How to be a vegetarian? (And also, why to be one?)

[Alex K]

That's very true, about taste retraining. I now love all my replacement foods, including soya/oat/rice milk. It's just how my food tastes. All these replacements have got hugely better recently, in case anyone tried them a while back and thought they were horrible. Some of them indeed were very nasty. But now there is a wide range and you'd have to be a really fussy, stubborn bastard not to find something you like.

Of course, some people decide beforehand that anything that isn't meat will be disgusting (I've met quite a few).

I find it quite striking how my sensitivity for the tastes of different vegetables has intensified over the past 8 years. I now find a rich world of flavours and spices and volatile oils in things like fennel, all types of celery, beats, etc. that I would never have suspected, and have never noticed before when I thought of vegetables as the mere side dish. Rather than being forced to eat boring stuff as a vegetarian, I find that food has become so much more interesting to me.