I am, after all, a recovering, borderline anorexic. Air stewardesses still tut-tut when I say I need a special meal.

I don’t own a wooden spoon or, come to think of it, a functioning oven. Aged 11, I remember seeing an item on the evening news about a herd of cows that had escaped from an abattoir. At about the same time, I saw the cartoon film of Animal Farm on TV. The sight of the horse being carted off in a lorry to be turned into glue haunts me still. I still starve in most countries in the world: in Istanbul the other week, I was alarmed to find even the dessert, a sort of crème brûlée, was made from chicken.

A heavy burden of productivity, therefore, is placed on dairy cows, which are increasingly subjected to mega-dairy regimes in which they are incarcerated almost permanently in order to maximise yield and drive down costs.

A working Holstein cow now produces up to 100 pints of milk per day – ten times more than she would naturally produce to feed her calf.

I have been a vegetarian from the age of 11 (I got through high school subsisting on brown-bread banana sandwiches) and, more recently, a vegan. I asked my mum, who until then had brought me up on a diet of hearty stews, gammon and pineapple and Sunday roasts, what happened in an abattoir. Why were people allowed to treat animals in such a way? I moved from Essex to London as a student and discovered the joy that was Cranks, off Broadwick Street in Soho. For the first time in my life I ate three hearty meals a day.

Such a heavy load takes its toll on their bodies – more than 75 per cent of cows have some kind of foot disease (Farmers Weekly, April 2009).

By the time they are five years old they are worn out and considered uneconomical – the next stop is the slaughterhouse.

It turns out that the lambs from wool sheep are indeed slaughtered for food, with a few female ones allowed to become ewes, and thus shorn.

A wool sheep is deemed too old at four, five or, at the most, six years old.