Almost Vegetarian

Forget tired clichés about bland tofu dishes, vegetables have undergone a 21st-century rebrand, says lifelong herbivore Nell Frizzell. Today, anyone who’s anyone is vegetarian(ish)

Unless you’ve sat down to a bowl of lukewarm soya, the colour and consistency of wet soil, cooked over a portable stove on a camp site, as those around you tuck into sizzling sausages, you’ll never truly understand the horror of being a vegetarian in the ’90s. Until you’ve bitten into another near-raw lump of eggplant at a meat smeared barbecue, or smiled sourly as you’re told to “just pick out the bacon” by your waiter, you’ll never understand how far we’ve come. When Cara Delevingne posts pro-vegan propaganda photos on Instagram and your Facebook feed is littered with former party girls getting high off their farmers’ market haul, you know vegetables are sprouting a new social status.

I was brought up in a no-meat-and-eight-veg household where brown rice was the norm and eggplants were treated with much reverence. Both my parents are vegetarian; not enormously strict but ethical in their eating. So I grew up cooking vegetarian food and thinking of meat as something that should be eaten rarely and responsibly. I was enjoying hummus, avocado, kale, quinoa, pumpkin seeds and beetroot long before I could tie my own shoelaces. Then, of course, university happened, dinner parties happened, work happened, boyfriends happened and I found myself sliding away from my vegetarian roots and simply eating whatever was put in front of me.