It’s all well and good to be vegan in the safety of my vegan closet, i.e. my gyp room.

I don’t know if my neighbours are silently raising their eyebrows at my growing stash of almond milk, soya yoghurt, and the new love of my love, coconut porridge topped with peanut butter (getting in that protein has never been yummier), but at least no one has turned me in to the porters for bringing Mother Nature back home.

However, there’s a limit to for how long you can isolate yourself into a sweet-potato baking, gingerbread porridge concocting, avocado Instagramming safe space. Three weeks into the experiment, it was time to come out of the kitchen loud and proud. It was time for The Formal.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous about my first time. I’d heard horror stories from my gluten, lactose, or just otherwise intolerant friends about endless fruit salads as dessert substitutes, and I’ll never forget the tenderness in celiac friend’s voice when she reminisced about the one time she was treated to a gluten-free brownie at formal.

"While I wouldn’t be tucking into a carcass any time soon, I was absolutely fine with hyenas doing so"

I mean, yes, I’m a lover of bananas, nuts, and all things fruity, but in my world, putting together the notions of ‘dessert’ and ‘healthy’ constitutes an oxymoron. So, booking my place, my heart broke a little when I ticked the vegan box and said my teary goodbyes to the sweet potato cheesecake calling to me on the menu – what would cheesecake be without cheese?

Yet, it turns out that going to formal is not just a matter of specifying your dietary requirements, mentally embracing fruit salad, and then sitting back and waiting for multiple courses of vegan goodness to be dished up. Oh no, I was really thrown in at the deep end at the pre-dinner wine reception.

“Excuse me, is the wine vegan?” I approached the waiter feeling like a seasoned vegan.

“Wine? Vegan? What do you mean?” the puzzlement in the waiter’s eyes imitated my expression when my supervisor asks me about that late-night essay I haven’t looked at since I Hermes-ed it off.

“Yeah, is it vegan?” I was met with deadly silence. I guess spending your days googling non-vegan ingredients is not the done thing after all. I had to go into my full-blown vegan-educator mode:

“Sometimes they use stuff like isinglass as a fining agent. And isinglass, as we all know, is fish bladder protein.”

“Fish in wine?! I mean we have wine with fish but there’s no fish in the wine.”

“Not the whole fish, just bits of the bladder…” I started to feel like I might just be earning myself freak status in college. “Just give me the elderflower.”

Having lost both my complementary wine and a reasonable chunk of my dignity, the only way was up. I was given trendy kale as the main, my potatoes were served separately from the standard buttered versions, and – lo and behold – my dessert was not a bog-standard fruit salad. The pineapple slivers with cinnamon and sorbet didn’t quite match the cheesecake, but it was actually really nice. Honestly. 

As so often in life, it wasn’t the food but other people that delivered the real challenge. The pineapple concoction soon caught the eye of my neighbouring diner: “So have you got some sort of a dietary thing going on?” (talk about dinner-table subtlety). I took a deep breath and came out as a vegan: it wasn’t quite as loud and proud as I’d hoped, but rather a bit of mumbling about doing a vegan experiment and writing a column.

That was enough to ignite the inner fire of my fellow diner: “How do you feel about scavengers like hyenas eating carcasses, since their food is already dead?” I smiled politely and said that while I wouldn’t be tucking into a carcass any time soon, I was absolutely fine with hyenas doing so.

The V Card: The Makeover

Sadly, my opponent was throwing in arguments increasingly removed from reality: “What about all those lettuces that you’re eating? Doesn’t a lettuce have feelings?” I felt like my arguing skills had been exhausted beyond a one-word response of “no”.

Not so for my new friend who was really starting to fly high: “But it’s just because we’ve decided to classify them as vegetables. It’s all language, just language.”

I sank a bit deeper into my chair, looking longingly at my fish-bladdery wine and trying to find the nicest way of delivering the news that biological evidence would seem to suggest that lettuces are, in fact, quite different from cows.

Pineapple instead of cheese, educating people about fish bladders, and disagreeing about lettuce cognition: during one vegan formal I’d done more than in a year of non-vegan dinners. However, I’d also had a five course meal, tried to explain my degree to scientists, and been subjected to a questioning about St John’s Apocalypse – all pretty standard Cambridge dinner occurrences. Yes, I was out, but waving the V-card in public doesn’t trump everything else