“Ewww, that’s so lefty,” she wisecracked.

Who said vegetables were political, I thought. But she was right: traditionally, organic food has been seen in America as an identifying mark of the “crunchy” tribe — unwashed, unshaven muesli eaters on the countercultural left.

Yet my wife Julie and I — both stout-hearted thirtysomething rightwingers who never met a steak we didn’t like — had begun eating organic for practical reasons: it tasted better than what we could get at the supermarket, and we liked how our patronage sustained rural family farmers.

Riding the subway home to Brooklyn, I stared down at the Birkenstock sandals on my feet and thought back to the day two years earlier when Julie had convinced me to try them on. Those hippie shoes? Oh, vomit. But I found them to be incredibly practical and comfortable for walking the streets of New York. Just because leftwingers got there first doesn’t make wearing Birkies a bad idea, right?

It’s silly to read too much into one’s consumer preferences, but I got to thinking at the time about the certain tastes and ways of living that Julie and I had developed that put us off the mainstream conservative-Republican reservation.

Although the loony lefties who lead the environmental movement are deeply off-putting, my wife and I recoiled from a crass conservatism that had no use for conservation and which never saw a field or a forest that it didn’t want to pave over to create a Wal-Mart parking lagoon.

Now I find that conservatives are heading in the same direction in Britain. This week David Cameron is addressing the 60th anniversary of the Soil Association, the standard bearer for British organic food, after accepting an invitation that Tony Blair has consistently rejected since he became prime minister. Cameron is even making his new home ecologically efficient.

Recently a friend who had just been to London e-mailed me Cameron’s green Christmas message to supporters, commenting: “It looks like the new Conservative party leader is a crunchy conservative too!”

THERE is much more to this than just conservation. In a nation that, like Britain, lives for shopping, Julie and I disdained malls and mass-produced culture. As a general rule we preferred the Small, the Local, the Old and the Particular over Big and Global and New and Abstract.

Because we value family above all, Julie chose to quit her editorial assistant’s job to take full-time care of our first-born son — a move that put off even some of our conservative friends.

We thought we could do a better job of teaching our son at home than public or private schools could, so we committed ourselves to the growing home schooling movement, which in New York City attracted mostly left-wing nonconformists.

At the same time the white-bread happy-clappy services at the neighbourhood Catholic churches bored us silly, so we started attending mass at a Maronite (eastern rite) Catholic parish church where the ancient chants and liturgies were still celebrated.

You get the picture. We are crunchy, for sure, but not liberals. We are traditionalist conservatives of the Catholic sort who identify more with Pope John Paul II, JRR Tolkien, GK Chesterton and even, God help us, with the Prince of Wales when he talks about the value of small farms and traditional town design.