Beyoncé wore fur to a vegan restaurant – and there's nothing contradictory about that

Exciting news from the ongoing saga of "celebrities and their food": Jay Z and his good lady wife Beyoncé recently announced that they are temporarily going vegan – "or as I prefer to call it plant-based!!" wrote Hova on his website, displaying an enthusiasm for exclamation marks that belies his 44 years. Unleash the bloggers! "Is this good for veganism?" fretted Slate, before coming to the conclusion that it probably isn't, as the Z family's veganism might actually be just an advert for a friend's nutrition company.

But I have lower standards than Slate because I really don't care why Hov and Bey are forsaking meat, fish and dairy as there are too many other compensations here. Watching them blithely wander, like innocent little babes, into the dark forest of zeitgeisty nutritional neuroses cooked up by the media and their fellow celebrities is just too fascinating to get hung up on why exactly they set off on this journey in the first place.

And lo, within days of the announcement, Beyoncé made the first and somewhat predictable stumble in her life as a vegan when she was photographed walking into one LA vegan restaurant wearing the biggest fur collar seen this side of the 1980s and then, soon after, entering another one, wearing – and there really is no other way to put this – an entire cow, from a cowhide top to leather trousers. Bey was widely, and many would say rightly, mocked for wearing a bunch of dead animals to restaurants that exist purely to refute the idea that animals should be killed for humans. But I'm going to defend her here, and I speak as one who eschews animal products herself.

It intrigues me when people excitedly announce that they're giving up eating animal products because I know all too well what a pain in the arse it is. Like Mr Shawn Carter, I shy away from describing myself as a vegan, but seeing as I am a lifelong vegetarian, who doesn't eat eggs and hates milk, I have reluctantly begun to accept that I do live in the neighbourhood, and it's a neighbourhood that's nowhere near any of my friends and no one I know really wants to come visit. Yes, veganism may have health and environmental benefits, but on a personal level, it's generally an expensive inconvenience.

Which is, of course, how it's become so popular today among a certain wealthy stratum of people: ones who confuse food pickiness with elitism. Which brings me to Beyoncé's vegan restaurants. Vegan restaurants are to me what I imagine really filthy internet porn is to others. While my super ego shudders away from their nicheness and all that they suggest about me, my id – my marshy, plant-based id – can't resist. Whenever I travel to California (the epicentre of self-righteous vegan restaurants), I go on a crazed vegan restaurant binge, thrilled that there is more than one thing on the menu I can order, tearing through these tofu-heavy dishes and agave-syrup-filled desserts with the savagery of a starving tiger tearing into a dying antelope.

So I have been to all of the vegan restaurants the Zs have been frequenting, including Cafe Gratitude, which I visited last week while working in Los Angeles and which Beyoncé appears to have managed to attend without necessitating the skinning of any animals. Cafe Gratitude is like a parody of Los Angeles food written by Woody Allen ("I'm going to have the alfalfa sprouts and a plate of mashed yeast") and Steve Martin ("Dehumidified ocean air on a plate of filleted basil"), but funnier. Food is not food here: it is a personal value, so all the dishes are named things like "Gracious", "Humble" and "Terrific", but what they actually are is Insane in that they each have about a billion ingredients, with hot and cold ones often jostling in your mouth simultaneously. It's the closest most people in LA will get to experiencing what it's like to eat something made by Heston Blumenthal. The reason I heard of Cafe Gratitude is because Gwyneth Paltrow recommended it on her blog Goop – the bible of elitist food fussiness – and I would bet my cashew nut butter that Gwynnie recommended it to her friends Jay and Bey.

One doesn't need to be vegan to be an elitist food fusspot. My local overpriced healthfood shop currently has a sign in its window asking "Why not go gluten free for Christmas?", as though this was a clever health choice for all and not something those suffering from coeliac disease are forced to do all the time. To limit one's diet, whether it's only eating plants or going on a juice "cleanse" or insisting on fresh organic offal, is a sign today of one's wealth and one's self-worth. To be difficult and high-maintenance is a sign of power. In his blog announcing his move to a "plant-based diet", Jay Z refers to it as a "spiritual and physical cleanse", and that is very typical of this kind of food elitism – to confuse one's diet with some kind of vague spirituality. When I lived in New York, my local yoga centre would advocate veganism in terms I hadn't heard since I last went to synagogue ("godly") or spoke regularly to anorexics ("clean", "pure"). If TV chefs are today's gods, with their aspirational instructions on how to live better, fuller lives, then elitist food fusspots are modern day's fanatics.

And that is why I fully defend Beyoncé's decision to wear fur to these vegan restaurants. For a start, she is not a vegan, and second, most of the people in those places aren't vegan either – I spotted two celebrities in Cafe Gratitude who I know aren't vegan. They're just there for the lifestyle. And what could possibly be a better illustration of that lifestyle than a fur collar in a vegan restaurant?