World Vegan Day: An Appeal

Today, as you’re all probably aware, is World Vegan Day. But have you stopped to think what that actually means?

It means that are millions of people all around the world — 7.5 million of them in the U.S. alone, apparently — who have not had access to a decent pair of leather shoes or a fat juicy burger or a honey sandwich for weeks. Sometimes months. Or, even, in the case of the ones who had really weird parents, their whole lives!

We mustn’t laugh. It’s serious. A permanent diet of vegetables — especially if they’re organic ones — can be fatal, as was demonstrated four years ago in Germany when no fewer than 50 people were wiped out by deadly cucumbers. 

Veganism, we also know, can cause terrible side-effects. Just look at this video and see what a vegan diet has done to this poor couple’s skin, the man’s especially. It also appears to have damaged their capacity for reason. Though the song is all about how much they love cows it has completely passed them by that if everyone went vegan cows just wouldn’t exist. There’d be no point. Cows are only there to make milk and breed more steak. They’re far too dangerous to be left standing around in fields for no reason: ask any dog walker.

Also, it is a known fact that a meat-free diet damages the receptors in the brain responsible for creating and understanding jokes. Here’s an example of the problem I mean. I once went to the Christmas revue in Broadmoor high security prison for the criminally insane. There was a lot more lightness of touch and wit than there was in that PETA video.

What I’m saying is that these vegans badly need our help. And I want you to think of me as your Benedict Cumberbatch, coming out on stage after my probably overrated performance as Hamlet to bludgeon you with my celebrity, shock you with my swearing and embarrass you with my donations bucket into giving generously to what I passionately believe is the single most worthwhile cause you’re going to hear about today: help me help the vegans escape from their living hell.

30p/50 cents will buy them a chicken carcass to turn into a nice stock which will make their vegetable soup actually taste of something and possibly — if Jewish mothers are correct — cure them of the nasty colds vegans tend to get from having such a piss-poor diet.

£4.75/$6 will buy them a nice steak, like those marvellous 30-day-aged Aberdeen Angus sirloins they do at Aldi. I’m sure steaks of a similar quality are available for that price in the U.S. The key is that it must be well-hung with a bit of age on it. (If I were Milo Yiannopoulos I would probably make a crude self-referential joke at this point, but obviously I’m above that). It needs to melt gently in the vegan’s mouth. (Still not going to joke about this). But I think maybe it would be wise to give them only a half-sized portion at first, a bit like you have to when starving prisoners are released from death-camps.

£10/$10 approx will buy them a comedy DVD, possibly something by Will Ferrell such as the much underrated work of recent genius Get Hard. Being vegans they won’t get it at first: they’ll study it in bemusement a bit like the apes on 2001: A Space Odyssey. Be patient: remember, these people will have had their humour-glands seriously, perhaps irreparably, impaired by the lack of meat protein. If in doubt, try showing them a Russell Brand comedy video first. If they laugh at any point, you will know they are a lost cause.

£3o/$50 will buy them some fresh foie gras. Some people say it’s cruel but if God hadn’t meant geese to be force fed through funnels he wouldn’t have made foie gras taste so delicious.

£50/$75 will buy them a pair of stout leather shoes. As with the steak above, be careful. Vegan feet are not used to proper shoes and exposure to leather may prove initially traumatic. Also, having been trapped in synthetic, non-breathable fabric for years, they may well have developed trench foot. So ease the shoes on gently with a shoe horn — and only allow them to be worn initially for a few minutes at a time.

£300/$500 will pay for the hireling and cap for a day’s foxhunting. They’ll protest at first, of course, in much the same that uber-macho rugger/American football players protest when they accidentally wander into the back room of gay clubs and all their repressed fantasies are suddenly realised.