Fat chance I’ll ever be a really skinny vegan

I’m thinking of starting a blog called the Fat Vegan, except being a journalist, I can’t bear to write anything for free.

I know this is not in the spirit of blogging, but then neither is fatness in the spirit of veganism. At least, not traditionally anyway — vegans are meant to be slim and shiny as eels, prompting people to tell them they ought to eat more pies and stop looking so anaemic. The first time I met one — a vegan, I mean — in London in the Eighties, he fitted the vegan cliché perfectly. Stick-thin and ash-grey, he was a cadaver in black faux-leather, with zero va-va-va-voom and an air of wilting melancholia. Crikey, I thought to myself, if this is what being vegan does to you, then you can keep it. Pass the cheese toasties.

But this was in the olden days, before the advent of Quorn (not vegan I know, but close enough); before even the ascent of St Linda of McCartney, whose fast food saved many a vegetarian in the Nineties before we realised that there were healthier alternatives to the alternative. Twenty years ago, being vegan was a militant political act; you were alone on the frontline of animal rights, of concern for the environment when the rest of us were still coming to terms with CFCs in aerosols and wondering if you were still vegetarian if you ate fish finger sandwiches.