodbye, duvet action. Hello, Tournedos Rossini. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to get down the shops. I’d better have a pretty decent bit of fillet waiting when my missus comes home after reading this.

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