'I had to sit outside class for being veggie and swapped meat for cabbage'

29 September 2023 , 17:55

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Artist Berry Daines used to swap dinners

As an 11-year-old girl, Lynne Rose was made to sit outside her cookery class for an entire year, on a wooden bench with only a pile of coats for company.

Her mother had made the innocent mistake of offering to supply vegetable margarine as a substitute for the lard used in the lessons, which vexed Lynne’s cookery teacher so much she banished her from the classroom “until my vegetarian phase was over”. A headstrong young woman who turned vegetarian at the age of eight after watching an Open University programme showing a cow being slaughtered, Lynne was determined to stand (or rather sit) her ground.

Her “vegetarian phase” has now lasted more than 50 years: “I always felt like the odd one out but it’s something I’ve always been proud of.” Nowadays, Lynne, who hailed from Basildon, Essex, and now lives in nearby Billericay, is one of more than three million vegetarians in the UK.

Environmentalism, animal welfare and personal health have always been push factors, but the dizzying range of veggie products on supermarket shelves surely helps. When Lynne and her fellow pioneers started on their meat-free diets, it was a very different story. Textured Vegetable Protein, a vegan soy mock meat, was invented in 1960. The first commercial tofu arrived in the UK in 1966. And in 1985, a product made of mycoprotein developed from a type of microfungus was launched in the UK by Marlow Foods.

Lynne Rose went vegetarian at the age of eight

Paul Harrison has also been a veggie since he was eight

Manufacturers realised “Fusarium venenatum” was unlikely to catch on as a brand name, so called it Quorn after a village in Leicestershire. Sunday is World Vegetarian Day, an annual fixture since 1977 “to promote the joy, compassion and life-enhancing possibilities of vegetarianism”.

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But older vegetarians may be remembering how they were regarded before the diets went mainstream. For Paul Harrison, who first gave up meat in 1975 when he was 11 years old because he wanted “to save the world”, being different was actually part of the appeal. He said: “I guess I enjoyed being eccentric.” In the wrong company, however, eccentricity can make you a target.

Lynne aged ten, two years after she stopped eating meat

A classmate once warned him that he was “missing a magic ingredient” from his diet – jelly. Paul immediately scurried to the greengrocers, clutching coins from his newspaper round. Only later did it dawn on him that he’d been stitched up, unaware that all jelly in the 1970s contained gelatine, made from ground-up animal skin, bones, tendons and ligaments.

And being eccentric could be inconvenient when his trusted mum, a Brown Owl for their Leicestershire village of Glenfield’s Girl Guides, wasn’t around to cook her bean stew and meat free chilli-sin-carne. In his mid teens, Paul attended week-long residential camps for budding archaeologists, finding options so limited that he ate 40 eggs in one week.

Tim Barford quit meat at age 17

Berry Daines, a 61-year-old artist who grew up in Lincoln and decided at the age of nine that she didn’t like meat, recalls how school dinners involved trading the “unpleasant” ingredients on her plate for other children’s cabbage and parsnips. A squatter in London during the 1980s, Tim Barford – who shunned meat aged 17 as an act of political rebellion – found that being veggie was “pretty cool” on the counter-cultural scenes.

Tim, now 60 and the founder of VegFest UK, lived off “rice, lentils, wholewheat flour, Jumbo Oats and vegetables scrounged off Chapel Market at closing time”. Playfully dubbed by pals as “Rainbow Lentil”, Tim says his vegetarian diet hasn’t changed much in the last 25 years. He mourns the loss of Sosmix and Steakettes and steers clear of the newer meat-free options.

Tim during his squatting years in 1981

Paul, on the other hand, thinks it is “amazing how much choice there is” today. Lynne, too, is grateful for the vegetarian food revolution. And although both used to be the only vegetarians in their families, Lynne has raised her daughter vegetarian from birth and Paul’s son has now joined him in his green mission. Lynne, now a teacher herself, has even become friends with a girl who used to taunt her in school – by smearing meat dishes on her face.

Mizy Judah Clifton