Yesterday was the anniversary of the introduction of food rationing in the UK, and what a shock to find that Marguerite Patten, doyenne of cookery writers, is still alive and kicking. I've got a couple of her cookery books.

My parents both served in the war, but for those in civilian life, food rationing is one of the things they remember with the least fondness. Bad enough having bombs dropped on you, your kids sent away for safety, your spouse training in some army camp, without food itself being difficult to obtain. 

Well, that's the received opinion, but in my family, it's taken with a pinch of salt. One reason that food rationing was introduced, let us remember, was that when the general mobilisation took place, so many men were found to be unfit for service due to malnutrition.

The pale, spavined, rickety product of a 10-year economic depression - a time when many people suffered from anaemia due to lack of meat, there was no NHS so ailments went untreated, and most people did grinding manual labour - came as a shock to the authorities.

They instantly instituted a rationing programme to bring Britain UP to standard, as well as prevent waste and food hoarding. For my family, as for many other working families, they had never eaten so WELL.

Certainly the diet was boring. Without our massive empire to exploit, Britons suddenly had to grow our own food instead of nicking it from people we'd conquered, and we'd halfway forgotten how to do it. We learned quickly, though, and God bless the Ministry of Food's efficiency in ensuring its fair distribution and that the population didn't starve to death.

I searched online for articles about the subject yesterday and found a few of those gosh-wow-how-DID-they-manage-without-microwaves? type features so beloved of the tabloids as if we all slept on swansdown. In this kind of feature, people follow the wartime diet for a week, suffer the ghastly pangs of Diet Coke withdrawal and end by wondering how on earth people coped without mooli and garangal.

Well, they didn't all live on powdered egg and Spam, I tell you what. A lot of them did what my family did: they poached, they kept chickens on any spare bit of ground, or a pig out the back; they planted potatoes; they learned to stretch meat; they grew their own herbs, they made bread pudding and Poor Knights of Windsor. In fact, that's how I grew up too, in the 60s and 70s, eating pheasant full of buckshot, jugged hare poached by my dad's workmates and fish caught by the local Jehovah's Witnesses (don't ask me why - they had their own boat).

One writer, eating a Woolton pie (a kind of shepherd's pie with root veg instead of meat, shown at top left) proclaimed it as tasting like cheesy slime. No it bloody doesn't. A properly cooked Woolton pie is really tasty, but you have to know how to cook, not just take the top off an M&S ready meal. Ye gods. Have Britons really turned into such a bunch of wimps? Two rashers of bacon a week? A bar of chocolate a week? That's all we eat in this house to this day. 

Oh well, enough rant. It seems a far cry from then to Good New Days of today, when we chuck a third of our food in bins and leave it to rot.  So much cleverer than our ancestors, drowning in a sea of our own plenty...

If you do even the most cursory study into what you, personally, can do to save the planet and benefit your health at the same time, it becomes uncomfortably apparent that you should probably give up meat.

All in all, meat is a pretty bad idea. Animal fats are the biggest cause of coronary heart disease in the west. Cows and pigs bred for meat use up a huge amount of land that could be put to agricultural use. Obtaining meat involves slaughtering the animal, to its inevitable suffering. Acres of Brazilian rainforest are lost every day in order to put land to meat production - mainly for populations that are already obese. 

Well, we all know the math. 

The problem for the average Brit is that our whole cuisine is founded on meat. And most of us enjoy meat. There is something about getting your gnashers round a nice juicy steak that a carrot burger just can't match. But at the same time, most of us don't relish the idea of the animal suffering so that we can eat it. So we do that fancy mental two-step that enables us to carry on doing something we know at heart is morally reprehensible.

Our Christian heritage is also a problem. Unlike some other religions, there has never been a moral imperative in Christianity to avoid meat in the modern era. Fish on Fridays is an idea long-gone, and for many centuries, access to meat for many people was so rare in any case that choosing to avoid it was not an issue. People ate meat whenever they could get their hands on it.

That situation is markedly different in other parts of the world. Jains in India, for instance, abstain from all meat and fish on the principles of non-violence. They also don't eat eggs; honey; any vegetable that 'bleeds' like blood when it's cut; root vegetables, in case insects are killed when they're harvested; or after sunset - in case insects are fatally drawn to the lamplight. One way or another, I sometimes wonder what Jains actually have left to live on. 

However, the rich tradition of vegetarianism that results from these strictures, and is found elsewhere in the East, particularly wherever there is a Buddhist tradition, results in a fabulous vegetarian cuisine - something we lack in the west. Eating veggie meals becomes positively enticing when a big Thali is laid out before you.

I would therefore advise anyone who wants to cut down their meat consumption to look to other cuisines for vegetarian inspiration, especially Indian. And if not Indian, then Mexican, or Spanish, or French, or Italian - all of these traditions have excellent veggie meals, such as pizza, ratatouille, chilli, guacamole etc, which are eaten simply as part of the cuisine, not as poor substitutes for meat-based meals, as so much British vegetarian cuisine seems to be. 

You could start by having one veggie day a week. In this house, it's usually Wednesday - the mid-week meal - and we'll generally have something like a ratatouille or a non-meat chilli, or a chickpea curry.

Even if you never progress further than this and remain a meat-eater the rest of the week, you have just dramatically reduced your carbon footprint - and that's something worth aiming for.