Meat has come under intense scrutiny lately, yet the product itself is not to blame. The real issue lies in our cultural relationship with meat and the global food system that has been built around it.
This is the first part of a six-part series about meat and the personal journey I undertook to decide whether to keep eating it.
Spiking Vegetarians
My childhood meals followed the classic meat-and-two-veg formula. My mother did the cooking and, even when she experimented, she mostly stuck to a template: grilled chicken, sausages, fish or pork chops, with vegetables and potatoes, or a hearty spag bol made from beef mince and slippery pasta.
On birthdays I could choose whatever I wanted, and my favourite was meat fondue. A pot of hot oil sat in the middle of the table and we speared strips of raw meat on long forks, plunging them in and watching them sizzle.
Letting children deep-fry meat at the table sounds crazy now, but back then it felt like a joyful, competitive ritual. We avoided the scorched patch at the bottom of the pot, where the enamel would grab meat and force an adult to intervene. That meal was pure meat — glorious, deep-fried meat — and if any sides existed, they faded into memory.
When I left home the idea that a meal wasn’t complete without meat stuck with me. Everything else was a side or a salad. Even vegetarian dishes were somehow minor players, despite originating from cuisines where plant-based meals are common. I also believed, for a time, that drinks under 3% alcohol were merely mixers. It took years to see how these strict categories narrowed my worldview.
For a while I thought teetotal vegetarians were weak — the kind of people who couldn’t match my beer-drinking, steak-eating idea of masculinity.
Grrrrr.
Vegetarians were easy targets for my mockery. I didn’t even know what veganism meant, and hypocrisy seemed obvious to me when I saw vegetarians wearing leather. My thinking was binary and unforgiving.
In my early twenties I hosted a dinner party that included a vegetarian friend of my girlfriend. Her presence baffled me — I’d never cooked for a vegetarian and couldn’t imagine what to prepare.
Everything except meat and fish, it turned out.
I was making a roast and, in a misguided attempt to provide variety, prepared a pasta dish for her using a sauce based on my bolognese recipe, which included a beef Oxo cube. While juggling dinner for eight, I absent-mindedly added beef stock to her pasta. Only when she served herself did I realise my mistake as she topped a plate of veg and potatoes with Oxo-laced pasta.
I froze. I didn’t want to make a scene or admit my error in front of friends, so I stayed silent, took a swig of beer and told myself it was her fault for being one of “those” vegetarians.
To Vicky, if you read this: I’m sorry.
My rigid attitude began to shift when I started eating more fish. Fish is still animal flesh, but it broadened my diet beyond the meat-and-veg formula. At thirty, lifestyle and dietary changes led to a 16kg weight loss in six months, and another 10kg over the next few years. Then I discovered Yotam Ottolenghi’s food, which felt revelatory.
Ottolenghi’s vegetarian book Plenty, published in 2010, was one of the few cookbooks I bought immediately. Living near Camden Town gave me access to the exotic ingredients he championed, like sumac, za’atar and preserved lemons. Plenty is a vegetarian book written by a non-vegetarian, and that contradiction challenged my old carnivore-versus-vegetarian mindset.
It showed me that you could enjoy both approaches.
Ottolenghi’s recipes reimagined plant-based cooking as vibrant, clever, and incredibly delicious — more exciting than a simple grilled pork chop.
Over the following years I flirted with vegetarianism, often going weeks without meat. My partner moved from pescetarian to vegetarian, which made me comfortable treating meat as an occasional indulgence — for restaurants or special takeaways — rather than the everyday default. Historically, meat was reserved for celebrations, not an always-on source of protein.
I was close to committing to a fully vegetarian life; it would have taken little to tip me over. But one thing kept holding me back.
There’s more to the story.
Continued in Part 2: ‘It’s an Eating Dog World’