Introduction The Happy Vegetarian

Twelve years ago I gave up eating meat because of famine in the Third World. Many of my friends thought that such a decision was bizarre and wondered how, as someone considered to be a gourmet cook, I would be able to survive in the kitchen without such an indispensable ingredient? They thought vegetarianism was a regime of brown rice, heavy nut roasts and leaden tarts made of wholemeal pastry needing a masonry drill to cut it. Indeed these criticisms of vegetarianism, though crude, have been fairly accurate until recent years.