Jebb

Prof Jebb said she will write to the relevant ministers in these three nations, as well as her counterpart in Scotland, and that she hoped to see the changes taken "forward on a four-country basis".

Matthew Jebb, who directs the National Botanic Gardens of Ireland and signed the petition, calls the plan “an astonishingly foolish thing to do.”

But according to Prof Jebb, little has been done to achieve this aim.

While it is well established that producing meat has a bigger environmental footprint than plant-based food, it has never been calculated in such detail, according to Prof Susan Jebb, who is head of the Food Standards Agency and a world leading nutrition scientist at Oxford University.

Prof Jebb who is on the Times Health Commission, a year-long inquiry by the paper into the future of health and social care in the UK, expressed frustration at ministers' decision to delay the introduction of a TV watershed for junk food advertising.