Vegetarians versus Vegans - the Final Battle

Give or take a couple of months, I've been a vegetarian 25 years this year. It's one of the few things I've consistently succeeded at.

By some strange coincidence, it is also over 25 years since I started eating cheese. Apparently I had no problem with it when I was very young - a time I have no memory of - but the closest I'd ever got since then was mozzarella. My aversion to cheese could have been caused by discovering I didn't like yoghurt when I was 5 and then discovering both cheese and yoghurt were made from 'off milk'. The 'cheese epiphany' started at a rare breeds farm just outside St David's, on an absolute shitty day. We were on holiday with our great friends Roger and Barbara, in a remote part of south-west Wales, and they opted to sit in the car rather than brave the usual holiday weather looking at cow shit and sheep's arses.

For 50p you could buy a bag of animal feed, which you could then give to whatever animal you fancied slurping out of your hand. I like animals, so when this tiny ickle baby lamb [said like you are 5] took a shine to me I revelled in him tickling my hand eating out of it; he was so good he consumed all the treats and I needed more. I went in search of the wife, who also had a bag of feed, and was followed by the tiny ickle baby lamb. I introduced her to my new friend and she said, "That's your favourite meat, that is." Having been a vegetarian for at least 5 years she was very passionate about that kind of thing. It would be fair to say that I never purchased meat to be consumed by me again. Whatever was in the freezer was quickly consumed and within a year I'd decided on being a fully-fledged veggie.

On the same holiday as this, the wife and friend Barbara went to a cheese making factory and came home with locally-produced Welsh cheese. I sampled a cheddar with chives and was pleasantly surprised; Roger who wouldn't eat cheese for another 23 years wasn't even going there. Obviously the discovery that mature cheddar is an entirely different world to some of the bland Edam-esque slabs of fat I'd grown to dislike, was a great thing, especially with my impending vegetarianism and despite being in my 30s when I discovered its joys, it is the equal-single-most reason I could never be a vegan (the other being duck eggs). Vegan 'cheese' isn't cheese, the same was Californian sparkling wine isn't champagne or Crawley town isn't capital of Ireland. Vegan 'cheese' is some form of spread masquerading as cheese by virtue of some enormous environmental footprint. [This pivotal holiday also introduced me to the delights of red wine - something I'd resisted until then.]

This is pretty much the 2nd (and 3rd) reason(s) I'm not a vegan. I can't see myself giving up dairy and in an enormous amount of ways they are as bad as meat eaters in terms of environmental footprint and damage; a large portion of vegan food is now processed because veganism is a new cult for burger-loving 30-somethings who probably wouldn't know how to make a brilliant vegetable stew or a spicy dhal or a wicked 5 bean chilli if their lives depended on it.

Let's also get another thing straight; you are not going to convert the world to not eating meat; the best you can hope for is a shift in beliefs, eventually leading to a huge downturn in consumption - there are too many meat eaters; it's a weaning off process only. So what vegetarianism needs to do is come up with ways of lessening their environmental footprint and given that my own consumption of processed food is minimal and I do not eat imported fruit or vegetables, sticking largely to seasonal produce unless left with no option; it is probably my cheese, milk, eggs and processed material that travels the most distance. The vegetable basket of Scotland is Ayrshire so most of our vegetables have travelled less than 50 miles, only our pulses and spices are really imported... I pretty much feel like a post-Brexit Britain citizen already.

The reason all this vegan food is as expensive or worse for the environment is the amount of work going into making it 'as good as' a meat dish. I understand the logic behind burger and sausage shapes and pies; they're all convenient shapes for wrapping or being self-contained; I don't understand the desire for 'bleeding' burgers unless it's to con a meat eater into eating a beetroot. I don't think a homemade veggie burger eaten on a bun is me hankering for a cow; this new vegan burger is almost like an advert by the meat industry for the meat industry and it costs five times as much and has about as much environmental impact as that cow in that field you want stopping because of the children's futures...

Take the infamous cauliflower steak - an enormously expensive slice of vegetable, marinated in more spices, for longer, with an unknown amount of waste. You pay for someone else's pfaffing about because most people haven't got the imagination to work out how to do it themselves.

I don't eat meat because I like animals. My wife doesn't eat meat because she actually doesn't like it. I'm the more radical of the two. I've stayed a veggie probably because I've never said I'm never going to eat meat again because my intention, at some point in the future, is to have the one meal I've hankered after in 25 years - seaside fish and chips (oh and people who claim fish are vegetables are twats).

Over the last month I have made a conscious effort to map out my environmental footprint. I add to it because of the amount of lentils, pulses and beans I have in my larder, as well as spice mixes from India and I have cassava in my freezer - the thing is a bag of lentils will last me months; as will the spices, so the cost per meal is spread out thinly. The worst footprint is probably the small amount of Quorn we consume and the bean burgers or other 'processed' food we have in the freezer when I don't feel like being Fanny Craddock and inventing something glorious to eat.

No meat or fish cuts down the carbon footprint enormously; what dairy we consume is all locally sourced or produced; in fact my preferred tipple here is from a microbrewery 15 miles to the south of me and, a major point is if I did eat meat or fish I could get 100% of it within 15 miles of my house and have a history of what the animal is likely to have lived like. The weird thing is people up here think of venison the way people down south think of pork chops - easily and widely available (but more local).

I kept ducks for years. I know people who keep chickens - ex-battery hens or rare breeds - is giving these animals a healthy, stress free life and reaping the rewards that you would otherwise dispose of sensible?

Veganism is something I have always thought as a bit extreme; a bit swivel-eyed and slightly mad-bag-lady with a dusting of masochism. As a vegetarian for nearly half of my life, I think I have a valid opinion here. If being vegan means your environmental footprint means you're not really an eco-warrior just a weekend warrior then you either need cooking lessons or are too bloody lazy. If you can survive on just about everything inside a 20 mile radius then you can eat live pigs just so long as they don't mind and you have their written permission. Just remember what you eat, or rather where it comes from and how it was produced is far more important to the environment than whether it 'bleeds' or has a 'beefy' flavour, or even simulates 'real sweaty fat' or the 'screams of dying animals' when you bite into it. If you take £10 of your weekly shop to local producers, local markets and shops then you're contributing towards the general regeneration of your own high street and the local food industry. That must be worth it more than a packet of Egyptian fine beans or Peruvian asparagus?