On Monday night I went to the Stella McCartney hosted, UK premiere of Food Inc, an Oscar-nominated documentary film which exposes the corruption, mis-information and generally scandalous behaviour of the food production industry of the US.  Before we could give ourselves a congratulatory pat on the back for living off the fat of England’s green and pleasant lands, at the end of the film, Patrick Holden, the director of the Soil Association stood up and told the packed auditorium that basically, everything that happens in America, pretty much goes on here.

If you’ve read Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, or Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals, you won’t find many surprises - except perhaps that Food Inc, also produced and partly presented by Eric Schlosser himself,  is visually very beautiful to look at in spite of its bleak subject matter. The film packs all the punches you might expect as you see how chickens are mass-produced in conditions that bring tears to your eyes, not just out of pity for the chickens but also for the “farmers” who take on huge business loans yet earn paltry (see how I avoided making a poultry pun there?) amounts of money; you hear about Monsanto’s brutal “ownership” of the soybean crop; you see impoverished Mexicans struggling to spend as little as possible on food so they can save for diabetes medication - the irony here of course being that diabetes is partly caused by the cheap food they eat.

I gave up eating meat and fish at the end of last summer.  If you can still find a copy of Harper’s Bazaar (the one with Julianne Moore on the cover), I wrote an article about how hard it is to give up meat when you quite like the odd steak, and more to the point, you don’t like that many vegetables.

There are so many reasons  - health, cruelty to animals - why it makes sense to eat less meat, but the argument which may well prove to be the most persuasive in the long run, is the UN’s statistics pointing to the harm caused to the environment, explained succinctly recently on Gwyneth Paltrow’s website by Sir Paul McCartney.

Giving up meat has definitely changed my life.  On Saturday night I attempted to make some vegan burgers from a recipe I found on the bestselling author Jane Green’s website.  (She is a good source for some great veggie recipes incidentally, well worth checking out!)  Feeling the pressure a bit - the beetroot and carrot hummous recipe I’d taken from a veggie cookbook received a huge thumbs down from my kids the night before - I liked the fact that this recipe called for mushrooms, lots of them, minced to smithereens in a food blender.  My son hates mushrooms.  Crushed to molecular proportions, he wouldn’t notice a thing.  (Evil laugh here, please).

One slight problem, we didn’t have a blender. We had a Smoothie mixer which a cosmetics company had once sent me to promote their juicy coloured lip glosses; we had a French herb chopper with a cracked plastic bowl; and one of those plunger things you plonk into the saucepan to make soups in a hurry, then spend hours wiping off the splashes of tomato all over the kitchen afterwards.

After several tries and a mound of plastic bowls and jugs piling up in the sink, I did what every self-respecting woman in her right mind would do: I had a tantrum.

“I can’t believe we’ve been married for 350 years and we still don’t have a Magimix! What kind of a marriage is this?!”

30 minutes and one short car ride later, the chrome MAgimix came to live with us. Happily ever after.  Except there was no space for it in the kitchen.  Two hours later, 5000 bottles of oriental sauce and several out of date jars of oregano and an armoury of kitchen knives were moved (without any of them being thrown) and finally the Magimix had a home.

The mushroom and pecan burgers were a hit.

See how giving up meat can be life-changing?