It's no longer edgy to be veggie

Just as anti-fur activists like Naomi Campbell have shaken off their principles about wearing dead animal skins, so some vegetarians are dropping off the wagon. Julia Sawalha has just quit being a veggie after four meat-free years. Anthea Turner has returned to the pleasures of the flesh after she got a whiff of her builders' bacon sandwiches. Liv Tyler was a tofu girl while she was dating strict vegan Joaquin Phoenix but has now fallen by the wayside, and Madonna and Lulu have also reportedly abandoned the carrot-sticks-and-celery routine. According to reports in America, even the Dalai Lama has started eating meat on the orders of his doctor.

Sawalha says: "I started getting dreams about eating meat. I told my sister and she said, 'It never suited you - eat meat'."

She's not the only one to turn her back on vegetarianism. A report by Mintel last month, says there are three million vegetarians in the UK, equivalent to 5.4 per cent of the population (among women, the proportion rises to 6.7 per cent). But, the survey adds, there has been a post-BSE return to beef-eating.

Mother of two young daughters Vanessa Arkell, who lives in Chelsea, has returned to meat. She first became a vegetarian at the age of 12 while at boarding school. "A lot of my friends were vegetarians. I think it started because the school food was so disgusting and the vegetarian option was always the best," she says. "We all went through a phase where we thought we could lose weight on it, and I suppose a few girls were vegetarian because they didn't want to be cruel to animals." Meeting her husband Peter, a confirmed meat-eater, when she was 24 was a turning point. "I was around meat a lot more - we were going to dinner parties where I was the only vegetarian and I think people saw me as a bit of an oddball. They'd say things like: 'You mean you don't even eat chicken?'"

Arkell began to question why she was a vegetarian and couldn't find a good answer. She had not stopped eating meat for moral reasons and she could not see any particular health benefits in it. "I was beginning to crave chicken, in particular. I'd see it on someone's barbecue or at a dinner table and think 'I bet that tastes good'."

The first time she ate chicken was "very strange", she says, and then she eventually began to eat red meat. When she was pregnant with her first daughter Java, she particularly craved it. Now, at 29, she eats hamburgers and steaks every two weeks or so. "I don't think it's very healthy to be a vegetarian unless you are incredibly disciplined about cooking high-protein food. Without meat you don't get the proper nutrients." When her daughters are old enough, they can choose if they want to be vegetarian, but in the meantime Arkell will be bringing them up as meat-eaters.

The Government seems to be taking sides in the debate: new guidelines state that schools will have to introduce red-meat dishes three times a week as part of a campaign to reduce the number of teenage girls who suffer from anaemia and anorexia. "Man is an omnivore," says Professor Robert Pickard, director-general of independent health charity the British Nutrition Foundation. "Evolutionary science tells us that man emerged from an insect-eating group of mammals whose adaptability was greatly accelerated by the adoption of an omnivorous diet. Meat should play a central part in any person's diet. It provides iron for the blood, vitamin D for the bones, and proteins and fatty acids for growth. It is also highly likely that red meat contains many other beneficial nutrients that we do not yet fully understand."

The 150-year-old Vegetarian Society says that far from being old-fashioned, faddy or eccentric, a vegetarian diet remains the choice of millions of people in search of healthy, cruelty-free food: "Some people lapse because of things like bacon sandwiches but there are so many fake meats nowadays that there is no reason to go back."

But the trend of the late Eighties and early Nineties, when vegetarianism was a fashion, seems to be over. In Paris recently, even skinny models were seen delicately picking their way through mini chicken fillets after a hard day at the shows.