‘They’re going to have to stop cows,’ said my mother, looking doubtfully down at her plate as we tucked into a roast dinner.

It was not like her to come over all veganistic, but she had been watching the BBC where she had got hold of the idea that cows might have to be banned because ‘they can’t stop them breaking wind’.

And nor should they, said I, cutting off a juicy slice to push into my mouth, the builder boyfriend and my father also chomping away as we sat around my parents’ dining table.

I wish the BBC wouldn’t do this. If they can’t say something logical, they should not say anything at all, or at least not charge the entire population a fee for their increasingly weird, niche outpourings.

I am amazed anyone swallows the conspiracy theory that cows are to blame for global warming on the basis that they produce emissions. Apart from anything else, what do we think all the vegans in the world are doing?

If you eat nothing but vegetable matter, you are going to be breaking wind with the best of them.

If we convert the entire planet to a system of plant-based eating, there would be 7.888 billion human digestive systems emitting methane and carbon dioxide until the former cows don’t come home.

Instead of screeching ‘You’ve stolen my childhood!’ 20-year-old Greta Thunberg should be looking up cow numbers (one billion) and people numbers on her iPad mini while she’s sailing a yacht to a climate change event.

People who lecture the world are very odd. Tony Blair claimed the poor should be prevented from eating junk food the other day: don’t let them eat cake. This makes him much more hypocritical than Marie Antoinette who was at least generous in her misguided sentiments, and, to an extent, ahead of her time.

Turns out when you are hard-up and depressed by your circumstances, sugar is the obvious way out, along with tobacco.

I’ve been sucking on disposable vapes since my house sale got delayed. This is another cheap, unhealthy pleasure the elite frown upon.

But plant-based eating is the most socially exclusive hypothesis of them all.

This is because working men can’t survive on vegan sausage rolls. I know this because the builder boyfriend has to have a steak bake, a fry-up or a stir-fry at the Chinese caff if he’s going to clamber on a roof and work himself half to death in the baking sun or the freezing cold and driving rain.

I don’t think the fancy ladies and gents whose roofs he clambers on understand this. It’s fine for those sitting at their desks in their home offices on Zoom. The sedentary can get by eating cashew milk mozzarella, coconut hummus and scrambled egg substitute made from mung beans.

Manual labourers need meat.

Here’s an idea for all those pushing the idea of plant-based eating: put the entire working population on veganism for a week and see what happens.

Force the road workers, the builders, the plumbers, the men who unblock your drains, the lorry drivers and the car mechanics to eat fake bacon, pretend cheese and ‘burgers’ made from a grilled mushroom between two bits of bread and see what happens.

The world would grind to a halt within a few hours. And it would serve it right.

Even if they are so stupid as to outlaw human fuel, quite how the elite are planning to ‘stop cows’ is another conundrum.

Would it be a phased stopping, during which there would be panic-buying of beef and attempts to breed from the last surviving cows illegally, driving cow ownership and slaughter underground with goodness knows what consequences for animal welfare? Or would it be a mass extermination worldwide, a cow-icide or, to be more euphemistic, a multilateral bovine disarmament? Either way, this will also spark panic, and more than one nutcase of a woman hanging on to the legs of her pet Daisy as the cow police come to take it away to prevent illegal cow-keeping beyond the cut-off date.

The vegans will gloss over all of this, because they gloss over everything. You’d be vague too if you ate lumps of stuff consisting of water, soya, pea protein, artificial flavourings and the bulking agent maltodextrin, a polysaccharide made from potato starch intensely processed to form a tasteless white powder cooked then combined with acids and enzymes.

But of course, this is why they really want to stop cows. They don’t want to watch us eating roast beef while they’re eating maltodextrin.

Just Stop Cows will be the title of a movement involving obnoxious traffic-stoppers in due course, possibly getting confused with Just Stop Cowes, a campaign in which climate activists rally against the existence of rich people on yachts unless they are Greta Thunberg.