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Good evening. Anthropologists will probably tell you the reason we're able to sit around in this studio, chewing the fat like this, is because our ancestors weren't picky eaters.

Rummaging around in the carcasses of animals killed by better predators fed our growing, energy-hungry brains in a way that plants could not.

We had to cooperate to hunt larger animals ourselves, and that led to language, civilization,

Shakespeare, and I'm a celebrity. Meat has a lot to answer for. But maybe not for much longer.

They've always been those who go vegan because they think it's unkind to animals to

eat them. Mind you, most wouldn't exist at all if we didn't. Now, we're told, our appetite for meat

is one of the things that's changing the climate. And we don't have to butcher beasts these days

to get the taste. The first burger was grown in a lab here in London at a cost of a

quarter of a million pounds a decade ago. Now scientists in South Korea have grown beef, muscle and

fat cells on grains of rice, which might not make the final of Master Chef, but could, visionaries say,

do away with famine and save the planet?

Has steak had its chips? More seriously, is there a moral case, even a moral imperative,

for going vegan? That's our moral maize tonight. The panel Ash Sarka from the Navarra Media Group,

the chief executive of the NHS Confederation, Matthew Taylor, the commentator and campaigner

Inaya Follarina Amaman, and the historian Tim Stanley.

Ash, Ash, Sarka, I haven't looked closely at your plate recently.

But are you a carnivore?

I am a carnivore, and I feel very guilty about it.

Quite frankly, I'm selfish.

I'm weak-willed.

And the pleasure of eating a lamb biryani is more

...