Mansel Fletcher

In April I gave up vegetarianism after 16 years and within weeks I was eating boiled lamb's brain. I decided to become a vegetarian when I left school in 1992, believing that my health would benefit a bit, and the animals would benefit a lot. As I was InterRailing in Prague at the time I went from mainly eating McDonald's burgers and chips to mainly eating McDonald's salads and chips. My excuse is that I led a gastronomically sheltered childhood.

While not a morsel of meat or fish knowingly passed my lips until very recently, I did start to think about eating meat again last summer, inspired by Bertie Wooster's enthusiasm for steak and kidney pie in a PG Wodehouse novel. At the time the thought remained abstract, but around Christmas (winter is a tough season for vegetarians) I began to wonder about the most ethical way to procure meat. If I shot a wild rabbit, skinned, gutted and cooked it myself, would there be much to feel sorry about? My wife, quite rightly, said that these thoughts suggested that I was becoming confused about my vegetarianism.

Then last April a moral dilemma ended my meat-free decade and a half. Once in a while I cooked meat for others and I had made a chicken curry for friends. The next evening the leftovers were in the fridge and because we were going away for the weekend anything not eaten that night would be wasted. Was it worse to eat the chicken - an act without consequence as it was already dead, bought and cooked - or to waste it? I'm Scottish, and I ate it.

I had forgotten what meat tasted like and expected a strong flavour. Instead I quickly understood why, in his book Kitchen Confidential, the chef and author Anthony Bourdain is so dismissive of diners who order chicken. It seemed dull and didn't taste of much. Much more impressive and pleasing was the way it felt in my stomach; substantial and satisfying without the sense of excess that comes from eating too much cheese. The comparison is relevant because a vegetarian in search of protein and satisfaction is likely to eat too much cheese fairly regularly.

“My food did not seem nourishing enough”

The satisfaction offered by chicken, if not the taste, reassured me that I was right to return to meat. I don't know quite why I had begun to feel that my food was not nourishing enough. According to Jackie Lowdon, of the British Dietetic Association, my enthusiasm for eggs, cheese and lentils meant that I had a healthy intake of protein. She did, however, countenance against eating lots of white pasta or rice in the evening because they're full of simple, rather than complex carbohydrates. This severely limits menu options for a vegetarian who likes Italian food.

Sometimes it was a problem to find something satisfying and healthy. A big portion of macaroni cheese is the former, but not the latter. A tofu steak and some vegetables are the latter, but not the former.

When I ask Chris Olivant, the customer services manager at The Vegetarian Society, what would constitute a healthy, satisfying meal, he suggests I try courgettes. As a vegan (someone who uses no animal products) he can't understand that a meal of courgettes might seem rather paltry - “it just depends on what you're used to”. Clearly he is the wrong person to seek sympathy from, but he does remind me that, really, the logic of vegetarianism leads to veganism, a step I never seriously considered.

Changed circumstances also influenced my decision. As a child it was quite normal for our family of six to be served three different dishes at the same meal to accommodate our dietary whims. I have my own family now and I don't want them to treat the kitchen like a restaurant. I want us to eat the same food, together, and that requires me to eat meat because my 12-month-old daughter eats meat.

I didn't rush to eat a lot of meat, but took opportunities as they presented themselves. Steak and kidney pie was a disappointment, but good sausages were amazing, although Lowdon warns that you shouldn't eat more than a couple a week because there are links between the consumption of processed meat and colon cancer.

Many of the things I tried were new experiences. Scallops were a sensation, as was a chicken curry at a Michelin-starred Indian restaurant. Bacon has never particularly interested me, but good Wiltshire ham added greatly to the pleasure of a lunchtime salad.

Sicilian food was a revelation

The pace of my experimentation increased dramatically when I went to Sicily on holiday. Suddenly I was eating fish and meat twice a day. Our first dinner consisted mainly of salami and sausages, while our third included polpini (whole baby octopuses) cooked in cuttlefish ink sauce. This was followed, over the course of the week, by an entire calve's tongue, cut sideways in all too recognisable chunks, raw sea urchin and boiled razor clams.

Having given up meat and fish at a time when I was still eating boil-in-the-bag cod, the Sicilian food was revelatory. But while I always knew that if I started to eat meat again I'd be adventurous about it, in Sicily things went too far.The sea bass eye was very tasty, even though I made the grave mistake of biting into the pupil (it should be spat out like an olive stone), but the boiled lamb's brain was too much. Our host, a keen cook, had boiled the bisected head, and started gradually by feeding me the cheek and tongue. These were OK, if unmemorable, but the soft, beige brain was repulsive; the texture somewhere between toothpaste and mousse.

These culinary adventures were largely enjoyable but they were also excessive, a fact underlined by the day I spent in bed after one particularly meaty dinner. It's a point Lowdon raises: “Most people in the UK eat too much protein; you need only a few ounces, three times a day.” This vindicates my intention to eat meat or fish irregularly but often enough to cut back on pasta, bread and risotto. Not that it's an original approach; the US president Thomas Jefferson said that he ate meat as “a condiment for the vegetables”, which is exactly what Lowdon advocates. And now that ecology has been added to the issues surrounding meat consumption, it's relevant on a collective level as well as an individual one.

So far my meat eating hasn't made me feel guilty, although I did worry about breaking the news to a vegetarian friend. In fact, my diet hasn't changed dramatically, partly because really well-sourced meat is too expensive to eat every day and partly because, with no experience, I've no idea how to cook it. Among the upshots of moderate consumption is that you can spend more on the meat you do buy and enjoy it as a treat. Which rules out lamb's brain.

Lorraine Candy

I am the vegetarian equivalent of a yo-yo dieter. From the age of 18 to 28 I shunned meat and leather, then for the next ten years I wolfed down lamb cutlets and barged pensioners out of the way at barbecues to satisfy my insatiable appetite for chicken. Now, as I approach the next decade, I am back in the veggie camp.

I blame the turkey, lying there on the kitchen table last Christmas Eve; those little tufts of remnant feathers on its ridiculously shaped uncooked legs almost made me cry. Then I watched Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's exposé of battery farms and Sunday lunch lost its appeal overnight. I couldn't eat those little fellas who'd been standing knee-deep in their own urine any more.

My first experience as a veggie was long before Linda McCartney's frozen-food range, before Quorn. Heck, it was before you could buy couscous in a supermarket. I lived on toast, pine nuts, brown rice and the occasional packet of frozen peas. I am 5ft 4in and in those days weighed just under 7st.

People would roll their eyes at dinner parties when I told them that I didn't eat meat. I was treated as some kind of weirdo trying to conceal an eating disorder. When I worked on a local newspaper with Piers Morgan, the former editor of The Mirror, he'd chase me round the office taunting me with a bacon buttie. Another colleague, fearing for the lack of nutrients in my diet, would feed me chicken soup having picked out all the meat. There wasn't much point going to restaurants unless it was a vegetarian Indian, and I knew every one in Tooting, South London. My parents took it personally - I think the phrase “showing off” was used.

My doctor told me to eat a burger

Then when I was 27 I got ill. I always had flu, I was anaemic and my skin was terrible. This, of course, had more to do with the rubbish I was eating than the fact that I was a vegetarian. However, my doctor, sick of the sight of me, said he wouldn't see me again unless I went out that day and ate a burger. I'm not medically qualified so I did as I was told. Slowly I eased my way back in with fish: first with a piece of cod, which, when I took it out of the wrapping, made me recoil with how “just dead” it felt - then, about a year later, with bacon. I was away.

But going back on the meat-free wagon hasn't been easy. My husband refuses to take my conversion seriously and gets cross when we go out for an Indian or Chinese as we can't share a dish any more; he has to eat all the spare ribs now and is developing a porky personality to go with it.

When I told my children - aged 6, 4 and 18 months - that I wouldn't be eating meat any more because I didn't like the way the animals were treated, I'd imagined they'd ask questions and perhaps shed a tear or two before promising to join me. But Sky, my eldest daughter, said that was OK, she would eat my share, and four-year-old Gracie just said thoughtfully: “I worry about the animals all the time.” I think she was about to add “get a life”. Neither wants to stop eating meat, so I still cook it for them, as it's not up to me to make their choices in life.

At present I eat fish occasionally and I still wear leather, which is my biggest crisis of confidence. I will stop eating fish because I don't want to eat dead things any more, but the leather is an issue. I work in the fashion industry and I am not sure how the front row will feel about plastic or “pleather” as we call it at work. My budget doesn't stretch to Stella McCartney's £400 leather-free stilettos, and the occasional Marks & Spencer fake leather shoe just doesn't cut it in my circles. It's an internal debate I hope to resolve this year.

But I'm glad I am a veggie again. I feel so much happier when we drive to our Cornish house past the fields of lambs and cows. Nowadays I don't have to look away.

Lorraine Candy is the editor-in-chief of Elle

Mansel's old vegetarian food diary

Breakfast: porridge with raisins and muscovado sugar, apple juice and a weak black tea
Lunch: vegetable soup, cottage cheese, rye bread, tomatoes and salad, yoghurt
Dinner: Carrots and hoummos, folllowed by a large portion of penne pasta with feta, courgettes, garlic, olive oil and lemon juice. More yoghurt.

Mansel's new omnivorous food diary

Breakfast: porridge with raisins and muscovado sugar, apple juice and a weak black tea
Lunch: Cold salmon steak, with lots of salad. Fruit
Dinner: Shepherd's pie with green beans. Fruit

Lorraine's old omnivorous food diary

Breakfast: two slices of white toast and marmite
Lunch: Chicken ceasar salad. Two apples
Dinner: Chicken breast with pesto and white rice, peas and sweetcorn, or pork chops. Glass red wine

Lorraine's new vegetarian food diary

Breakfast: Two slices of whiettoast with marmite. Yoghurt with honey and blueberries.
Lunch: M&S pasta salad with pesto and pine nuts. Apple and sparkling water
Dinner: Basmati rice and beggie Thai curry. Two glasses of white wine. Two pieces of Green&Black's chocolate

Nutritionist's verdict

Mansel Fletcher's vegetarian day's diet was more nutritionally complete than his omnivorous day. However, the main problem with the vegetarian day's food is that the milk and feta lift saturated fat intakes above the daily maximum of 30g for a man (20g for a woman), even though total fat is below maximum levels. This is a point that dairy-eating vegetarians need to be careful of because over-reliance on full-fat dairy foods can raise saturated fat intakes significantly. The salt intakes at 9g is 3g above the maximum intake. Cutting back on ready-to-eat breakfast cereals, shop-bought hoummos and ready-made soups would reduce intakes significantly.

The calories in Mansel's omnivorous day fell to 1,100 - less than half of an average man's 2,550 estimated energy needs - and, therefore, nutrients of all types plummeted as well. However, he still managed six portions of fruit and veg and the salmon added valuable omega-3 fatty acids.

Lorraine Candy's vegetarian diet gave about 1,720 calories - less than a woman's daily estimated needs of 1,940 calories daily - and 68g of fat (just within the daily upper limit of 70g for a woman), of which 15g was saturated, below the 20g maximum for the day. She was slightly short on protein, eating 40g of her daily 45g target, and, had only four of her five fruit and vegetables and just over half of her fibre target. She managed to get all the iron she needed but would be advised to have vitamin C-rich fruits or veg at meals to maximise non-meat sources of iron. The white bread, yoghurt and pesto sauce meant that she virtually got her quota for the day of bone-building calcium.

On her omnivorous day Lorraine boosted her calories to 1,876 and her protein shot up from the chicken and chops to over double her daily needs. Her fat rose slightly to 77g and saturated fat to 18g, which is not bad considering she had quite fat-rich chops. Like around 40 per cent of all women in the UK, Lorraine's iron intake was below the recommended 15mg daily even though she was eating meat. She can improve on this by having eggs and lean cuts of beef along with oily fish and the dark meat of poultry.

AMANDA URSELL, Times nutritionist

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