Why I'm sick of Christmas by Corbyn's (vegan) shadow farming minister: Spokesman says she dreads festive season as it means 'getting up close and personal with bits of dead animals'

Labour's vegan farming spokeswoman has declared she is ‘sick’ of Christmas – as it means getting ‘up close and personal with bits of dead animals’.

Kerry McCarthy, who ruffled feathers when she was appointed to the role by Jeremy Corbyn, has already said she believes meat should be slapped with tobacco-style health warnings.

And in a post on her personal blog, she revealed her dread of the festive season which poses a particular challenge for her as ‘meat is everywhere in huge quantities’.

Kerry McCarthy, pictured, is Jeremy Corbyn's shadow environment secretary and an avowed vegan 

Her friends, who are ‘normally nice and interesting and funny’, suddenly start sharing pictures online of ‘stuffing turkeys, smothering potatoes in beef fat and boiling ham in Coke’, she wrote.

Miss McCarthy, who as shadow environment secretary is supposed to represent the food and farming industries, wrote the blog after spending a previous Christmas Day ‘as usual with a bunch of meat-eaters’.

She described the ordeal of ‘fussing over them to make sure they’re not using the same serving utensils for the vegetables and the meat, and that the vegetarian gravy hasn’t got muddled up with the ordinary gravy, and trying to help with the serving up and clearing away without having to get too up close and personal with bits of dead animals’.

‘To be honest I got rather sick of it’, she wrote in 2010, five years after becoming MP for Bristol East in a blog entitled ‘A Vegan at Christmas’.

‘And for the first time I felt, I don’t really want to do this again. Yes, Christmas should be about spending time with family, but perhaps next year I’ll just turn up in time to see them vegging out in front of Dr Who and EastEnders’.

Miss McCarthy, 50, is probably not helped at this time of year by the fact she also ‘hates’ mince pies – even vegan ones – and does not drink. In another blog she described of turmoil of being invited for mulled wine and mince pies by her neighbours.

‘Do you say yes’, she asked ‘but explain you’re vegan and send them off in a last minute panic trying to find vegan mince pies?

‘And no point asking me where you’d get them as I don’t like them anyway’, she wrote. In the end she found an excuse not to go, and admitted being vegan ‘does limit your ability to socialise’.

Environment secretary Liz Truss said those sitting down to a traditional roast turkey dinner tomorrow will know whether the birds were born, reared and slaughtered in Britain due to new labeling requirements

Some commenters on the blog reassured her it was fine to bring her own drinks and snacks.

But one person joked: ‘They’re only inviting you over because you’re an MP. No-one wants to spend Christmas with a sober vegan.’

Miss McCarthy insists she does not mind having dinner with a meat-eater, and pays no attention to what is on other people’s plates, but said she had not lived with a meat-eater since the 1980s.

Her seasonal favourites include a ‘traditional Christmas curry’. The following year, just after Christmas 2011, she tweeted: ‘No mince pies for me – I hate them!’

The MP has been a vegan for two decades and was a vegetarian for ten years before that.

Shortly after she was appointed to the shadow cabinet three months ago, she alarmed countryside campaigners and farmers by saying: ‘I really believe that meat should be treated in exactly the same way as tobacco, with public campaigns to stop people eating it.’

In a magazine interview, she said the ‘constant challenging of the environmental impact of livestock farming is making me more and more militant’ - and she slapped down dairy farmers struggling with low milk prices, saying: ‘It’s a supply and demand thing.’

Back in 2009, she questioned the US tradition of the Pardoning of the Thanksgiving Turkey, tweeting: ‘If it’s good to pardon one turkey, surely that’s an admission it’s mean to kill the rest?’

Last month she tweeted that she was meeting some fishermen, but managed to attract ridicule by asking if she could refer to them as ‘fishers’ as a ‘gender neutral alternative’.

Environment secretary Liz Truss yesterday announced that those ‘sitting down to a traditional roast turkey dinner’ this year would know if the birds were born, reared and slaughtered in Britain, thanks to new labelling laws.