Dear enormous piece of red flesh, seeping blood onto the plate and asking to be cooed at. You do look lovely and bright tonight (and yes, you are sitting on a normal dinner-plate sized plate).

But I am not interested in you this week.

I know that fellow Australians love to fill half of their plate with you each and every lunch and dinner time and also sometimes for breakfast if they live north of Tweed Heads.

But I am feeling rather you’d out. So, this week, I am being uncharacteristically puritanical. Or, that is, I am trying not to eat you and your bedmates.

So here’s a little problem. Last night, I ate a snail or six.

Garlicky, buttery, moreish and piping hot, I dipped my bread and sank my teeth into the diminutive, dark flesh and totally forgot about my week off.

So, this is my question to you, mister steak, miss bacon, muchacho tenderloin and monsieur liver: do snails count as meat? Are they one of you? Do little house-carrying slugs mean that I may as well have tucked into a juicy steak last night instead of eating an omelette for my main course?

Being vegetarian in Sydney – I have decided after just one meal out – is a bleeding minefield. Safe to say the whole city country thinks along the same lines as Bart and Homer…