I tried the vegetarianism thing through 2010 – when I moved to Greenwich, I was living with two vegetarians, and out of respect for them (they owned the house) I tried not to bring meat into the house.

For a while, I ate it out of the house, but when money got tight after I stopped working for ORG, I basically stopped eating out, which meant that if I had food out of the house, it was stuff I’d had the foresight to stuff in my bag as I left.

I didn’t particularly find I missed specific foods; like you, I thought I’d miss bacon and steak – but cheap bacon is shit, and since that was all I could afford even before I went veggie, it wasn’t a big deal. Steaks I did miss more, but I found ways around it.

And I discovered new foods that I wouldn’t have picked up before, which I’ve wound up developing recipes to make at home, in a much healthier way than the ready meals I was grabbing because they were cheap/quick/easy.

The one thing I found that surprised me, sometime in January 2011 when I was out with friends for food and ended up choosing a steak restaurant, was that for a couple of days afterwards, I had massively more energy, and felt generally healthier.

My GP later pointed out that what I probably missed most, through not eating meat, was iron :p