Queueing behind a young woman in the supermarket I became fascinated by the items she had placed on the conveyor belt.

Several bottles of expensive booze had gone through first, followed by six tins of chickpeas, two bits of broccoli, then packet after packet of processed meat substitute products.

Cheese-free cheese, ham-free ham, soy this and tofu that, and something to make a curry with that was simply called ‘Chunks’…

Bringing up the rear, rather fabulously, were two enormous crates of an energy drink called Monster Energy Ultra.

I was bursting to ask this lady: ‘Has it ever occurred to you that the reason you need 24 large cans of liquid energy in your weekly shop is that the food you are putting into yourself is almost totally devoid of energy?’

She was only in her thirties, I would guess from her clothing, and the usual assortment of tattoos and piercings that one sees on young women nowadays, but she had silver hair and pale skin with a greenish hue.

She did not look to me at all healthy, but perhaps I was wrong and she had deliberately dyed her hair grey and powdered her face with greenish white make-up.

What chiefly baffles me about the vegan movement is the lack of fruit and vegetables involved. This woman was apparently not all that interested in fresh food.

What she wanted was processed junk that tasted of meat. It could be made of anything. Chunks of what? She didn’t care, so long as she could make-believe it was something else.

This I do not understand. If you are convinced that meat is appalling, then why would you want to replicate the experience of eating it? I don’t drink alcohol. I don’t drink anything that tastes of alcohol either. I don’t want to kid myself that the situation is not what it is by slurping alcohol-free beer.

Why do vegans want to kid themselves by eating replica bacon? It doesn’t seem very congruent to me. If meat is so morally redundant, or unhealthy, or whatever it is they claim, then why would they want to imitate the taste of it?

And then there is the question of dirty veganism, by which I mean the relapsing they seem to do when they don’t think anyone is looking.

I bumped into someone I know who is vegan the other day and he was hunched in his car stuffing an ice cream down his throat.

‘Just one Cornetto?’ I muttered at him through the window, for he was gobbling this cone at such speed it was like watching a snake dislocating its jaw to swallow a cow.

Sure, it’s possible that it was a vegan Cornetto, which Wall’s describes as ‘made with soy and gluten free’.

But vanilla flavour soy with chocolate flavouring would not explain the speed he was stuffing it down, nor the ecstasy on his face. Nor the fact he was sat behind the wheel of his car with the engine running, and when he saw me, he slumped down further, pushed the rest of the cone down his throat and began driving away.

Perhaps the green-faced girl has a secret stash. Maybe there’s the food they buy when they’re full of good intentions and then there’s the mad dash to the corner shop for emergency meat and dairy.

As she walked away with her various hessian sacks emblazoned with right-on slogans, I watched my items go through: fresh prawns, a bunch of parsley, some cherry tomatoes.

I climbed back into the pick-up truck with our dinner. ‘I’m making you a nice seafood linguine,’ I told the builder b, who was covered in dust and paint after a hard day’s work. It’s one of his favourite meals. I follow a recipe given to me years ago by a boyfriend from Naples, modified recently with a few tips from my Sicilian hairdresser. It’s heaven on a plate, although of course you have to suspend the idea that the prawns’ rights have been infringed in the making of it.

‘Did you get the picture I sent you?’ I said, heaving myself up into the truck. But he was looking at cars on Facebook marketplace.

I told him about the green-faced woman, and he gave me the meat lecture all the way home. ‘Farm to fork is the only solution. No one likes factory farming. But the answer is not to stop supporting good farmers closer to home by eating packets of tofu. The answer is to eat less meat of better quality.’

All I know is that I’m very glad our house sale went through and we are packing up to move to a place where farm to fork, and sea to spoon, will be a very short distance indeed.