Catering: eat your greens

January 16

By Alice Shopland, founder of Angel Food

I’m marking Veganuary 2025 by publishing a blog post a day.

I am not a professional chef, just an enthusiastic and creative home cook. But when the Green Party needed a caterer for their national conference in Auckland not long after I’d become vegan, I put my hand up because I wanted to help ensure it would be a vegan event. The environmental benefits of a plant-based diet were beginning to gain recognition 20 years ago, and there was pressure from vegan members of the party for this to be acknowledged and acted upon. Members with other environmental and social priorities insisted food should be a matter of personal choice.

I suspect the party was also sensitive to being too far out of step with mainstream society, and may quite rightly have felt that if they were seen to endorse veganism it would be weaponised against them in the media. Still, they agreed that the food at that year’s conference would be vegan. I did have to supply organic cow’s milk for tea and coffee.

It was not a huge conference – about 100 people – and it was only for three days. But when the ingredients were delivered the day before the event started, I was astonished at the volume. It drove home to me how our food choices have such a big environmental impact.

I loved doing the catering, although it was exhausting and stressful, mostly due to my lack of experience. For example, because I love mushrooms, I assumed they were a treat for everybody else too. Knowing that an all-plant-based menu was an unwelcome compromise for some attendees, I decided to be generous with the mushrooms (a relatively expensive ingredient). That’s when I learned that not everybody likes mushrooms. I also learned that making dhal for 100 people is not as simple as multiplying your family-sized recipe 25 times. It took three big pots to hold all the dhal, but I didn’t figure that out until partway through the cooking process, and I failed to distribute the chilli (and other seasonings, but most notably the chilli) evenly between the pots… so some people got under-seasoned dhal, and some people got the tongues nearly scorched right out of their heads. If that was you, then sorry. I should also apologise to my tallest kitchen assistant, Graeme, who because of his superior height was given the task of stirring the vat of polenta. Polenta is notoriously spitty and Graeme’s forearms suffered.

Caffeine addicts at the conference appreciated that at each break in the proceedings, we had copious amounts of plunger coffee ready to go, rather than the instant coffee (which, as Colin always says, is neither instant nor coffee) or perc coffee which is the norm when you need to supply lots of coffee quickly and cheaply.

I seriously overordered black beans and polenta, which meant that many meals at home were based around those ingredients for the next six months. I have no regrets about that – black beans are still my favourite pulse.

Overall, people loved the catering. One guy told me that he’d been worried about the vegan meals causing excessive flatulence in the communal sleeping area (the conference was held at Waipapa Marae at the University of Auckland) but he concluded that the plant-based regime had led to less farting not more. It was not a scientific survey but I did appreciate the comment. After the last meal of the conference, my hardworking catering assistants and I were formally thanked, and the attendees all sang “You Are My Sunshine” to us. It was so lovely to have our efforts acknowledged in this way. I thought it meant they loved our food more than the catering at previous conferences, but I later realised that singing that particular song for the catering team is a well-established (and lovely) Green Party tradition in Aotearoa.