24–30 September is Meat Free Week, a global initiative that encourages foodies to embrace a plant-based diet and consider the impact of eating too much meat. TL&CC co-founder Ruth Hobday shares her experiences as a vegetarian of more than thirty years.

Veggie. Vego. Weirdo. You could virtually see the thought-bubble form above people’s heads when I first announced my decision to become meatless thirty-five years ago. My parents included. I was fifteen, and suddenly even the thought of eating meat had me sprinting for the bathroom every time my father decided to incinerate yet another slab of hapless animal flesh.

To be fair, he’d been doing it for a while. This was a man who ate fried blood sausage for breakfast. My childhood memories include walking out of the front door face-first into a couple of pheasants he’d been given by a farmer friend which he’d decided to hang from a beam immediately above the door. That’s when I learned that a hung pheasant is ready to pluck and prepare for eating when the stomach moves. Because the maggots have consumed all of the entrails and are getting restless. And when he decided to host a Chinese banquet and fastidiously glazed Peking duck the traditional way. All six of them. Swaying softly in the breeze from our balcony for a week, heads and all. Then there was the time he experimented with roasted ox hearts. After my mother and I refused to eat them he fed them to the cat – who also refused. For a while I tested everything on the cat and resolved that if he wouldn’t eat it, then neither would I. In the end giving up meat altogether was the path of least resistance.

My father, understandably, wasn’t particularly sympathetic and as the family cook (my mother literally couldn’t boil an egg), wasn’t having a bar of it. He made a grand gesture of purchasing me a vegetarian cookbook – Mollie Katzen’s legendary Moosewood Cookbook, which I still have to this day – and declared that if I wasn’t going to eat meat, I had to make my own arrangements. It was a blessing in disguise. Soundly supported by Mollie and my mother (who was secretly delighted with some less violent menu options) I set about teaching myself how to cook. By the time I left home two years later, armed with Mollie’s Moosewood and its sequel The Enchanted Broccoli Forest, I was not only a half-decent cook, but had also jettisoned fish and seafood from the menu.

And so out into the big wide world I went, where things weren’t quite so vegetarian-friendly. Oftentimes the only menu options available were vegetable side dishes. (Up until quite recently, all salads also mysteriously contained a meat element – as if chefs couldn’t get their heads around why anyone would simply wish to eat fresh produce?) I can remember one particularly memorable restaurant menu which literally read like the cast of a Disney animated film: Bambi, Thumper, the March Hare – they were all there.

Happily, three-and-a-half decades on, dining choices have changed almost unrecognisably. Restaurants and food experiences are offering meat-free, dairy-free, sugar free, gluten free, low-carb and halal options. People with allergies are catered for – nay, encouraged – to speak up about their dietary requirements. Even airlines offer low-fat, heart-healthy, gluten free, vegetarian and even vegan options, although not always in a form that entirely resembles food. But it’s the thought that counts.

Airside dining notwithstanding, taste is now being celebrated as the most important factor in catering for those of us with specific dietary needs, not merely what can be left out of a meal to meet minimum compliance requirements. And what a joy it has become to dine out! Chefs are tripping over themselves to showcase their vegetarian prowess, regularly elevating the humble vegetable to near-mythical status on their menus – carpaccio of beetroot anyone? From cafés, roadside stalls and food trucks to bistros, bakeries and fine dining, chefs and restaurants everywhere are finally embracing what Mollie Katzen was trying to teach us with Moosewood Cookbook and Alice Waters was serving us from her Berkley restaurant, Chez Panisse, all along. Fresh. Taste. Provenance.

And along the way this humble vegetarian fell in love and discovered the secret ingredient to the perfect meal – food made with love just tastes better. Even if it’s vegetarian. So why don’t you give it a try? Go meat-free for a week. You’ll make the planet a better place. You’ll make your body a better place. And you might just love it.

Ruth Hobday Weirdo, co-founder Truth, Love & Clean Cutlery

To get involved in Meat Free Week, click here.