Siobhan Marshall
Home » Magazine » Good, issue 5 » Siobhan MarshallCould Siobhan Marshall be New Zealand’s most beautiful vegetarian—and our most hopeless gardener? Best-known as Pascalle West in Outrageous Fortune, Siobhan tells Good what put her off meat for life and why she’ll eat her veggies—but she can’t grow or cook them.
Photo by Toaki Okano
I’d love to garden, but I do not have a green thumb. I kill everything. I’ve got a friend who gives me plants all the time, and they just die. I try, but I have to give them back to her to nurse back to life.
I’ve got tomatoes at the moment and they’re surviving, it’s great. We’ve got lettuce and salad greens as well. They’re still growing, I think. I’ve tried to grow beans and silver beet. I’ve grown potatoes, they’re fun, I like digging them up.
The other day I had my first tomatoes, and they were so yummy. I ate them because I thought the plants were dying. They were all shrivelled, but my flatmate moved them and now they’re beautiful. I was like, ‘How did you know to move them?’
It’s hard when you’re renting. We just grow stuff in pots. In my last flat we planted stuff anyway—we even made a wee lawn. I asked the landlord at my new flat if we could make a garden, and she said it was cool. My boyfriend’s really good at that sort of thing.
We almost moved into a place in Piha, so we went around there with some native trees, coriander and stuff like that—and then we didn’t get the place! Now they’ve got some nice plants there.
We’ve had a bach in my family for like 100 years. You can only get there by boat. There’s nowhere like it anywhere in the world. When you’re up there, you pretty much only eat from what’s there. So you go fishing, catch a fish, eat that. I think that’s really nice.
My grandparents were farmers, so I grew up going to their stud farm every year. They’d raise bulls and send them off to the meat works. I remember them being loaded onto the trucks one year, and it wasn’t nice. I think the cows know.
I’ve always loved animals. I used to volunteer for the SPCA when I was about ten. On weekends I would go and walk the dogs. I fell in love with one called Zeus.
When I was a little girl I wanted to be an actor or a farmer. But that was before I knew what farming involved. I think farming’s a bit of a worry now—the water pollution, and the greenhouse gases.
I like documentaries. Last year I watched Earthlings, which shows what happens to farm animals, and it’s really full on. I’ve watched it with big guys that burst into tears halfway through. I think everyone should watch it to at least know where your food’s coming from. I don’t eat meat now.
I hate yoga. I just hate it. I can’t do it, it’s too slow, it hurts too much because I’m so inflexible I can’t even touch my toes. It’s just horrible. I’m into belly dancing at the moment. I just recently started doing it and I love it.
The next season of Outrageous Fortune is about Pascalle learning to cook. My mum came to a screening and said, “She’s just like you”. I can’t cook either. I’ve been banned from the kitchen. In the first season of Outrageous Fortune I made a tofu cheesecake and brought it into work. It was so disgusting—I’ve never lived it down. Still, my vegan colleague liked it.
