I recently convinced a friend to accompany me to the new full-on vegan restaurant-cum-yoga studio Stem and Glory – no mean feat, given that the same ‘friend’ has found her calling in making sure that I know which of my favourite foods I can no longer eat. Halfway through our very vegan, very chocolatey cakes, she leant in and whispered: “You know what, only the woman with blue hair looks like what I was expecting. The rest are… normal.”

It may come as a shocking revelation to some that most vegans do not, in fact, walk around town with bare feet, wear hemp, or even have ‘vegan’ tattooed on their forehead. I’m not exactly a paragon of the back-to-earth hippie look either, what with my pink nails, non-naturally blonde hair, and distinct lack of self-dyed garments.

Even more shocking, though, is how removed vegan food can from anything even vaguely resembling a vegetable: like a Louis Vuitton bag sold on the streets of Paris or a Britney Spears live performance, much of it screams ‘fake’. If you thought that every vegan was happy to go plant-based in the most literal meaning of the word, with a diet of parsnips, potatoes and polenta, it’s about time you reconsidered your worldview. Because, believe it or not, many vegans still want to eat like carnivores, only without the actual meat. Enter, vegan fakes.

“Fake meats are essentially the chicken nuggets of the vegan world: beautifully processed, heavy on mystery ingredients, and light on the peeling and prepping front”

Browsing the alternative meat section in any supermarket is a testament to vegan creativity: tofu, tempeh, seitan, Oumph!, pulled oats – there is more variety to vegan meats than to a standard butcher’s selection of charcuterie. How people come up with these ideas, I really don’t know, but there are enough people growing fungi, working their magic on soy beans, and cooking up gluten flour for meat-like substances to be churned out from experimental kitchens like new narcotics emerging from home labs.

I won’t lie – I was initially very much opposed to the idea of fake meat. If it’s not the real deal, why bother? And somehow a slab of gluten (that’s seitan) as your Sunday roast just isn’t the most appetising culinary prospect.

But as with so many other things, my Violet V-Card project has made me a bit of a convert. Fake meats are essentially the chicken nuggets of the vegan world: beautifully processed, heavy on mystery ingredients, and light on the peeling and prepping front.

I saw the light thanks to a batch of tofu hot dogs that tasted just like the real thing. Although that says more about the quality – or lack thereof – of a standard hot dog than the authenticity of vegan ones: I once made the grave mistake of looking at the ingredients of a hot dog pack proudly proclaiming 4 per cent as the actual meat content, with the percentage of obscure ‘ingredients comparable to meat’ being just a bit higher.

When even the meat you’re subbing for is not really meat, you might as well go vegan – equal fakeness all round.

Some fakes, though, are real gems in their own right. In the name of investigative journalism and vegan culinary reporting (yes, that’s a euphemism for procrastinating in my degree), I found my way to a wonderful little joint in Shoreditch that does exactly what it says on the tin: Vegan Burgers by Mooshies.

Their torch-bearing menu item, the Pulled Mooshie, made me wonder if the ‘vegan burgers’ sign outside had just been a hallucination, given how much it looked like your standard pulled pork burger. Tucking in though, the experience was, quite literally, much fruitier than any piggy you’ve bitten into. If you’d never heard of jackfruit, worry not, neither had your resident Violet vegan, but it turns out that this relative of figs can be cooked and spiced up into a deceivingly pulled meat-like consistency.

In many ways it was like having a surf and turf: there was a distinct BBQ-y flavour dancing on my tastebuds, combined with distinct undertones of pineapple. With that explosion in my mouth, I was sold. Mooshie, marry me?

The V Card: The Carvery

It’s not all about meat, though: for many, the real vegan challenge is cheese. If a cow was saved every time I heard the ‘I’d go vegan but I cannot exist without cheese’ line, the world would be a much more vegan place, as there would, quite simply, be no beef left.

But very conveniently, blending, processing, and doing who knows what to nuts gives you vegan cheese, or the snazzily spelled cheeze.

I was a bit of a late bloomer in this respect, as my first encounter with vegan cheese was on the sub-optimal side of things. It involved a pizza in Zizzi’s – heralded for its introduction of vegan cheese to the menu – with sad white puddles on it that from a distance could have just about been mistaken for mozzarella, but that close up turned out to be more of a white sauce-type thing than anything I’d standardly have on a pizza.

So it took the visit to Mooshie for my cheeze love to blossom. To accompany my aforementioned jackfruit burger, I ordered Mooshie’s cheezy sweet potato fries. Let’s just say it’s a small miracle that I lived to tell story, because the chips exceeded Abba in their cheesiness.

I don’t think discovering all this fake food is a rebound relationship for me: I’m more than ready to break up with cheesy chips from the Van of Life for good to have some more Mooshie in my life. Turns out that sometimes a vegan girl’s just gotta fake it