Welcome to Veet’s Vegan Cooking School,

My name is Veet and I established Veet’s Vegan Cooking School in 2015. Since establishment, I have been running a three-day Vegan Foundation Course each month and a Vegan Chef Training course on a yearly basis. 

In 2020, I graduated with a Post Graduate Certificate in Nutrition from Deakin University and am currently undertaking my Masters in Nutrition. Since qualifying as a nutritionist, I have been offering individualised nutrition and food analysis sessions along with cooking classes, courses and Vegan Chef training. Combining my nutritional knowledge with my passion for vegan cooking is a dream come true. It provides the foundation for the healthy lifestyle I live and breathe. I now want to empower others to change their lives through education and knowledge. 
 
The founding principle at Veet’s Vegan Cooking School is to enjoy a quality lifestyle, through good sustainable nutrition, physical activity, mental and spiritual well being. All produce used at Veet’s Vegan Cooking School is organic and preservative free, stemming from a lifetime commitment of allowing only the best quality food into my own body.
 

My Vision

The vision at Veet’s Vegan Cooking School is to help people establish healthy lifestyle habits, with a focus on ethical and clean eating. Our courses enable our customers to feel confident in choosing and cooking foods, which will give them all of the nutrients, vitamins and minerals they need on a daily basis, to enable their bodies to work at an optimum level.
 
The focus of the Vegan Chef Training course is to teach aspiring chefs the skills they need to establish ethical food sourcing and run a successful food business.
 
Throughout my travels around Australia, it became clear that the busiest and most successful cafes and restaurants were those that stood by their ethical and moral values. In Melbourne’s Brunswick Street, there are three vegetarian and two vegan restaurants where customers line the streets for hours, waiting for a table. In the tiny town of Milton, customers commute for hours just to experience the incredible cooking from a well-known vegetarian restaurant. This symbolises the evolution of food consciousness in Australia today. Newer generations are actively seeking establishments catering towards vegetarian, vegan and palm-oil free foods; raw is a word they love. There is no reason why there cannot be an ethical vegan café or restaurant in every town in Australia. 
 
Veet's Vegan Cooking School offers a training program that will give budding entrepreneurs the skills to help them flourish in this rapidly changing environment of vegetation and vegan cooking and catering.
 
 

My Personal Story

 
At sixteen years of age, in year ten, I announced to my mum that I wanted to become a vegetarian. While mum supported this transition she asked me where would I get my protein from? Great question. This began my journey into researching vegetarian cuisine. I visited school and community libraries to learn everything I could about vegetarian protein sources and sustainable plant-based diets.
 
At the same time, I signed up for a week-long work experience, in the kitchen of the Darwin Travelodge Hotel. Here, I was ridiculed for revealing my vegetarian diet and was promptly told by the head chef that there was no chance of becoming a chef, if I was a vegetarian. Upon hearing this, I looked elsewhere for a career and became a care worker for the Department of Community Services. I then studied to become a primary school teacher, working in schools and in a juvenile detention centre, caring for the most vulnerable children in Australia.
 
Travelling the world both as a teacher and a tourist made me realise how much of the world's traditional food was vegetarian and how well balanced it was. However, on my travels I met people who had been vegetarian for years, but as a result were not very healthy. This didn't make any sense to me. I was incredibly healthy as a vegetarian. So I started to conduct my own research into what they were doing wrong. It became clear that I was following a more traditional way of adopting a vegetarian diet, eating only organic wholefoods, prioritising complete proteins in sufficient quantities and sourcing fresh local produce to ensure enough vitamins and minerals were included in my daily diet.
 
When I moved to the Northern Rivers in NSW in 2008, I gave up my teaching career to follow my passion. I started an organic vegetarian catering business. I looked for a chef course but there still wasn't one that would accommodate a vegetarian diet. But I went ahead with my business idea. I became extremely busy, catering for high-end retreats looking for healthier food choices. Here I was able to help educate those seeking more information about a vegetarian diet. In 2010, I was asked to teach cooking classes. I soon realised that teaching one-off cooking class wasn't providing enough knowledge and resources for those wanting to pursue a healthy life as a vegetarian, or for those who wanted to start a business in vegetarian cuisine.
 
In 2014, the word had spread and more and more people came to me in pursuit of transitioning into a healthy vegan or vegetarian lifestyle or wanting to establish a career in this rapidly growing food industry. At this time, there still was no official educational course for this transition. So I created and provided a course that would help people to follow their passion, either becoming a Vegan Chef or learning how to cook healthy vegan food.
 
When I began to write the syllabus for the Vegetarian Chef and Lifestyle Training program, many people I met had become vegan upon seeing how cruelly animals were treated along with the debilitating environmental effects the dairy industry had. My own research into this prompted my transition into becoming vegan, giving up dairy and other animal products. Once the first module of the course started in May 2015, it was very clear that I would be running a Vegan course.
 
The more I researched the vegan diet, the more I realised that this was the healthiest way to live. When COVID 19 hit at the beginning of 2020, people were relying more and more on my nutritional knowledge, gained through my experience as a teacher and chef to stay as healthy as they possibly could. I decided to study at Deakin University to become officially qualified as a nutritionist. Throughout my studies, the scientific research clearly showed that a vegan and plant-based diet was the most effective lifestyle choice to maintain health, functionality and stay disease free. 
 
These days I am a vegan advocate for health, the environment, animals and meditation. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me via email, as I would love to meet you to help you on your health journey.