Are you strictly wheat and two veg ... (original) (raw)

Celebby-veggies

Gwyneth Paltrow is so green she's practically salad. Charged by macrobiotic, wholegrain fuel and wielding a child called Apple, she and Chris Martin are Britain's first family of meatless food. They lead a happy troop of celebrity vegetarians through the red-carpetted fields of barley and oats and soy-substitutes. Richard Gere explains his ideology here: 'You start with an insect,' he says, 'and it ends up being Afghanistan. I'm reaching with this, but there is a connection.'Alicia Silverstone is planning to take her veganism to the next level by 'raising a family on a farm and growing my own food, and growing my hair down to my ankles'. Rock on. Woody Harrelson has been vegan for 18 years. Why? Dairy is the devil's work. 'It is evil to your body to put something in there that's designed to make an animal go from very small to very big in a short time,' he says of milk. Avril Lavigne upset family friends by going vegan, forcing La Pizzeria in Ontario to take down their 'home of Avril Lavigne's favourite pizza' sign. 'I don't eat mushrooms or pepperoni any more,' she says. 'Meat's not too great for you.' **Tobey Maguire'**s in Avril's gang too. 'I don't like eating dead carcasses pumped full of chemicals and hormones,' says Spiderman. 'It's not a moral thing. It's logical to me not to eat that shit.' Josh Hartnett lost out on Peta's prestigious sexiest vegetarian award to Outkast's Andre 3000, but hasn't eaten meat since he was 12. 'One day I was cutting up a chicken for my mom and I hit a tumour with the knife,' he explains, swoonily. 'There was pus and blood all over the place.'

Talking of pus and blood, **Kelly Osbourne'**s a veggie too. She upset her fellow salad-eaters in 2005 when she dyed her bulldog, Piglet, fuchsia.

Veggie-come-latelies and born again omnivores

We know better than most, the trials of sticking to a meatless diet. It's hard! So hard in fact that some of us stray. We started off vegetarians, then gently began experimenting with slim meats - the wafer-thin hams, the prosciuttos, the bacons. Before we knew it we were bathing in liver. We're not alone. When she got married, Madonna embraced the Brit lifestyle, embracing sausage rolls, protein and blood-lust after a lifetime of staunch vegetarianism. Anthea Turner says she smelt her builders' bacon butties and fell off the vegetable wagon. While Julia Sawalha strayed to the meat-side after four years on the greens - she was filmed eating ostrich on the Big Breakfast. Busted! One of Peta's 'sexiest vegetarians' Reese Witherspoon appeared on Ellen Degeneres' talk show cooking coq au vin. 'Everything's better with bacon!' she trilled. Liv Tyler went vegan for love when she met Joaquin Phoenix, but returned to beef when the relationship went sour. Vegetarian animal rights campaigner by day, former fur-wearer by night - 'When I crack an egg now,' Heather Mills says, 'I think: "Could that have been a baby?"' Her ex-ex Chris Terrill fondly remembers Heather cooking him her sublime Lancashire hotpot.Drew Barrymore, once a strict pleather-wearing veggie, now likes a sausage. Or, as she puts it: 'I don't put strict restrictions on myself any more.' And even the Dalai Lama's strayed. 'When I see a row of plucked chickens hanging in a meat shop, it hurts,' His Holiness once said. The poor dear tried to keep to a diet of nuts and milk until doctors forced him to return to meat.

Where the smart set veg out

TeaNY, 90 Rivington St, NYC

Moby (who defines himself as a 'vegan fascist') opened a meatless restaurant and tearoom in 2002. His ex-girlfriend runs things now, and there's a nice hardcover book in the toilet for visitors to browse while 'going'. Vegans think of everything.

The Gate, 51 Queen Caroline Street, London, W6

Madge, Gwynnie and Stella flock to this converted church hall in Hammersmith to gorge themselves (sensibly) on lentils and the like.

Terre a Terre, 71 East Street, Brighton, Sussex

The Brighton set frequent this inventive restaurant, with Nick Cave, Fat Boy Slim and Bobby Gillespie all spotted sampling their much-drooled over tapas. They sell a range of their favourite pickles and sauces in jam jars by the front door too. Not the celebrities. That would be silly.