7 January 2021: Chris Stark became the Vegan Whisperer and tried to sniff out a flexitarian

Scott opened with a message from listener Will, who said he and his fiancée Millie listened to the podcast with dinner every night.

The couple had become engaged the previous summer but still found the word “fiancée” slightly strange to use.

Will also wanted to recognise Millie, a community children’s nurse who had been working through the pandemic.

Scott said messages like that were exactly why the team wanted the programme to remain upbeat during another difficult stage of lockdown.

Chris brought back one of his least scientific abilities.

He believed he could tell whether somebody was vegan simply by listening to them speak.

The game had already produced enough apparent successes for Chris to behave as though this was a genuine gift rather than a string of guesses.

Callers joined the show without immediately revealing their diets.

Chris listened for whatever mysterious vocal clue he thought separated meat-eaters from vegans.

A new category immediately caused trouble.

Some callers were not straightforward vegans or meat-eaters at all.

They were flexitarian — mostly eating one way while occasionally changing the rules.

That made Chris’s binary sniff-test much harder.

If somebody sounded “vegan” but still occasionally ate meat, was the Vegan Whisperer correct or wrong?

Scott enjoyed watching a silly feature collapse under the complexity of real diets.

The daily quiz tried to combat lockdown boredom with another collection of things people assumed they recognised.

This time ordinary sounds were stripped of context.

Without seeing the object making the noise, even something heard regularly could become surprisingly difficult to place.

Bangers then provided the more familiar end-of-show competition, with Scott and Chris each trying to persuade a listener to choose their track.

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