Cold turkey: is a Christmas tradition coming to an end?

When I recently asked younger work friends about the prospect of turkey for Christmas dinner, it was greeted with grim fatalism. Nobody said that they liked it (though the accompaniments and the leftovers got some enthusiastic thumbs up). One cosmopolitan European colleague even said she felt like ‘the Grinch who stole Christmas’ after suggesting to her horrified British in-laws that they have goose instead.

For how much longer will the tradition of eating turkey last? A sense of heritage keeps it, for now, on the Christmas table, particularly in rural Britain. But our cities are younger, more multicultural, and it isn’t uncommon today for some families to have turkey alongside dishes from other national traditions, or eschew it altogether.

Then there are, of course, a growing number of vegans and vegetarians in a generation horrified by the thought of tortured farm animals and the prospect of environmental catastrophe. For some, eating any kind of meat is déclassé, and a meat that has been tainted by the Turkey Twizzler scandal seems particularly uncivilised.