Who said, "You're the Piers Morgan of Christmas lunch"?

And why?

Well, as the Christmas 2019 countdown begins - ever earlier, it seems - and our screens throb with food porn, fun, and sparkling gift ideas, Greenpeace serves up a reminder about the connection between meat consumption and the environment.

'Climate emergency' was named as Word of the Year 2019 by Oxford Dictionaries, which defines the term as: "a situation in which urgent action is required to reduce or halt climate change and avoid potentially irreversible environmental damage resulting from it."

Over the past year, it has risen from relative obscurity to become a hotly debated term and to re-shape the way the word 'emergency' is used: Oxford Dictionaries says climate surpassed other types of emergency modifiers, becoming the most written about emergency by a huge margin, with over three times the usage frequency of health, the second-ranking word.

Environmental NGO Greenpeace picked up on the trend for its Christmas campaign, serving a thoroughly untraditional turkey 'roast' cooked up within a mock comedy stand-up format. The general message around climate emergency is clear to all nationalities, but you probably need to be a Brit to get the full impact of the reference to headline-grabbing TV presenter Piers Morgan.

The 'Ultimate Comedy Roast' pits a turkey against a potato in a stand-up battle to deliver the message. "We eat 10 million turkeys every year on Christmas Day in the UK - and they’re fed on forest destruction," says Greenpeace. "We are in a climate emergency and forest destruction is one of its driving causes. The forests of South America are being cut down to grow feed for animals like turkey and chicken, which supermarkets sell all over the UK."

People in the UK need to cut meat consumption by 70% over the next 10 years to make a significant difference, says Greenpeace. Does that make you think differently about your Christmas meal, or your general meat consumption?

And does humour make the grim message more palatable?

Greenpeace is not the only one using mockery messaging this festive season: JOE.co.uk, purveyor of fine political parodies, has produced another Christmas cracker which also puts climate change and the environment at centre stage.

For those not already in the know, JOE does a spoof each year on the eagerly awaited and generally slightly mushy Christmas ad by British department store John Lewis.

Here's the 2019 John Lewis one, about Excitable Edgar, a small dragon who causes a lot of mayhem with his fire-breathing. The JOE spoof features Greta Thunberg, the teenage Swedish environmental activist who's become the international face of climate change activism, and US President Donald Trump, the cause's even more recognisable bête noire. 

There is no humour without compassion. Do these ads stir up your thinking, giving, or behaviour patterns?

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