Meat is the new black

I am not what you would call the greatest carnivore ever to write a restaurant column. But then, the calling of a restaurant critic is a curious one and for every nancy boy like me, there is a macho critic who thinks nothing of wolfing down a nice dish of offal or an enticing plate of braised spinal cord.

But this is an issue that goes beyond the microcosm of food and restaurant writers - yes, there is a difference and I fall into the latter category - meat has finally escaped the gastro-ghetto and is sashaying down the catwalk. It is flaunting itself at the best tables in the best restaurants and being eaten by all the best people.

Meat is no longer a question of taste or even ethics. It has become rather more important than that: meat has become a fashion statement. The sense of carnivorous hedonism is all around us; Madonna has been cited as a reconverted meat eater and so has Liv Tyler. Even the Dalai Lama has turned carnivore, under doctor's orders. And the fact that the Vegetarian Society has just introduced a special credit card for veggies doesn't seem much of an incentive to convert back.

Instead, any celebrity who wants to earn column inches is getting back in the butcher's shop: whether it is Julia Sawalha eating chicken 'complete with gravy' or Anthea Turner earning a rebuke from her animal-mad sister for having 'gone back to meat'. Meanwhile, ?ber-model Liberty recently confessed that her favourite meal was a good old-fashioned steak at the Popeseye in Shepherd's Bush. A return to meat eating, or a 'lapse' as gossip columns prefer to put it, is as much a part of contemporary celebrity status as a stint at The Priory.

Time was when meat was a fashion faux pas. Minimalism, health, sushi, the sobriety of the recession-wracked early Nineties and all that Buddhist-yogic-reincarnation claptrap militated against the consumption of our four-legged friends.

But today fashionable London is subsisting on the three-M diet: Marlboros, martinis and meat. Lots of meat. It's unlikely, however, the M for meat will include beef - unless it's organic - after the discovery of a cluster of cases of CJD in a Leicestershire town last month. Meanwhile, the rumbling threat of a BSE epidemic in Britain hasn't touched New York. When it was revealed last year that the stick-thin American Vogue editrix Anna Wintour had an assistant whose job it is to take a car from the Cond? Nast Building to the kitchen of the Royalton to collect her steak hot from the griddle, New York suddenly erupted in a carnivorous feeding frenzy. Manhattan became one giant tank of piranhas.

In some circles, meat is becoming quite simply a wonderful accessory. For a woman to sit in Le Caprice and tuck into organic steak tartare, when all around are ordering sea bass, is a contrapuntal gesture of immense significance. It speaks of woman as predator, a stereotype that seems once more to be in vogue: all spike heels, micro skirts, power pads, and Sex and the City on a six-figure salary.

Forget the calorie-counting, neurotic protagonist created by Helen Fielding in Bridget Jones's Diary; the millennium meat- (and man-) eating woman owes more to the fiction of Shirley Conran, and she is not going to hang around waiting to catch the eye of Mr Right over a double decaf latte with wings.

She is Miss Wrong. She smokes too much, earns too much and hasn't got time to count the calories. Besides, as an eater of meat (and little else) she has no need - most of Hollywood, and presumably Ms Wintour, already knows the secret of the high-protein diet. It is apparently what has kept Jennifer Aniston so thin, and helped Bill Clinton slough off the worst of his middle-aged, Mid-West paunch.

The crack cocaine of crash dieting, the high-protein meat diet is fast, effective and potentially dangerous: if you don't drink enough water your kidneys might pack up; stay on it too long and risk permanently damaging your bone marrow. But then why else do you think the three-M meat eater drinks martinis if not to derive valuable nutrients from the olive or the twist of lemon?