I went along to the fundraising dinner for The Hunger Project on Saturday night, where the guest of honor was the Liberian president (and first woman president of an African country), Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf. Johnson-Sirleaf was to be the recipient of the Africa Prize for Leadership, which Wangari Maathai (whose guest I was) had won in 1991.

Now, a big fancy dinner at the Hilton Hotel might strike you (as it did me) as a somewhat ironic gesture for something calling itself The Hunger Project. And there was food galore. A nice (and welcome) gesture, however, was that you had a choice of meals: salmon or vegan. Given that most folks who attend fundraisers (so I'm told) won't cough up the dough unless the food is bloody, the food choice of the evening was pretty bold. But it pales into comparison with an Oxfam fundraiser dinner once where, apparently, people got the food that their fundees normally ate. As you can imagine, it was basically vegetarian and the portion sizes were very small. Now, that would have been an interesting fundraiser to be at.