My 17-year-old daughter has suddenly become a vegan.

Her sudden conversion from carnivore happened last week after she went on a college trip to a farm in Sussex as part of her geography A-level course.

She was horrified by the way the animals were kept, sows in cages so small they couldn’t even turn around, their piglets nearby but not close enough to snuggle up to their mother or even suckle and cows in sheds covered in excrement.

“I can’t eat meat or any animal products if this is the way they are produced,” she told me on her return, looking genuinely shocked and upset. “So I’m turning vegan.”

She has. And what a pain it is, in a house full of carnivores (including the dog). Much as I applaud her principles – and when I think about it I do agree that animals should not be farmed in a way that entails suffering – the change in her eating habits is deeply inconvenient.

I hate to be petty but it’s annoying that when planning tonight’s dinner, I now have to think of a vegan option, which is certainly not easy.

Many foods are labelled as vegetarian but very few as vegan and as I am not very imaginative when it comes to cooking, I am at a total loss as to what to feed her.

Shopping and meal times have become a nightmare and my daughter’s principles have led to a doubling in the number of dishes cooked each mealtime and the amount of washing up and an increase in our shopping bills because vegan food is very expensive. I’ve now resorted to handing her a tenner and telling her to go and buy her food herself.

It has irritated me more because of the timing: a room in our house is currently changing use so it has been my job to clear it, clean it and paint it. Just as the house is in complete chaos and mess, the last thing I needed in the past week is a stubborn case of veganism. I simply don’t have the time (or the inclination, to be honest) to research vegan food and vegan recipes.

Veganism is very time-consuming – for my daughter as well as for me. She now scrutinises the ingredients on every single packet with an eagle eye, triumphant when she realises its contents do not contain any animal product and defeated when she spots one of the many evils: egg, for example, or gelatine, or even sugar (some is bleached using animal bones, apparently). Her diet has become extremely limited, which makes me worry about her health in case she is not consuming enough iron and all the nutrients and vitamins a teenage girl needs and it makes me dread visits to relatives who will now have to cater to her whim, family visits to restaurants, our choice now limited to her tastes, and even popping in to a cafe because choosing something to eat and drink is now an ordeal.

Perhaps when she is a practised vegan, it will be easier because she will automatically know what she can and can’t eat. I’ve found myself hoping it’s a fad that will last as long as her recent gluten-free regime – about three months.

But I suspect the images from the farm visit are now imprinted firmly on her mind and are not going to fade any time soon.

I’m proud of my daughter for developing principles and acting on them but secretly, selfishly, I keep thinking: couldn’t she have waited until she leaves home?

I’m a huge SPAG nerd – that’s spelling, punctuation and grammar, not spaghetti, by the way – and frequent misspellings and misuse of words and phrases in publications often distract me from the content of whatever it is I’m reading.

Frequent offenders include “bored of” rather than “bored with”, “I was stood/sat” rather than “I was standing/sitting”, referring to people as “that” rather than “who”, such as “That woman that was standing there...” instead of “The woman who was standing there...”, and the confusion between the uses of “that” and “which”: “The house which he bought” rather than “The house that he bought...”

Some, admittedly, are words used infrequently, for example “phase” as opposed to “faze”. People write, “I was really phased by his weird appearance” when they mean “fazed”. To be fazed means to cause to be disturbed or disconcerted, whereas phased means to carry out something in gradual stages.

However, pedantic though I am, I was recently caught out by the spelling of a word in a phrase. I have always thought that the “desserts” in the phrase “just desserts” was spelt with a double S. But research has taught me it is “deserts”, meaning getting something you deserve. I got it wrong. Oh, the irony...