A long time ago, before it was even fashionable, when obesity and global warming were subjects for discussion only in arcane professional journals, when riding a bicycle meant you couldn’t afford a car, when “organic” was just a branch of chemistry and in some countries vegetarians were still classed as game, I used to get a weekly vegetable box delivered.

It was from Abercrombie & Cole, or Abel & Fitch, or some other likely young farmers’ co-operative, and they took it upon themselves to select as varied an assortment as possible of what was in season and good at the time, and delivered it to you weekly in a box. One week it might be a hundredweight of sweet potatoes, the next week maybe a hundredweight of sweet potatoes.

You’d call and complain (being really nice and calling them “Man”) and the next week you’d open the front door in the morning to find eight kilos of parsley and a yam.

Round about now, one would be just coming out of the pumpkin glut, pretty drained at the thought of having to throw another “celeriac party” to make use of the new surplus, and looking forward to the gaseous aftermath of a thousand anal dilations that comes with the brassicas of Advent, before the “kale months” take hold, right through to the end of March.

And then, of course, come April and May, when there isn’t anything at all (maybe some watercress, a stick of rhubarb) and you have to scavenge for tins of kidney beans in the store cupboards of those who haven’t survived the winter.

Eventually, I grew to hate those vegetable boxes. Really hate them. As if they were Nazis or footballers or those men with the circular earrings actually inside the flesh of the lobe. I’d go into the kitchen and there the box would be, on the floor, looking all angry and vegetal, and I’d shout, “Yes, what?”

And it would just sit there, pretending not to have heard, all full to bursting with turnips. And then, just when I turned away to go about my business, it would mutter behind my back, “Mmmm, yummy all mashed with butter and a pinch of nutmeg…” and I would turn back round and grab it, haul it up by its self-righteous little ears, march it out into the garden and heave that sonofabitch on to the compost heap.

After a couple of years I had the finest mulch in Christendom: 100 per cent organic, weapons-grade table vegetables, no twigs or grass clippings or leaves, just a huge julienne of lovingly sourced, rare-breed, heirloom fruit and veg, nicely rotted. “From delivery to compost heap in less than a minute,” was my motto, and it gave me a soil-enriching agent so concentrated I’ll wager it was worth more by weight than gold, caviar, cocaine or a side of zucchini at Locanda Locatelli.

And then I became a restaurant critic, stopped eating at home, and cancelled the weekly box with glee. I know that, in Michael Pollan’s now over-quoted phrase, we should: “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants,” and it’s true I have high cholesterol and a hereditary predisposition towards heart disease, but, hell, you’ve got to die of something.

And then came the outcry last month over the statement by Lord Stern of Brentford, a “leading climate-change campaigner”, who declared that, “Meat is a wasteful use of water and creates a lot of greenhouse gases. It puts enormous pressure on the world’s resources. A vegetarian diet is much better.”

Not only, Lord Stern announced, is meat production responsible for 18 per cent of global CO2 emissions, but the methane in cow and pig wind, both farted and belched (we’ve already discussed the gaseous consequences of a vegetarian diet), is 23 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

We’ve known for a long time that a fully vegetarian world would be more sustainable and better able to feed its growing billions. But we didn’t care. It would be far too boring, totally unfair on all the luscious breeds of meat animal that would be neglected into extinction, and obviously the gaseous benefits of doing away with the livestock would be totally negated by the chronic farting of nine billion vegetarian humans.

So we must tread the middle path, for the sake of our heart-health, wallets and planet, and just eat less meat. Meals, except on special occasions, should be plates of vegetables, enlivened with a little bit of flesh. It was a way of eating that got us from the dawn of time to about 1960, and if we get back on it, it’ll help us to keep going as a species for just as long again.

They do it, I had heard, at the Riverford Farm Field Kitchen. And seeing as Riverford is probably the sexiest and most powerful independent veg box provider in the UK, and might be just where I turn in future for my weekly compost, sorry, I mean vegetables, I thought I’d go down there.

Before lunch, having missed the formal farm tour, we wandered the grounds and, hungry from the long train journey, scavenged late corncobs from the withering stalks, chomping them as we walked: starchy, sweet, a little powdery, but totally edible and totally digestible. Though not quite enough to make one regret the invention of boiling.

The restaurant is, indeed, a kitchen. A very big one with half a dozen cooks working under head chef Jane Baxter, and then eight or ten tables of eight where one sits and shares with strangers. But it’s okay, everyone’s pretty posh.

No starters, which is good. Starters are pointless and time-wastey at lunch. And then a blackboard listing what you will be served. Not choices. Just what you will be served. Like the “menu” at school.

And so we were brought, I think, five dishes of vegetables to share. There was spinach mixed with the aforementioned corn: serious green fibre and antioxidants with sweet golden nuggets. There was a very robust, creamy celeriac mash, which must have had a lot of potato in it to have that sort of fluffiness, but it didn’t say so, so maybe not. Grilled leeks and unfeasibly tasty cauliflower (one could almost forget, shopping in town, that cauliflower is supposed to have a taste) with a mustard sauce. There was beetroot and carrots roasted with cumin, which affected each vegetable in a slightly different way, and nicely facilitated their contrast, and then also some pistachio nuts for crunch and protein. And red cabbage, braised down to a soft pink roil, but its will not totally broken, with flecks of blue cheese and walnuts.

By the time I had piled these lush, minerally, vitaminic, earth-mothering and brilliantly colourful morsels on to my plate, there was barely room for the veal cooked in milk that was the meat part of the meal. On this occasion, they hadn’t got the meat quite right. The veal was a little fibrous, a little wan. Meat has two stages of tenderness: the early tenderness of very rare meat, when its juices are still contained in its cells, then the tough stage when the cells break down and the juices leak out, and then the second tender stage, when the meat starts soaking up the juices again. This veal was on its way to the second stage, but not quite there.

And it didn’t matter a jot. Because, for once, the meat was merely one of six components. It wasn’t the great, bleeding, murderous, earth-killing centrepiece, attended by a bowl of sorry weeds. Imagine a dinner party like that. Where you slightly arse up the chicken or pork, but nobody gives a damn because really they’re here for the vegetables. How relaxing for you. How healthy for them. How conducive to the future of life on earth.

And so, for once, I rewarded myself with pudding. And thank God I did. For lined up on the counter, for each table to descend upon in turn, was an array of quite the best traditional puddings I have ever seen.

I majored in a serious plum crumble, all sweet and sour and hot and punchy, and minored in large mouthfuls of the wonderful sticky toffee pudding, singing with roasted sugar flavours and dense sponge, a sliver of the perfectly tart, brisk little lemon tart, a smidgin of sweet clafoutis and a hefty slug of the caramelised apple pavlova. All of these with lashings of thick Devon cream, though there is also custard, for weird people.

So there’s me, having the lunch of my life with five veggie dishes, second helpings of pudding, and barely a scrap of meat. The future starts today.

The Field Kitchen

Riverford Farm, Wash Barn, Buckfastleigh, Devon (01803 762074)

Cooking: 7

Vegetables: 10

Sustainability: 10

Score: 9

Price: lunch, two courses, £15.95/head – stunning value.

Saturday Times 14/11/09