Does being a meat and two veg guy make me a freak?

I wasn’t always a boring eater. I used to have a slightly crackpot reputation among friends and family for ordering the weirdest thing on the menu in a restaurant.

And yet I have had to reconcile myself to the fact that I’ve basically bottomed out as a meat and two veg guy. Sure, on the extremely rare occasions that I eat out, I’ll probably have something wild just so I can briefly feel alive again. But 99% of my meals are eaten at home, generally cooked by me, and with two fussy kids and a partner who responds with visceral horror any time I suggest we might try Polish cuisine (which is more like three meats and some cabbage), the good ol’ meat and two veg tends to win.

It’s such a depressing-sounding phrase – like you’ve given up on life, like you’re simply spooning down drably uniform food units as you go about your tedious little day, too starved of inspiration to even attempt to respond to culinary developments of recent years. As plant-based eating becomes increasingly popular – and offers an ever-expanding array of options – meat and two veg remains obstinately rooted in the British psyche. But life, and food, have moved on.

I don’t want to be too down on it. For starters: two veg – that’s pretty good, right? We’re talking about doing some solid damage to our five-a-day here. OK, in my house it’s often fairly unadventurous boiled things that won’t offend a six-year-old, but you don’t get more plant-based than a vegetable. “Meat” – well, it can cover a whole spectrum of possibilities: chicken! Beef! Vaguely avant garde sausages from our local sausage shop!

It would be a struggle to paint a meat and two veg lifestyle as particularly sexy, but you can’t believe the endorphin rush that comes from persuading a small person to eat food that isn’t covered in breadcrumbs and processed to within an inch of its life. If you don’t screw up the cooking of what is basically food that’s very easy to cook, then meat is nice! That’s why people eat it.

And you can be kind of ethical about the meat you choose, too: free-range chicken, grass-fed, organic lamb, avoid beef with a connection to deforestation in Latin America … Yes, it’s worse for the environment than simply not eating meat at all, but to eat meat and two veg is not to say I don’t care.

Yet, I am well aware this way of eating is out of date, a feeling exacerbated for me by the fact that my day job involves working with a lot of cool younger people. They talk about individual dishes in specific London restaurants the way I used to talk about the latest single from a mid-2000s indie band. And where back in my day vegans were regarded as a sort of extremist vegetarian sect who ate their own, peculiar, nut-based cuisine, now veganism seems to have leapfrogged vegetarianism in terms of popularity – people go to vegan restaurants because they’re cool, because they’ve heard about some amazing new dish, because of colossal advances in food technology, because of increased open-mindedness about food, because of the increased internationalism in cuisine and, naturally, a desire to consume food in a more healthy, environmentally-friendly way. People go to vegan restaurants without even being actual vegans.

• Is it time for Łukowski to replace his sausages …

Nonetheless, is it for me? For a long time, I’ve worried that nouveaux veganism is so cool that my dabbling with it would have the air of a midlife crisis. Is embracing veganism at the age of 40 the culinary equivalent of Ben Affleck getting a new tattoo?

Related: Lab-grown chicken and 3D-printed steak: what’s the future of plant-based foods?

But recently it has become so obvious that the wind is blowing in a certain direction – there’s now a plant-based section in Tesco – that I’ve realised I’ve probably been overthinking it. Ultimately, the world is changing: in my lifetime meat might become scarcer, or more expensive, or beyond the ethical pale, or grown in a vat, or replaced with insect protein. I have made my peace with the fact that, at some point, my diet will have to change.

So why not introduce some more plant-based foods into my already two-thirds plant-based diet? The need to appease my children has always been an excuse for lack of action, but the rise of faux meat is actually the perfect opportunity to pep up family mealtimes, be it from the now bewildering array of plant-based sausages available, to kievs, escalopes, and even fake bacon (that one’s a bit weird, to be honest).

• … with a plant-based alternative?

I’m not sure I’m ready for the really cutting-edge stuff, and meat is unlikely to leave my diet. I need to give the kids something to rebel against when they’re older and go fully plant-based themselves. But, for now, yes, I’m a meat and two veg guy. But sometimes I’m also a fake meat and two veg guy. And that’s what we call progress.

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