Growing up non-vegan: part I

January 10

By Alice Shopland, founder of Angel Food

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

Although I wasn’t raised vegan I feel lucky that I do share a lot of values with my extended family.

My parents met in the late 1950s, cycling to their mutual place of work in Cambridge, England, where Ray was a draughtsman and Sylvia was a secretary. He was largely estranged from his family, having been in London children’s homes since the age of two. (I always knew he grew up in care but it was only when my eldest son was two that I realised the impact it must have had on my father’s life.) Sylvia had just returned from a year in Sarawak, on the island of Borneo, where her father had taken a job as Director of Technical Education. Ray and Sylvia’s shared interests included classical music, peace and quiet, the outdoors, birdwatching, antiques and Scandinavian modernism. They married and lived together in London for five years, where I was born in 1965. I was named after Mum’s eccentric great-aunt Alice, who married three times (as have I) and offered her own burial shroud as an emergency nightdress for an unexpected overnight guest (no, I don’t have a burial shroud).

My parents lived in London because that was where work was, but they escaped the city whenever they could, for holidays and weekends. As a fan of big cities myself, I love London but having experienced the grubbiness of its air myself in the 1980s – I’ll never forget the first time I blew my nose and saw black snot on the tissue – I can only imagine the grime levels in the coal-fire-filled 1960s. Finally, Mum persuaded Dad that we should emigrate to New Zealand for the clean air, better weather and small population.

New Zealand was actively encouraging white migrants especially those from “Mother England” at the time, and letters from extended family who had already emigrated made it seem very attractive. In November 1967 we left Southampton on the SS Australis, arriving in Auckland five weeks later, on Christmas Eve.

Mum and Dad bought a big old wooden farmhouse on a quarter-acre section in Māngere, south Auckland, and Dad spent much of his spare time over the next 30 years repairing and renovating it. My sister Sue was born in 1969, the first Kiwi in the family.

Sue and I had a fairly progressive and wholesome upbringing. Mum was involved in environmental groups (including one called Friends of the Home with the un-hardcore acronym FROTH) and did lots of voluntary work.

At one stage a dairy-free diet was suggested for Sue. Mum struggled to find dairy-free recipes so she suggested to the Asthma Society that someone should compile a recipe book to solve this problem. “Great idea,” they said, “why don’t you do it?” To her credit, she did. I’m very proud of my mum’s can-do attitude. The booklet was published in the 1970s and included a recipe for margarine: it’s a measure of the power of the New Zealand dairy industry back then that margarine could only be bought if you had a prescription from your doctor. (The margarine recipe was based on Kremelta – hydrogenated coconut oil – and tinted with turmeric.) Mum has always been an adventurous and experimental cook, so she quite enjoyed the challenge. She did find it frustrating when recipe ideas didn't work out but often found that adding cheese and butter to the failed iterations made them at least edible for family meals even if they were no longer dairy-free.

Mum and Dad were both against conspicuous consumerism and discrimination, but in a quiet don’t-rock-the-boat kind of way. When I became a more vocal activist myself, their softly-softly approach used to really annoy me. But they both had good reason to value not getting offside with people, and not just because they were establishing themselves in a new country. Dad grew up in children’s homes rather than in the security of a loving family unit. Mum’s mother was French, and growing up with a foreign parent in distrustful jingoistic war-time England would certainly have reinforced any tendencies towards caution.

Mum grew fruit and vegetables, cooked a mix of healthy and international food, and made wine, ginger beer, jam and pickles. Our diets were influenced by Mum’s French heritage, the time she’d spent in Malaya and her tendency towards self-sufficiency. Once when we were driving on a country road Mum saw a car in front of us hit a pheasant. She insisted that Dad stop the car so she could take the pheasant home and cook it for dinner. Although we didn’t eat like our Kiwi neighbours (no tinned spaghetti on toast, for example) or most English people, it was hard to get too exotic because supplies just weren’t available. New Zealand was even more isolated in the 1960s than it is today, and the local economy was fiercely protected. There were local equivalents to English sweets like Smarties and Mars bars, but we would sometimes buy ‘the real thing’ at the airport or a relative would bring some, and we’d agree they were so much better than the local version.

We were the last family in our street to get television; I remember watching TV at our neighbours’ and when I got home I pretended that watching TV had given me a headache, as a nod to its alleged evil influence.

Mum’s choice of outings could be a little unusual. I remember her taking me to view a session in the Ōtāhuhu District Court to round out my civic education and for her own curiosity. Unknown to Mum, one of the cases being heard that day was a woman on charges of homosexual behaviour: this was well before the Homosexual Law Reform Act of 1986. Others in the public gallery turned to look at us, presumably thinking that Mum should take me out of court, but she brazened it out. We also regularly picnicked in the old Symonds St cemetery, not for ghoulish reasons but because we liked the tumbledown picturesqueness.