Let me begin by clarifying; I am a plant based eater, not a vegan, and this has nothing at all to do with morals. ethics or health, it’s just that I can’t yet commit to checking every single ingredient additive or product origin prior to usage or consumption. But I don’t eat meat, fish, dairy or honey so I feel I have earned my ‘Plant-Eater’ badge. With bells on.

I began life one of those fussy eater types, much like my own offspring is now and, some might say (including my mother) that Auntie Karma paid a visit and the bitch never left. I distinctly remember never really having much of an appetite for anything, in fact, the consumption of food was always a chore and I found sitting at the dinner table a pretty tasteless convention, both in relation to the food itself and the process. I could function on very little calorific fuel and rotated through a few key staples such as boiled egg and soldiers, rusks with soft cheese and one other incredibly dreary concoction that my mother threw on a plate whilst tirelessly preparing a hearty home cooked meal for the rest of the family. I refused to even contemplate the idea that anything green belonged anywhere other than the garden and when I did finally agree to a slice of cow, the constant mastication of the rubbery, chewy texture which always resulted in a tissue full of spat out gristle, it all became increasingly traumatic and tedious. By the time I reached the age of 19, I had had this epiphany whilst stroking my pet cat, and decided that my cat was no different to livestock we were slaughtering for sustenance so from that moment on I was a dedicated vegetarian.

Now, for someone who still refused to eat any roughage, this posed a little bit of a conundrum. How the bejesus was someone who detested vegetables going to become vegetarian? (The clue is in the name) But over the course of the initial few weeks, I didn’t just transition, I went full cold turkey, ditching anything that could once think for itself in favour of food that used to challenge my gag reflex. My older sister had transitioned a few years previously so I had a bit of prior knowledge although she was away at university a lot so barely saw her. My mother, who was the most patient woman in the world when it came to all things catering related, was happy to accommodate my brand new foray onto the battlefield of green veggies and odd looking pulses and, of course, the mid 1980’s bore the introduction of Quorn, the perfect alternative to lumps of poultry and minced beef, an absolute Godsend for the transitioning omnivore.

Back in the late 1980’s and 1990’s, being anything other than a flesh eating Neanderthal was like running an ultra marathon…..exhausting. Back in the day when I had discovered that boys were not just for Christmas, I thrust myself head first into a vividly colourful dating career which spanned a couple of decades and tag teamed with the vegetarianism, perpetuated an ongoing quandary. Being invited home to ‘meet the parents’ became a stressful affair and I was often made to feel like the weird intruder who breaks in through your kitchen door at night and stands there brandishing a letter opener, reciting Edgar Allan Poe. Mothers, eager to accommodate, would make far too big a deal of the situation and go into a flurry of panic preceding a family dinner. I would try and placate her by reassuring her that I would be happy with “just the veg” but they would insist on trying to replicate the ‘meat and two veg’ dinner plate formation by scouring the freezer aisles for a suitable alternative. I couldn’t help carrying the awful burden of guilt that mothers went out of their way to make me feel ‘normal’ whilst the rest of the family, siblings, grandparents and partners would stare across the table at me as I tucked into my fake bake, expecting me to spontaneously combust or something. They would then try and justify their love for the dead flesh of our fleecy friends and make me feel even more uncomfortable in the process. Vegetarians were the pariah of the dinner table, the persona non grata, the leper, the reject and undesirable. But I was committed to the cause and nothing would stand in my way, apart from one particularly nasty experience on a trip to the Caribbean.

Around the late 1990’s I somehow ended up in Barbados for Christmas. I had followed a boyfriend out there for a few days as I had procured a cheap standby flight along with the sister of one of the other lads whose partner also worked for an airline. I had never been to the Caribbean before but wasn’t sure what to expect but one thing was for certain, absolutely nobody on the island knew what a Vegetarian was. After a few days of fending off the mosquito bites, battling the Banks Beer hangovers and eating undercooked rice, I was forced to consider some sort of deep fried flying fish platter. It was that or quite literally, starve. I was quite unwell for a few days but I don’t think that was fish related, just a combination of the aforementioned cocktail of issues I encountered, some self inflicted, some beyond my control. It was at that point that I realised eating fish again could be my ticket out of window licking territory and thus my vegetarianism transitioned into pescatarianism and the menu was once again an open book.

I remained fish foe for a few years and then following on from the birth of my daughter in 2010 and on a family visit to France, the lure of the farm fresh bacon became overwhelming and I collapsed. Around 2012 I regressed all the back to a full on meat eater after 20 years of abstinence. When I look back now I can’t quite believe this happened. All those years spent battling the nay-sayers and the veg-shamers, dodging restaurants that only had nut cutlets as the vegetarian option or who would reluctantly knock you up a tasteless ratatouille so you didn’t have to sit at the table hogging the bread basket. What a futile waste of time it all seemed now. I experienced a few meaty faux pas in those dark days which have left a lasting imprint of consternation in my memory bank such as the time I decided to re-visit a moderately cooked steak (never really a fan of cow) but had simultaneously contracted some sort of Noro related vomiting bug, I suspect, from my daughter and her dribbling pals at nursery. The memory of desperately hugging the toilet bowl whilst struggling to eject offensive looking chunks of brown flesh from the pit of my stomach will never be erased and bearing in mind, hangovers aside as a youth, I have only vomited a handful of times in my life, this biblical incident broadly compensated for the lack of puking.

My omnivorous journey lasted around 5 years but meanwhile, all around me, the vegan movement was rapidly expanding. I was naturally drawn to this but at the same time thought they were all a bunch of whining mandal-wearing, misguided fools. I went to work in a gym at one point and during a conversation with a big muscular trainer, I discovered he was, in fact, a plant eater thus immediately extinguishing my presumption that all vegans were underweight, undernourished feeble hippies. After getting to know him for a few months and also toying with the idea of introducing some healthier choices into my diet, I read a few books and carried out some due diligence on supplementing B12, alternative calcium sources and some suitable ‘swaps’ for meat, dairy and fish. I entered into the transition with an open mind and reassured myself that I would only put myself through this if it was the right thing for my body. Unlike my earlier supersonic teleportation into vegetarianism, I did this one gradually over the course of 2-3 months, slowly but surely using up what I had left in the fridge, freezer and cupboards and replacing each one with a non-dairy, meat-free alternative. I had also recently discovered an intolerance to casein, the protein used in the cheese making process, so this facilitated the abstinence from that despite being a lover of the stronger stuff. Fortunately I had always favoured dark chocolate over the milk variety and on the topic of milk, I generally hated the stuff so giving it up or replacing with a non-dairy alternative wasn’t an issue. But I did stop drinking tea and started taking my coffee black and in my opinion now, if you don’t like black coffee, you don’t like coffee!!

So I stuck with it, although there will be the very rare occasion I may eat something that isn’t strictly dairy free or whilst holidaying abroad, in the absence of any definite protein sources, I may resort to eating a small amount of fish. I still wear leather shoes and don’t always check the origins of my cosmetics but I do my very best so these are the reasons I consider myself a ‘plant based eater’ rather than a full on vegan. The plant eating movement in general is gaining momentum now that environmental issues are at the forefront of public interest and supermarkets now have entire aisles dedicated to plant based eating. The one question frequently spouting forth from the mouths of dedicated flesh tearing omnivores and grinds my gears each and every time I hear it or read it on social media is;

“Why do vegans still want to eat stuff that looks like meat if they don’t want to eat meat?”

This is probably the most foolish, ill thought out, uneducated, misinformed and boorish comment I’ve ever heard. Firstly, and what every single meat eater fails to recognise or want to recognise is that those processed, packaged meat alternatives you find in abundance on the supermarket shelves, are not aimed at vegans or plant eaters. They’re simply cashing in on ‘Meatless Monday’, ‘Veganuary’ or transitioning omnivores without a clue what they’re getting themselves into. Why does a sausage have to be considered something made of meat? Or a steak or a fillet or mince? Are these simply not names applied to a process? You can make a sausage out of just about anything if your rolling skills are deft enough. Why would you try and recreate something completely new and innovative and go though unnecessary angst when all you need to do is swap out the meat for something that’s going to hold the meal together in almost exactly the same way? Toad in the hole? Lasagne? Bolognaise? I believe non-vegans feel they have to continuously ask this question just to indemnify the lack of verbal ammo they possess in their armoury against the cruelty-free movement.

Anyways, rant terminated and moving swiftly on to the subject matter in hand and that is the current developments surrounding lab grown meat. I know, I know…..sounds sinister, right? Well, not so when you begin to delve a little further into this phenomenon. Back in December 2020, a news article was circulating that a laboratory in Singapore had developed a process of extracting cells from a live animal and then combining with plant based alternatives in a bioreactor to replicate the flesh of the animal but without the antibiotics, bacterial contamination from waste and artificial hormones. The process involves zero slaughter and causes significantly reduced harm to the environment due to not having to decimate thousands of miles of rainforest for livestock every year. In addition, we could substantially reduce the amount of destructive grazers roaming the countryside, wiping out miles and miles of woodland and forestry thus reintroducing the natural predators back into suitable habitat to go about their business, naturally controlling the deer population amongst other actions that contribute to the circle of life. It certainly makes more sense but is it appealing? I guess if the process develops as organically as possible then there is no reason to dismiss the concept as a possible remedy for the effect animals bred for slaughter has on the environment.

But will it appeal to the hardcore vegans or unfaltering plant-eaters? I guess that depends on how the animal is treated in the process. You could, I suppose, lay this concept side-by-side with the abstinence from dairy, eggs and honey as the animal isn’t slaughtered in the process, but there is a huge amount in cruelty involved across all of these industries which operate on a mass production basis. When you look at cows milk production on an industrial scale then there are obvious reasons why we (plant-eaters) avoid at all costs. From the separation of the mother from the calf to the forced artificial insemination of the females, the entire process is a minefield of barbaric actions against these mammals but aside from that, the milk from a cow, very much like the milk that humans produce, is biologically constructed to feed the infant from each respective species. In the factory process of egg laying, the male chicks are literally ‘shredded’ as they are surplus to requirements but even if the bird is free roaming, would you want to consume the equivalent of human uterus, a mechanism designed for growing and supporting life? As far as honey goes, have you ever seen the work that those little dudes put into building a hive? And then we terrible humans barge in there in our giant hazmat suits and just unashamedly steal it all away so we can shove it on our breakfast toast. Bees are an integral part of the environmental function and yet we treat them with absolutely zero respect or, indeed, recognise their importance in our life cycle. The only concept that really separates us from the animal kingdom is their ability to communicate with us. Ask yourself this; if a sheep about to be slaughtered for it’s flesh started pleading for mercy, would you still eat it?

So it remains to be seen how the animal is treated during the development of lab grown meat but if the process involves absolutely no animal cruelty whatsoever, then yes, I think I would be willing to give it a go in moderation. How about you?