Let’s face it – no one really likes turkey, do they?

It can be dry, tasteless, and worst of all, unethical. Luke Dale-Harris makes the case for ditching the obligatory bird, and replacing it with something a bit closer to home

Despite our current allegiance to it, turkey dinner is a fairly new Christmas tradition (PA)

Christmas is a holiday of sparring traditions – festive lunch or dinner? Go to church or crack on with presents and champagne? Wet walk or two hours of Macaulay Culkin?

But one convention tends to go unchallenged – when it comes to Christmas dinner, turkey rules the roost. Yet every other day of the year there’s one thing we can all agree on – no one really likes turkey.

Without wanting to go into all the reasons why turkey is environmentally problematic (Christmas guilt being another potent festive tradition we could do without), it’s worth taking a minute to consider why, if nobody’s mad about it, we continue to stay true to turkey. Surely for what is arguably the most important meal of the year, we should be eating something we can spend the proceeding dark, cold weeks getting properly excited about.