In an extract from his new book The Ten (Food) Commandments, the restaurant critic and confirmed carnivore explains how he learned to love vegetables
A weekday lunchtime and I am standing by my stove doing something appalling. I have done bad things with food before, of course. I once ate two Pot Noodles for dinner, and didn’t even feel guilty. I am a man of appetites and sometimes those appetites make me do things. You cannot have one part of me without the other.
What I am doing now is not in character. It goes against everything in which I believe. But still I am doing it because, if I’m going to make a convincing argument about what non-meat cookery should and shouldn’t look like, I first have to stand in another person’s shoes. And so: I am cooking with Quorn. I am cooking with a meat substitute, made using a fungal growth called mycoprotein, which is meant to have a meaty texture that recalls the muscle mass of something which once had a pulse.
Related: Jay Rayner goes into the abattoir
Related: Food shortages could force world into vegetarianism, warn scientists
Continue reading...