The curse of having to go vegan

I’m on a no-alcohol, no-caffeine, no-sugar, vegan diet. It’s less fun than it sounds. Occasionally I cheat, but mostly I don’t, because I don’t want to upset the lovely doctors at the Infusio clinic in Frankfurt who gave me my stem cells for the Lyme disease treatment and who insist they need the right anti-inflammatory, alkaline diet to thrive. And besides, even though it’s horrible, I’m quite enjoying, in my masochistic way the rigour and the punishing asceticism. Also, it has given me insights into a world which I never imagined in a million years I would ever enter.

Vegans walk among us. They are everywhere. But you don’t really notice this until you become one and suffer alongside them. I say ‘suffer’ because, much as they may deny it, veganism is a self-inflicted curse. Like a vampire (only without the blood intake, obviously), you are doomed to live in a nether-world on the margins of society, cruelly constrained by your bizarre dietary practices, feared and shunned by normal people, only really able to associate with your own kind because only they understand or care.

When you eat meat you’re never short of dinner options. One of those juicy aged steaks from Aldi, say; or a beef stew you made at the weekend; or roast chicken; or, if you really want to push out the health boat, fish. Occasionally, if the wife’s involved in the decision-making, you might have the odd dinner or lunch or breakfast where you forgo meat, and get your protein from cheese instead. But when you’re a vegan every one of these delicious possibilities is verboten.

What do you eat instead? Dal, mainly. Your best survival strategy is to eat like they do on the Indian subcontinent — only without the ghee, which is a bugger, because that’s what lends the buttery richness to your dal.