THERE are times when you hear something so daft it almost calls for a double take.

"I don't like vegetarian food," sniffed a woman who, despite her shallow approach to food, was bragging about her culinary prowess on a TV cookery show.

It seemed a ridiculous thing to say, like when parents insist their fussy child will "only eat chips" because they turn their nose up at greens.

Just because a dish is meat-free doesn't mean it's exclusively for vegetarians. There's a massive range of veggie food out there, so to say you don't like it is a bit like saying you don't like anyone with red hair, or place names beginning with 'O'.

The expansion of the food industry over the years, and the bewildering range of food and food outlets available worldwide, means that meat is massively over produced and consumed.

Rearing livestock for consumption is a major contributor to the gases that hasten climate change - the United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organisation estimates it's responsible for nearly 15per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, and other groups believe the figure is much higher. And meat-heavy diets, especially red meat, are said to increase the risk of conditions such as heart disease and cancer. Yet many people who still insist on eating meat every day, despite the warnings not to.

I gave up meat when I was 18, solely because I was horrified by battery farming. I accept that eating meat is perfectly natural, and I have nothing against it if the animal has been reared humanely, but I regard intensive farming as cruel and unnatural.

When I turned veggie there wasn't much in the way of meat-free food, other than dehydrated soya mince and sausage mix that resembled pulped cardboard. Now there's a huge range of good quality vegetarian food, offering something for all tastes. With so much choice, even die-hard meat-eaters have no excuse not to try an alternative now and then.

With meat consumption under discussion at the recent UN summit, Sir Paul McCartney has been urging people to go veggie once a week. Joanna Lumley, Fearne Cotton and Woody Harrelson are among the stars appearing in an online video for his song, Meat Free Monday, and those signing up to the once-a-week-flesh-free-diet pledge include Jamie Oliver and Ricky Gervais.

In this fast food age, the life of an animal is as cheap as the mass-produced burger-filler it ends up as. Meat should be treated as something more precious. We owe it to ourselves, and to the environment, not to consume it every day - and we owe it the animals that provide it to make sure they're farmed and killed to decent welfare standards.