I will probably have my honorary membership of The Meat Club revoked for sharing this with you, but I did my first flesh-free day yesterday – tofu sausages in the morning and chilli made with quorn in the evening. And I’m feeling fine.

We’re much better at responding positively to some food messages than others. When Charles Clover wrote The End of the Line about the importance of only buying fish coming from sustainable sources, so many of us changed our eating habits rapidly – and restaurants responded too. When the smug and earnest-looking Paul McCartney family posed to say we should be like them and have “meat free Mondays” we turned away not because what they were saying was wrong (yes, we are destroying the planet with our ever-growing meat demands) but because we didn’t want to be hectored by the sanctimonious.

 While cod and tuna sales have dipped, meat sales can’t keep up with demand and with the economic empowering of the Chinese, pig producers here are doing roaring export trade to there. America of course is the biggest culprit – they also eat more pork than they produce and ship the rest over from the Danes.

As with the title of my dear friend Rachel De Thample’s book “Less Meat, More Veg”, I will tweak my diet for the sake of my own health as well as that of the planet. And I’m delighted to see that our new head cook Marcus is bringing in a Vegetarian Menu to give you all a new, guilt-free reason to dine with us.