To eat or not to eat. That is the question.

Last week, I was chatting to the father of Ellie’s French exchange before he and his family whisked her off to Normandy and a new world of gastronomic experiences. A fluent English speaker who knew Britain and its eccentricities well, he listened as I told him about our foodie adventure of the past three years introducing the kids to the ways of the countryside in order to give them a real understanding of food from the spade to the plate - only to find us all put off our food now that we live on a farm. He looked at me as if it were me speaking the foreign language rather than him, and searched for a word in response. “Comment dit-on ‘gater?’” he asked his wife. I paled; after having many posh teenage French girls to share our summer holidays over the years, I knew only too well what 'gater’ means. Spoilt. Over indulged. Ruined.

These kind, cultured people would indulge Ellie in her vegetarianism, and Ellie would cope; she deals with Grandpa’s gently provocative dinner time asides, doesn’t she? Anyway I knew that she would have to get through her host’s taxidermy collection to get to the 52” flat screen TV, so by the time she got to the dinner table she would probably find what lurked there a breeze.

But it wasn’t Ellie who he was describing as gatee; it was me. I was shocked. After 46 years of eating lung, tripe, tongue, heart, brain, hock and parson’s nose, I think a little contemplation of my place in the food chain is timely rather than spoilt, n’est-ce pas? Maybe what he meant was that food is for eating, and it’s only someone whose life is so packed with choice who can afford the bitter taste of eating their own pig. He has a dog, he argued, but he also has snails. One he takes for walks, the others he has for dinner. Ok, so this is a man who shares his sitting room with stuffed foxes which suggests to me – and I imagine to Ellie - that any discussion on human-animal relationship is going to be a bit skewiff. But he’s French, and let’s face it, he’s never going to understand a point of view so topsy turvy as mine. It’s only recently that I dismissed Ellie’s animal-loving vegetarian rant myself. I would smile, convinced that she would come around even as she pointed out that our oil-less, climate changed future would be better, fairer, healthier if meat were not on the plate. I argued, careful not to be too patronising in my food-writer-knows-best voice that the lives and lifestyles of cows, pigs, chickens, goats were totally reliant on people like me to eat them, and that eating better reared animals less often was the answer.

I even ate meat perfectly happily after organising a debate between our local farmers and the vegan campaigner from Viva! for Transition Town Lewes. I understood the argument; methane emissions aside, it’s the enormous energy needed to drive the agricultural industry that’s depleting the last dregs of our oil supplies. But farming is about tradition, jobs, environmental maintenance, it’s about food, I insisted to my smug know-it-all new teen back then.

Two years on, her vegetarianism isn’t wavering half as much as my carnivorism. My thoughts are all over the place but Ellie will go into Year 10 next week able to debate something that really means something to her in her Philosophy, History, Classical Civilisation and French GCSE classes, and who knows? Maybe she’ll come out with something more relevant than an A*.

We are not just what we eat, but what we think about what we eat, what we know about what we eat, how far we've come in how we eat and about the gentle ways in which we can influence others to think about food. Ellie’s daily refusal to eat her escargots this week has already led the family to rack their brains about what to cook for her, and of course they have come up with vegetarian feasts that have had them – and me via MSN – salivating. Bien-elevee Ellie may not be if that means doing what you’re told and eating what’s on your plate in someone else’s house, but I’m rather proud of my little radical, gently nudging her new friends to think twice – and then maybe again – about our relationship with food. Is that spoilt? I don’t think so.