EVEN if their ranks do include Billy Connolly, Madonna, Joanna Lumley; and, believe it or not, Meat Loaf, vegetarians have had to put up with derision and incomprehension for years.
When Michael Colgan, artistic director of the Gate Theatre in Dublin, decided to give up meat at the age of six, his mother brought him to the doctor.
"She thought there was something wrong with me. Vegetarianism wasn't a word you heard much of in the 1950s," he recalls. "Bout I've always been stubborn. There are certain things I can't get my head around. I didn't wear flared trousers during the 1970s either."
Now the tables have been turned. With the recent BSE scare, the 2 to 3 per cent of the population who don't eat meat must be feeling more than a little smug; their choice of diet vindicated at last.
Katie Donovan takes some soundings from vegetarians past, present and possibly to come.
Professor Ivor Browne, former chief psychiatrist with the Eastern Health Board:
Becoming a vegetarian has been a gradual process for me over the last 10 years. I now don't eat red meat, fish or chicken. I still eat dairy produce and I don't believe all that stuff about margarine. I eat a lot of potatoes and butter.
I'm not an ideological vegetarian; I didn't set out to be one. I do a form of spiritual meditation called Sahaj Maj, and most people who do that are vegetarian. It is a process of refinement. You feel lighter after eating a meal without meat. Grosser food turns you off. You don't make the same smells. You're more like a horse or a cow.
I gradually turned off meat. I remember the last meal I had with meat. It was bacon and cabbage and I had it on Inisheer. It turned my stomach. Then five years ago I went off fish. I was eating calamari in Spain. Now even the smell of fish turns my stomach: It's amazing. I used to love eating mackerel as a child.
There is no point in making a fetish out of being a vegetarian. The world is so full of pollution, you don't know what sort of chemical sprays they put on fruit or vegetables either. I do wash grapes before eating them. Hopefully the next civilisation will be simpler and cleaner.
Sahaj Maj comes from India, where they regard it as wasteful to kill and eat cows. Indians use the dairy products from the cow and they use the dried dung pats for fuel, like we use sods of turf. The country would not be able to feed its population of one thousand million people if those people were not mostly vegetarian.
Councillor John Gormley, Green Party spokesperson and former Lord Mayor of Dublin:
Cattle know immediately that they are being led to the slaughter. Farmers and people who work in slaughterhouses will tell you that the quality of the meat changes with the type of fear that is in the animal. They tense up and this affects the meat.
Intensive farming can be horrific. Pigs are kept stuck between slats all the time, without any freedom of movement. They are just meat machines. I can understand why people kill animals for food but this is just cruel. I became a vegetarian in 1983 because of the cruelty aspect.
There was a big controversy when I was Mayor last year because I wanted free range turkeys for the Mansion House charity Christmas dinner. Irish farmers donate 50 turkeys at Christmas for this. In the end I had my way and we got free range turkeys, and I think this practice will continue, which is a bit of progress at least.
"Battery farms are horrific. The chickens have their beaks cut off so they won't peck themselves or each other. There is just so much gratuitous cruelty involved. The BSE scare is only the tip of the iceberg. We need to look at the way we produce all food, including the pesticides we put on vegetables. There is a market for real, organically produced food. I do my shopping on Saturdays at the Dublin Food Co Op on Pearse Street, which sells organic fruit and vegetables and has 800 members.
I eat fish occasionally, and I eat butter and free range eggs. I drink soya milk, because I think we tend to overdose on dairy foods. I feel less hyper now than when I used to eat red meat. When I ate red meat it made me feel more tense.
I don't lecture people. I just say that you're better off eating less meat because of all the hormones, angel dust and antibiotics in it. Most farmers will tell you that they keep one animal for their own consumption, and they don't give it all that stuff.
When the BSE scare happened, we all got worried about the farmers, but what about the consumer, the person who has to eat the stuff? Our duty in government is to protect the people, not the vested interests.
Pauline Berwick, artist:
I didn't say "he heh, heh" when I heard about mad cow disease, but I did think that meat eaters were getting themselves into an awful muddle and it was time to purify up a bit. I remember the Kerry cows from my childhood: they ate grass and hay and they smelt lovely. Their breath, their coats, even their dung smelt good. It is so different now. They are pumped full of hormones and other unnatural stuff, and they smell awful.
I have never eaten beef in my life. I don't feel I've missed out. Eating red meat makes both animals and humans more angry and vicious, or so I've been told, and I'm not a cross person. Eating red meat makes your breath smell unpleasant too because it is so to digest. I always know when my husband has been eating red meat by the smell off his breath.
My mother decided to become vegetarian when she was pregnant with me. I grew up a vegetarian too, but not a total one because she gave me fish soup as a baby, which has given me permission, psychologically, to eat fish ever since. I don't worry about fish as much as other animals because they are killed on the spot.
Killing animals is natural but it depends on the way it's done. The ideal situation is if they are free range, allowed to run around freely, and then killed on the farm out of sight of the other animals. I lived in the South Seas for two years, and I saw them kill wild pigs. A young man would have to hunt and stalk the pig. That was fair game. It was not shocking to me.
But carrying live animals in lorries is unnatural and want only cruel. That makes me hot under the collar. Animals taste better when they are allowed to run around freely. It can't be good to eat all that fear.
Michael Colgan, artistic director of the Gate Theatre in Dublin:
Being a Vegetarian has never been a moral thing with me. I'm not the sort of person who hears the grass scream when he cuts it but there are certain things that one does which I believe are the future and others the past. Smoking is the past and vegetarianism is the future. There is just something inevitable about it, like Britain losing the empire: meat will be replaced by soya.
Vegetarianism didn't become fashionable until the late 1960s. I remember going to a lot of parties where people thought I was strange and asked me if I was a vegetarian, why did I wear leather shoes? They didn't think I was weedy enough looking to be a real vegetarian. Barbecues were the worst: I would be starving, there was nothing I could eat, from the ribs to the cocktail sausages. At least now there are veggieburgers. But in the meantime I have started eating eggs and fish, because I was such a pain in the ass, going to people's houses for dinner and not being able to eat anything.
I'm not saying people shouldn't eat steak. I don't have a sense of righteousness about BSE. I'm one of the few vegetarians who feels sorry for those farmers who've had their livelihoods devastated. But I don't like the propaganda of the meat industry. They get away - with names - they don't call a burger a cowburger; they call it a beefburger. They say pork rather than pig.
Michael O Siadhail, poet:
I abhor slaughter. I can't even beat going fishing because I can't kill fish. But I am intellectually aware that culling is necessary, so I see both sides. About 15 years ago I read Tolstoy's stark essay on vegetarianism, in which he said that if you couldn't perform the slaughter yourself, you shouldn't eat the meat. After I read it I gave up eating meat and fish for two years.
The problem was that I suffered from terrible discomfort in my stomach (what the doctors call nowadays Irritable Bowel Syndrome) and weak spells where, after walking for only 10 minutes, I'd have to sit down and take a rest. I couldn't understand it because I was actually gaining weight. The doctors told me afterwards that you need Vitamin B 12 and some people can produce it without eating meat but I couldn't, probably because I was brought up eating a lot of meat.
So vegetarianism just didn't work for me, even though I ate lots of beans and Marmite (Marmite is supposed to help with the B12 assimilation). Gradually I started eating fish again and then, a year later, chicken. Nowadays I will even eat red meat if I am a guest in someone's home and it is offered to me.
But ideologically I'd still like to be a vegetarian.
Marie Staunton, model (main photograph):
I have been a vegetarian for about eight years, simply because my boyfriend became a vegetarian and as he does the cooking, it was either become a vegetarian along with him or starve! It was fine and although we don't eat eggs or chicken, we do still eat fish. I didn't like that sluggish feeling you'd get after the Sunday dinner anyway. Red meat takes a long time to go through your system.
A lot of models eat a light vegetarian meal before a show because it's easier to digest and you feel less bloated afterwards. With me it is not necessarily a choice that has to do with losing weight because if you are eating out, it is actually quite difficult to get vegetables that are not covered in rich cream sauces or mayonnaise. A piece of lean chicken would be less fattening.
I don't eat butter or mayonnaise: the taste of them is enough to make me retch. When I'm on a shoot, I usually just eat a roll and some fruit for lunch because it's very difficult to get a sandwich without butter or mayonnaise. If I'm out for dinner and there is meat on the plate, I'll eat around it, especially if I'm hungry enough, I don't make a fuss.
For ages after I gave up meat I craved sausages and rashers, especially if someone else was cooking or eating them and I could smell it. But that wore off finally. Now I don't even think about it. I was never a really big meat eater. When I was growing up my mother used to cook pasta, so we were used to experimenting with food. What I like to eat now are salads and vegetables prepared in interesting ways. I also eat tofu (bean curd), which is 100 per cent protein and takes on the taste of the other food you cook it with.
Gerry Boland, member of the Green Party and the Vegetarian Society of Ireland:
I went off meat 12 years ago and it was the best decision I ever made. Within six months I felt much better, physically. I get sick less often and I have more energy. It opened up a whole new holistic approach to life for me, where I was conscious that I, personally, was no longer involved in this process of killing animals for food. I had been unhappy about the waste of resources in the production of meat: there are four billion livestock and eleven billion fowl in the world (numbering three times the human population), and feeding and housing them comes at a huge economic and environmental cost. It is extremely uneconomic: 40 per cent of the world's grain is fed to animals. It is not only wasteful, it is a human rights issue: one third of the world's human population is starving while we are eating meat.
I had also been unhappy about the suffering inflicted on animals as part of intensive farming. I can't understand people who give up red meat but still eat poultry.
The modern day cow must be the most over worked animal in the world. She has a natural lifespan of up to 30 years. Because of the rigours of the dairy industry, the cow is forced to keep having calves (which are often sent off to a veal farm) so that she stays lactating. She is prone to diseases like mastitis because of being constantly milked. A scientist in England has equated the amount of energy she expends during all of this to a jogger running for eight hours a day. She is so exhausted after six or seven years that the quality of her milk deteriorates and she is sent off to the slaughterhouse. That is the thanks she gets. After I realised all of this, I felt I couldn't drink milk again. I became a vegan.
That was seven years ago and it meant giving up eggs as well as dairy produce. It is a difficult change to make, unless you are committed to cooking and finding out more about it. But the high fibre, low fat, vegan diet is very healthy. I don't care if people think I'm a crank. Things have changed anyway: now most restaurants in Dublin know what a vegan is. Five years ago they would have thought it was someone with pointy ears.