This campaign against rare meat has got me seeing red So my friend ordered a burger, rare. "Sorry," they said, "but we can't do it. Policy. Ha, I thought, that'll teach you for daring to order your meat minced. Then I ordered a rare steak, and it was my turn to see red - or rather, to see no red at all. What with health and safety, they can't take the chance. Partly, it's the cowardice that upsets me. Rather than proposing an outright ban on rare meat - and being howled down by the carnivore constituency - the food fascists simply make it ever harder to serve, via ultra-stringent hygiene standards and the unspoken threat of legal action from stomach-clutching customers. Partly, it's the wider attempt, in a thousand little ways, to create a pasteurised version of real life, in which no one ever comes to harm because no one's ever allowed to decide anything for themselves. Mostly, though, I'm upset because of the insult to the food. Yes, you can make a risk-free steak, but the result (to quote Anthony Bourdain), is "a flavourless, leathery hunk of carbon." Luckily, I've still got an old George Foreman grill, so can cook burgers the way I like them: flash-grilled just long enough that they don't fall apart in your hands. But as for eating out, I wouldn't bet against Britain becoming the first country in history to legalise gay marriage, but ban steak tartare. In the light of the report published this week, it's about time I made a confession. It's no excuse, I know, but everyone else at university was doing it, and it seemed like the trendy thing to do, and I wanted - oh, how I wanted - to be funny and popular and fit in. Looking back, it seems a bit sad: yet another conformist middle-class kid rebelling against his upbringing and sticking it to the grown-ups and their "rules" in the most pathetic way he could. It wasn't big, and it wasn't clever - but yes, I put down my religion on the census as "Jedi." Oh, and smoked a few joints. But everyone did that. The magnificent Michael Gove, in an interview in the Christmas edition of The Spectator, has introduced me to an equally magnificent new word: ramapithecan, a synonym for troglodytic so obscure that it fails to make the 2,000 pages of my OED. Then again, Gove is perhaps the only minister with the blend of learning and chutzpah to describe himself as "Promethean" - meaning either that he would defy the gods themselves to bring enlightenment to humanity, or that he spends his afternoons having his liver pecked out by vultures.