I was recently invited to a birthday dinner.

Both my husband and I are vegan but were not concerned as the group was dining at one of the many wonderful curry houses in Leicester.

India has a long-standing history of vegetarianism with many Asian foods being vegan by default. However, what we experienced that evening saddened me greatly and summarised for me what is wrong with the developed world.

When we opened the menu at the curry house we actually struggled to find the vegetarian dishes among the pages and pages of meat-based dishes. When the meals arrived, all of them (apart from ours) where laden with meat from animals that included lambs and chickens.

Putting aside the number of animals sacrificed for a birthday celebration and all the suffering that those animals had entailed, I felt overwhelming disappointment that our obsession (of the developed world) with consuming animal products has caused us to transform, almost beyond all recognition, the traditional foods of one of the most vegetarian continents on the planet.

Meat is one of the most resource-intensive foods to produce and most individuals in the developed nations currently do nothing to end the grotesque status quo that sees farmed animals fattened while people starve.

The day after the meal I went to church, during the sermon the priest told the congregation "live simply so that others may simply live".

VH Sheppard, Leicester.