Ice cream that hasn’t come from a cow? The world has gone mad and farmers are paying for it - Sarah Todd

Scavenging terriers were banished and the mammoth task of unpacking began. This is where it all unravelled. Frozen items first, the usual suspects such as peas and green beans, and then underneath The Husband’s treat of some Cornish vanilla ice-cream was a brown box …

Well, the jammy thing, looked like he had landed a free box of choc ices. It had said somewhere on the website that sometimes a perk was included.

Hang on a minute, closer inspection revealed the items in question were vegan. To say this shopper was apoplectic with rage is an understatement. In fact, it’s a wonder the offending ices didn’t instantly melt with all the angry heat radiating from her.

What an absolute and utter cheek; being sent ice cream made from goodness knows what.

Now then reader, imagine a vegan shopper being sent a free pack of Aberdeen Angus beef burgers or eggs, or milk? It would be no surprise if a report on their hurt feelings made the ten o’clock news.

Yes, this shopping scenario seems an almost perfect example of how the minority in Britain - right here, right now in 2025 - are always being treated as the majority. Supermarket executives would worry about offending non-meat or dairy eaters, but did they give a second thought to my cultural heritage as a farmer’s daughter?

No, of course they didn’t. This is perhaps also why the shop included pork fillets not clearly marked on the online order form as from Denmark. Hell would have frozen over before this shopper would have knowingly bought meat not produced on a farm in this country, where our welfare standards are the highest in the world. Same with the vegetables that were half-mouldy. No wonder as they had come all the way from Spain.

Pages have already been written about the potentially devastating impact of our Chancellor of the Exchequer’s smash-and-grab on family farms with her politics-of-envy Inheritance Tax (IHT) proposals.

Traditional patchwork holdings will be smashed up, with land grabbed by greedy investors bringing in bigger, more factory farming concerns to run it. Maybe some surplus, perhaps with a farmhouse ripe for renovation, will go to types who will be keeping three little piggies and half a dozen hens to make their move from London complete. How super for them, not batting an eye at the price, but not in any way contributing to feeding the nation.

What a worrying time. In many ways IHT has been the final straw.

Good to hear that on February 10, farmers will again rally on the streets of London, timed to coincide with the day MPs will debate a 145,000-strong petition urging a U-turn on the IHT plans.

In this correspondent’s view rural unrest has been brewing for a long time.

The Covid pandemic changed many people’s perception of the countryside. It became a national playground, a welcome green lung in troubled times.

Somewhere along the line the fact that these fields actually belong to real-life farmers rather than the nation has become blurred.

Some (perhaps Rachel Reeves and her political chums) will say that’s not fair; that all citizens should share. But hang on Rach, when other people went off to work in better paid industries the ancestors of these traditional farming families slogged away digging ditches and drains with shovels, laying hedges, ploughing with horses, picking potatoes and milking cows by hand. Living a physically hard life to build up their acres, something it can seem the Countryfile generation now wants to rob them of.

Must cool down. Maybe a scoop of the dairy ice-cream with added clotted cream will help? One thing’s for sure, that vegan interloper has a lot to answer for. Somehow stirring up feelings of a world that is a constant cacophony of contradictions. For heaven’s sake, ice-cream that hasn’t had anything to do with a cow?

Poor old cows. Scientists with test tubes are either trying to reproduce their natural wares or they are being blamed for global warming. They eat grass, turn it into milk and meat, with their muck then being used to naturally fertilise the land. Now, where’s the harm in that?

Hang on, perhaps it’s all part of a bigger plan…get rid of farmers and livestock so solar panels can be put on once productive farmland, leaving little option but to have all food imported.

But back to where we started. There is no answer from the supermarket complaints department and with our electricity and internet down - bet that doesn’t happen to Sir Keir Starmer and his vegan mates in London - the requested email can’t be sent.

And sorry to lower the tone but, being a tight Yorkshireman, The Husband retrieved a vegan choc-ice from the bin and made the kind of emission that would make a dairy cow blush.

“Tasted all chemically,” he said in mitigation.

Sarah Todd is a journalist specialising in farming and country life. Read her weekly column every Wednesday in The Yorkshire Post.