Lunch with Dale Vince was never going to be chateaubriand at Hawksmoor. Britain’s most successful hippy supplies vegan burgers to a quarter of Britain’s primary schools, banned meat burgers at his Forest Green Rovers football club and plans to make protein from grass. The 63-year-old considers meat eating a “morally wrong and revolting” habit.
My train cuts through verdant wooded valleys and pulls up at Stroud station, from where I walk uphill to the Star Anise Café. This unpolished Cotswolds town is known as a countercultural enclave.
It is where Vince “dropped in” after more than a decade as a New Age traveller and, in 1995, began the green energy business — Ecotricity — that has since made him a fortune once estimated at around £100mn. (He is now paying a £40mn-plus divorce settlement.)