“And so, the end is near…” – Meat Free Challenge, week 4

Four weeks in, and I’m getting very near to the finish line – at the other side of which, a sizzling hamburger can already be glimpsed like a mirage promising meaty times ahead.

Or maybe not. You see, I’m really not that desperate to return to the old carnivore ways. Granted, I’ll be glad to have the choice to munch on meat or fish again if I so wish. But I think I’ll be doing a lot less of that in the future. The veggie month has widened my food horizons and challenged many previously steadfastly held assumptions, most prominently the notion that to classify as a "proper" meal, a plateful of food needs to have something that was recently breathing as its centrepiece.

Here are a few other things I’ve learnt during the last four weeks…

1)   Meat doesn’t make a meal. It can be difficult to think of veggies as the star attraction of a robust meal. How exactly are you going to replace, say, a steak or a pork chop with a carrot? But with a bit of imagination and experimentation (of which more later), it’s easy to come up with purely veggie alternatives that taste just as good – if not better.

2)   Non-meat diet suits a greedy person. A vegetable diet allows you to stuff your face in a more comprehensive fashion than a diet rich in meat products – which is a bit of a dream come true for someone as irreparably greedy as I am. Take a recent trip to the excellent Corner Café in Leeds (which really should be visited by anyone even vaguely interested in Indian food). I indulged in a feast that, under normal circumstances, would have resulted in such a robust bout of belly-fullness I would have had to roll out the restaurant’s door. By erasing meat from the plate, I wound up full to the brim, but comfortably so.

3)   Veggies are a tight person’s dream. Due to a wide variety of the misery and trouble life can chuck in your path, things have been a bit tough recently on the money-front. Even so, I’m reluctant to start scaling down on quality food, even when my bank balance is yelling for an energetic shopping bout at the nearest branch of any frozen foods retailer. As such, figuring out that replacing meat and fish with veggie purchases results in – roughly speaking – a 25% decrease in the shopping bill has been greeted with considerable whoops of joy.

4)   Veggie diet inspires experimentation and innovation. I’d like to think I’ve picked up basic cooking skills during the time I’ve been interested in slaving in the kitchen. Even so, I can’t handle a bit of meat without some vague worries of poisoning myself or, even worse, anyone else partaking with poorly cooked bits of once-living matter. Here’s the thing: you’d have to really put yourself out to make people ill with vegetables: if they’re not crawling with maggots, they’re good to eat. As such, I’ve been able to throw cookbooks to the side and figure things out for myself for the first time during the last few weeks. Apart from a few midweek staples, nothing has been cooked the same way twice. A few things have even been completely made up. This is new territory for me - and I'm enjoying it.