It’s so passé to eat to live. What with all this first-world privilege, food is more about self-expression, ideologies, and foodie status than nutrition – eating to sustain your existence just gets a bit boring. Even back-to-the-Stone-Age Paleo is more of a trend than anything else: I’m pretty sure Paleolithic folk didn’t go about their days snapping pics of their protein bowls or tweeting their #hunting efforts.

When dietary requirements are all the vogue – I mean, picking the standard menu is so five years ago – and food has become culinary culture rather than sustenance, your food choices are bound to attract more attention.

And when your diet is self-inflicted, with the added bonus of being laden with a whole background philosophy, you can wave goodbye to eating in peace. My vegan experiment has reached the point where I’ve been subjected to enough comments to create a V-Card bingo: here are some tasters of the chat vegans have to endure – sorry, enjoy.

‘But you can’t have any refined sugars! And it’ll all have to be… raw!’

When I announced that I was about to embark on my V-card project, I was met by a deer-in-the-headlights reaction from a pair of fellow diners. The shock in their expression was real as they lamented my supposed divorce from sugars and cooked foods. It took me a while to assure them that no, refined sugars do not harm animals, nor do they have feelings of their own. (To the Fellow who tried to argue that I should be considering the emotions of lettuces: lettuces aren’t sentient either.) And the same goes for cooking, baking, boiling, frying, sautéing, and any other method of making things non-raw: it’s all ethically sound and vegan-friendly.

The misconceptions about veganism are more than understandable, though. The current clean eating fad does eliminate refined sugars, and often laces that with a vegan diet, while PBWF (plant-based, whole foods diet) is a buzzword on social media.

And if you thought standard veganism was radical, you should meet raw vegans, who don’t heat anything above the magic point of 48°C. Don’t get me started on fruitarians, who’ll happily survive off fruit (30 bananas for lunch comes as a standard feature) and claim that they’re eating balanced diet. I’m too much of a sugar addict and hot porridge lover to give up either sugar or stove – so no, no clean eating or rawness for me, please!

‘Where do you get your protein from?!’

I don’t exactly come across as the bodybuilding type – I avoid weights at the gym as I avoid meat, dairy, and eggs – so the number of people who express their concern over my vegan protein intake is quite astonishing. We’re living through a weird obsession with protein: protein powders, bars, and shakes are a hit even among the non-body builders, and ‘protein pack’ comes as a standard label on any snack.

Fear not, though: protein is the least of nutritional concerns for vegans, and in fact for anyone else. You really don’t need to be munching up multiple chickens in a post-work out protein window: on average, men should eat 55g and women 45g of protein a day, which, sorry to disappoint, doesn’t amount to even half a chicken. Two palm-sized portions of meat, tofu, or nuts, for example, will have you covered nicely.

‘I once heard of a vegan who became really unwell because they didn’t get enough nutrients’

And I once heard of a carnivore who became really unwell with a cocktail of lifestyle diseases because they ate a bit too much – oh no, wait, that’s just a shockingly high proportion of the population.

It’s true that being vegan can be a balancing act: as much as pro-vegan campaigns like to portray veganism as plain, Instagrammable sailing, it does take more than a spoonful of nutritional awareness to work out the right food combinations to guarantee all the nutrients. But why people are so concerned about minority diets when a bulk of the population is eating its way towards premature mortality, I don’t know.

‘I once had a parsnip’

Not everyone is about questioning my ability to exist as a vegan, though. Some people really like to show their support by telling me how they once were ‘nearly vegetarians’, eating fish, and restricting red meat to a meagre three days a week. Whether vegetable stories are offered as a way to bond over parsnips or as a pre-emptive defense mechanism against the potentially preachy vegan, I don’t know, but at least food chat beats weather chat. And it’s always better than…

The V Card: The carvery

“I could never give up the meat from my meat and two veg”

Well, I never asked you to. Don’t get me wrong, I like talking about people’s favourite foods and what they couldn’t live without, be that Scotch eggs or Camembert. But when the conversation moves inevitably to the next stage of ‘Don’t you miss Wensleydale with cranberries/dairy whipped cream/milk chocolate from Hotel Chocolat/[insert one of my non-vegan food loves here],’ that’s just brutal. I mean, I’m trying to stop animal torture here, so why torture me?

And now, could I just have a minute to eat my dinner, please? (It comes with enough protein, promise)