Eating for health: a journey towards becoming a plant-based cook

Presenter: Mary Hames

This presentation is in part a photographic journal in which I reflect on my decision to follow a plant-based eating plan to reverse chronic illness. I show how I experiment with planting my own vegetables and plan my meals. I refer to my successes and failures and how this process of planting, cooking, and eating became an intense learning experience. This involved a focused research process and a continuous battle of opinion with the people involved in the medical chain.

This journey started as a response to my questions to lower the number of tablets I had to consume daily. The general practitioner insisted that the tablets kept me alive, and the pharmacist said that the pharmaceuticals will let me live for a very long time. I, on the other hand, was concerned about the side-effects and dependency on tablets. This is an ethnographic study supported by photos, recipes, and narratives of healing.

Bene Appétit: Consuming Food and Remembering Jewish Identity in the Selected Works of Esther David

Presenter: Anandha Lekshmi Nair

South Africa is rated as a food secure country, it is also rated as one of the most unequal society.
Unequal economic and power relations governing the South African food systems with its global politics was replayed through narratives of ‘looting’ of food recently displayed in the media. Covid-19 aggravated the historical burden of racial, class and gendered inequality embodied disproportionately by black and mostly female bodies. While the ‘looting’ narrative inevitably showed rifts in South Africa’s social fabric the protests relayed an underlying everyday food and livelihood crisis for marginalised black urbanites. A shallow diagnosis by media of the ‘looting’ as thuggery undermines long due critical dialogue between the ruling elites, white monopoly capital
and the masses of food insecure black communities.

This paper explores these crucial facets of the social, political, economic infrastructures of power that underlie the food scarcity and inaccessibility for the majority of black poor women and their families. The main aim is to advance the call for a more equitable and accessible food system that incorporates diversity of food sources whilst strengthening resilience of local food systems in the face of competing interests from state protected large international capital. The paper is informed by documentary and press analysis, as well as analysis of webinar discussions from mostly feminist activist following the July protest and supermarkets’ ‘looting’. The paper centers women’s narratives drawn from relevant networks and social movements that challenge hegemonic food security narratives and policies which exclude marginalised women in informalised local food systems. By centering women’s voices often missing from food security dialogues, this paper draws on the efforts and resistances that have gone into crafting alternative food systems, contributing insights for effective design of both inclusive local economies and innovative solutions to the food crisis.

The venison appeal: Exploring the cultural politics of game meat in South Africa

Presenters: Shirley brooks, lindokuhle khumalo, melanie sommerville, & Tariro Kamuti

Eve gave into the temptation by biting into the “forbidden fruit”- her act of disobedience then, her transgression can be ascribed to the act of eating. An affinity exists between the gastronomical and the sexual, an affinity that exists in continuity and recalls a long standing tradition within Western culture and literature of associating women with food.

Consuming food eschews no neutrality. Anthropologist Mary Douglas in her essay, “Deciphering a Meal” treats food as a code, and writes, “if food is treated as a code, the message it encodes will be found in the patterns of social relations being expressed. The message is about different degrees of hierarchy, inclusion and exclusion, boundaries and transactions across the boundaries. Like sex, talking of food has a social as well as a biological component.” Woman was food because breast milk was the human being’s first nourishment – the one food essential for survival. Moreover, both God and women were food insofar as they were bodies. God, like woman, fed his children from his own body. Social arrangements and cultural symbols stereotyped reception of nurture as a male activity, and provision of nurture as a female one. Moreover, this close affinity between divinity and women allowed men to control and regulate the sexuality of womenby keeping them within a spiritual, sanitized domain.

My paper is grounded in the exploration of the presence of the female bodies and their relation to food- their act of consuming and being consumed by the patriarchal order (justified in the garb of religiosity), by taking into consideration some texts like “The Goblin Market”, “Jane Eyre”, “The Duchess of Malfi” etc amongst others.

Becoming B. Smith: A Brand and an Icon

Presenter: Kimberly Nettles-Barcelon

Barbara Elaine Smith accomplished many firsts in her over 40-year career as a model, restaurateur, lifestyle television host, and all-around style maven. Barbara was the first Black model on the cover of Mademoiselle in 1976. In 1986 Barbara, then known professionally as B. Smith, was the first Black woman to open a white-tablecloth restaurant in the Theater District of New York City. She pioneered the media lifestyle format with the publication of her coffee-table book B. Smith’s Entertaining and Cooking for Friends (1995), when her weekly half-hour syndicated television show, B. Smith With Style, debuted in 1997 along with the publication of the glossy B Smith Style magazine in 1999. B. Smith went on to open two additional restaurants (in Washington DC and Sag Harbor), develop a sewing patterns line for Vogue, a furniture line for La-Z-Boy, and a best-selling home-goods line for the retailer Bed, Bath & Beyond. Her work as a Black woman cultural arbiter is foundational to the reimagining of African American people and black style that continues to resonate today.

Sadly, on February 22, 2020 Barbara Elaine Smith passed away from complications with early onset Alzheimer’s disease. She was 70 years old. At the time of her death, B. Smith was worth over $20 million, tangible evidence of the significance of her more than forty-year career. When she passed away at least 50 national and international media outlets aired tributes to her, remarking on the breadth, beauty and impact of B. Smith’s cultural work. From food media (Food and Wine magazine and Eater.com), to Black press (Essence Magazine and BET.com), to business publications (Forbes.com and Black Enterprise), and mainstream press (NY Times, BBC, CNN) stories detailing “Why B. Smith Always Mattered” circulated widely. Becoming B. Smith: A Brand and an Icon.

This essay explores the commodification of lifestyle media products as a process that simultaneously expands the reach of Black brands while watering down their political resonance. In close readings of her television show, coffee table book, and cookbooks as well as the rollout of her home goods, furniture and patterns lines, I think through the commercialization of B. Smith. While many would deem these products as markers of success, I argue that the intrepid expansion of B. Smith into these areas of enterprise made the cutting edge and political nature of her aesthetic work less viable, or certainly less visible. While B. Smith hired chefs to cook in her restaurants, on the television show we see her cooking with her celebrity guests and friends. Her cookbooks, too, featured B. Smith as party planner and cook in one of her homes on the East Coast of the U.S. In fact, by 2007, B. Smith became the image on Aunt Jemima’s Cornbread mix in that company’s effort to move away from a racist image of Black women. Read comparatively, one can see the strain between various B. Smith images – upscale entertainer, home cooking wife and mother, jet-setting restaurateur, and Black woman cook/chef.

Looting or redistribution? redefining narratives or food riots and global food politics

Presenter: Rejoice M Chipuriro

South Africa is rated as a food secure country, it is also rated as one of the most unequal society. Unequal economic and power relations governing the South African food systems with its global politics was replayed through narratives of ‘looting’ of food recently displayed in the media. Covid-19 aggravated the historical burden of racial, class and gendered inequality embodied disproportionately by black and mostly female bodies. While the ‘looting’ narrative inevitably showed rifts in South Africa’s social fabric the protests relayed an underlying everyday food and livelihood crisis for marginalised black urbanites. A shallow diagnosis by media of the ‘looting’ as thuggery undermines long due critical dialogue between the ruling elites, white monopoly capital and the masses of food insecure black communities.

This paper explores these crucial facets of the social, political, economic infrastructures of power that underlie the food scarcity and inaccessibility for the majority of black poor women and their families. The main aim is to advance the call for a more equitable and accessible food system that incorporates diversity of food sources whilst strengthening resilience of local food systems in the face of competing interests from state protected large international capital. The paper is informed by documentary and press analysis, as well as analysis of webinar discussions from mostly feminist activist following the July protest and supermarkets’ ‘looting’. The paper centers women’s narratives drawn from relevant networks and social movements that challenge hegemonic food security narratives and policies which exclude marginalised women in informalised local food systems. By centering women’s voices often missing from food security dialogues, this paper draws on the efforts and resistances that have gone into crafting alternative food systems, contributing insights for effective design of both inclusive local economies and innovative solutions to the food crisis.

“To consume, or be consumed”: an enquiry into sexual/textual politics of food and women

Presenter: Sonakshi Srivastava

Eve gave into the temptation by biting into the “forbidden fruit”- her act of disobedience then, her transgression can be ascribed to the act of eating. An affinity exists between the gastronomical and the sexual, an affinity that exists in continuity and recalls a long standing tradition within Western culture and literature of associating women with food.

Consuming food eschews no neutrality. Anthropologist Mary Douglas in her essay, “Deciphering a Meal” treats food as a code, and writes, “if food is treated as a code, the message it encodes will be found in the patterns of social relations being expressed. The message is about different degrees of hierarchy, inclusion and exclusion, boundaries and transactions across the boundaries. Like sex, talking of food has a social as well as a biological component.” Woman was food because breast milk was the human being’s first nourishment – the one food essential for survival. Moreover, both God and women were food insofar as they were bodies. God, like woman, fed his children from his own body. Social arrangements and cultural symbols stereotyped reception of nurture as a male activity, and provision of nurture as a female one. Moreover, this close affinity between divinity and women allowed men to control and regulate the sexuality of women by keeping them within a spiritual, sanitized domain.

My paper is grounded in the exploration of the presence of the female bodies and their relation to food- their act of consuming and being consumed by the patriarchal order (justified in the garb of religiosity), by taking into consideration some texts like “The Goblin Market”, “Jane Eyre”, “The Duchess of Malfi” etc amongst others.

Cultivating food justice: a case of urban community gardens in the cape flats

Presenter: Tinashe P Kanosvamhira

The adoption of neoliberal policies by several African governments has resulted in food systems that have promoted various food injustices such as unequal access to food. At the same time recent literature that urban agriculture has the potential to promote just food systems at local levels through the provision of alternative food and food decommodification.

Through a mixed-methods  research approach, this paper examines how urban community gardens in the Cape Flats have attempted to counter the neoliberal food system entrenched in Cape Town. The study is based on questionnaires, semi-structured interviews, and observations from 34 urban community food gardens that were selected through a combination of a purposive and snowball sampling method across Gugulethu, Khayelitsha, Ottery, and Mitchells Plain. In-depth interviews were held with state and non-state actors to elicit information on how they supported urban community gardens to achieve their agendas. The findings demonstrate that urban gardeners are progressively attempting to promote food justice through the decommodification of agroecologically vegetables, improved access to vegetables, and the conscientization of local communities on food rights. Nevertheless, the impact of such efforts remains curtailed because of the unsustainability of community gardens and the limited coordination of activities. As such efforts on food conscientization are likely to be sporadic in nature with marginal effects on the local food system.

In conclusion, the paper argues that apart from more structural barriers, more coordinated and localised food activist groups are encouraged to create a more effective movement that could have a more impactful and sustained role within these distressed communities

Meat in black and white

Presenter: Shari Daya

Food and identity have much to do with each other. In the African context, however, food is studied through developmentalist lenses far more than through cultural ones. Therefore, we know little about the ways in which food and contemporary, particularly urban, African identities shape each other. I explore this relationship through an analysis of personal food narratives gathered as part of a four-year research project exploring food memories, values and practices in three South African cities. Meat appears frequently in these narratives, and this paper focuses on this powerful food, sandwiching data analysis between short biographical reflections that personalise the paper’s intellectual arguments.

Using the metaphor of ‘spillage’ as a tool, I show how personal narratives about meat raise questions about identity formation, sometimes surprisingly. These stories about how meat matters, help to deepen understanding of how racial identities take shape in this context. While this is important in itself, these narratives point to the entanglements between race and larger questions: about planetary health, inter-species relationships, morality and humanitude. The contribution of this paper to Food Studies is the demonstration that broader ethical questions about food, specifically meat, cannot be separated from (carefully contextualised) imaginaries and materialities of cultural identity.

Perceptions of Women Street Food Vendors on the determinants of competitiveness of the street food enterprise in the rural towns of Vhembe District, Limpopo Province

Presenters: Tjale Cloupas Mahopo, Cebisa Nesamvuni, Johan Van Niekerk, & Edward Nesamvuni

The study investigated street food vendor’s perception of socio-economic attributes as determinants of their competitiveness in the Vhembe District of Limpopo Province, South Africa. Porter’s diamond model was used as a framework for the analysis of this study. A cross-sectional survey of street food vendors selling ready to eat foods was conducted in Vhembe district towns on 511 street food vendors (age range 18-75 years) using a convenient sampling method to recruit street vendors. Information on sex, education, age, marital status, location of street vending, business ownership and income, use of social safety net, and information on cost, labour, quality, technology, water use, infrastructure, capita, resilience against natural factors, and distance to market and access to market information, stability and health security, were collected.

Descriptive and exploratory analysis was used to summarise the results. Participants’ perception involved rating 46 factors as either enhancing or constraining competitive performance, rated on a Likert scale with 1= (strongly disagree) and 5 (strongly agree). Over 90% of the participants were women, and on average, participants were unmarried, between the ages of 35-44 years, with high school education. The 46 rated factors were grouped into the Porter Competitive Diamond. The chance (3.59/5), production (3.57/5), and government role (3.49/5) factor conditions received the highest overall determinant rating as most agreed, while related industries (3.34/5), demand condition (3.28/5) and firm structure, strategy, and rivalry (3.22/5) received the lowest average rating as most disagreed constraining. The improved strategies for water, financial, and governmental support for street food vendors could increase the competitiveness of street food enterprises in the Vhembe district.

Becoming B. Smith: A Brand and an Icon

Presenter: Kimberly Nettles-Barcelon

Barbara Elaine Smith accomplished many firsts in her over 40-year career as a model, restaurateur, lifestyle television host, and all-around style maven. Barbara was the first Black model on the cover of Mademoiselle in 1976. In 1986 Barbara, then known professionally as B. Smith, was the first Black woman to open a white-tablecloth restaurant in the Theater District of New York City. She pioneered the media lifestyle format with the publication of her coffee-table book B. Smith’s Entertaining and Cooking for Friends (1995), when her weekly half-hour syndicated television show, B. Smith With Style, debuted in 1997 along with the publication of the glossy B Smith Style magazine in 1999. B. Smith went on to open two additional restaurants (in Washington DC and Sag Harbor), develop a sewing patterns line for Vogue, a furniture line for La-Z-Boy, and a best-selling home-goods line for the retailer Bed, Bath & Beyond. Her work as a Black woman cultural arbiter is foundational to the reimagining of African American people and black style that continues to resonate today.

Sadly, on February 22, 2020 Barbara Elaine Smith passed away from complications with early onset Alzheimer’s disease. She was 70 years old. At the time of her death, B. Smith was worth over $20 million, tangible evidence of the significance of her more than forty-year career. When she passed away at least 50 national and international media outlets aired tributes to her, remarking on the breadth, beauty and impact of B. Smith’s cultural work. From food media (Food and Wine magazine and Eater.com), to Black press (Essence Magazine and BET.com), to business publications (Forbes.com and Black Enterprise), and mainstream press (NY Times, BBC, CNN) stories detailing “Why B. Smith Always Mattered” circulated widely. Becoming B. Smith: A Brand and an Icon.

This essay explores the commodification of lifestyle media products as a process that simultaneously expands the reach of Black brands while watering down their political resonance. In close readings of her television show, coffee table book, and cookbooks as well as the rollout of her home goods, furniture and patterns lines, I think through the commercialization of B. Smith. While many would deem these products as markers of success, I argue that the intrepid expansion of B. Smith into these areas of enterprise made the cutting edge and political nature of her aesthetic work less viable, or certainly less visible. While B. Smith hired chefs to cook in her restaurants, on the television show we see her cooking with her celebrity guests and friends. Her cookbooks, too, featured B. Smith as party planner and cook in one of her homes on the East Coast of the U.S. In fact, by 2007, B. Smith became the image on Aunt Jemima’s Cornbread mix in that company’s effort to move away from a racist image of Black women. Read comparatively, one can see the strain between various B. Smith images – upscale entertainer, home cooking wife and mother, jet-setting restaurateur, and Black woman cook/chef.

The Vegetable Patch, Ricoffy and No Name Milk: Eating in Athlone

Presenter: Gabeba Baderoon

This is a reading of poems and prose about food and memory. My memory of meals in Athlone
starts from the ground up. When I left, I missed the food the most. Since then, longing has made me write about it and eventually learn to make it. Through food, I ultimately reached into the ground, the first cleared ground, a garden. In Cape Town, fifteen kilometres east on Klipfontein
from our house, gardens are not just accessories to houses. They are the reason for imperialism.

The Company Gardens in the centre of the city, named for the Dutch East Indian Company, were established to provide fresh fruits, vegetables, meat, and water for ships trading in spices and slaves between Asia and Europe. Gardens today drive the employment of lowly paid domestic-but-not-quite-house-workers. To clear ground and make soil is to envision a future that you may never see. The temporality of a garden is an order of time that is not background. It is the present and it is the deep past. Along the side of my mother’s house is an area that we call the vegetable patch, but it is by now an urban farm all of thirty square metres in size. It produces yellow lightbulb-shaped tomatoes, sweet if misshapen carrots, green-ripening-into-red peppers, thin green chilies,
long squat squash, red lettuce, fat purple eggplants, a mass of broad beans, full-leaved ginger, turmeric and all kinds of herbs. But it produces them out of soil that has taken forty-five years to nourish into fruitfulness. My role forty years ago, when I was a child and this place was slowly becoming our home, was to take vegetable peels out to the compost heap. In doing this, I was central to the making of the garden, though I didn’t know it at the time.

The venison appeal: Exploring the cultural politics of game meat in South Africa

Presenter: Rini Singhi

The objective of this paper is to explore Rajasthan’s desert food culture: native, local agriculture,
eating practices and its link to sustainability. Situated in the North-western part of India, Rajasthan is an arid and dry state. The scarce produce has forced its inhabitants to adopt ingenious ways to use the what’s available around. Kherji tree, also the state tree of Rajasthan is one such example. As a native species of the state, it grows with low input and is said to be drought resistant and nitrogen fixer. The unripe pods are green, and locally known as ‘sangria’ or ‘sangar’.

The pods are also dried and used all year round to make Pachkuta, a famous five vegetable dish staple to Rajasthan. Since all parts of khejri are useful it is called the ‘kalpavriksha of the desert’. It is also known as the ‘king of the desert’. In 1731, Amrita Devi Bishnoi along with 363 other people sacrificed their life for the protection of Khejri trees in Khejrali village near Jodhpur in Rajasthan. A testimony of a deep link relationship between community and nature. This paper aims to answer how local food is climate resilient, community enhancer and a healthier diet option.

The Unwritten: A poetic exploration of the recipe beyond and between the lines

Presenter: Pralini Naidoo

Through poetry, story and image, I explore some of my heritage foods and the ways in which their recipes reside and shift beyond ‘words on a page’. By its very definition, the word recipe implies a formula and while their textual and published form offer multiple readings, defining the recipe as simply a set of instructions in a published bound book (depending on who is telling the story) can concretise the ways in which the replication of food is conceptualised.

Published recipes are just as much a form of knowledge production as any, allowing those in power to appropriate, exoticise, reduce and take ownership of the food narratives of more marginalised communities. Rethinking forms of recipe transmission beyond a mainstream published form disrupts and allows for complex understandings of the ways in which heritage recipes change and adapt while remembering the unwritten.

I miss my mum’s cooking: Migration and Black British cultures

Presenter: Michael McMillan

Across the African diaspora food cultures and identities have emerged through histories of colonialism, imperialism and migration, such as okra, rice, breadfruit, saltfish and cornmeal.

Delicious dishes are also made from meat and fish parts that were castaway during the enslavement of Africans, such as pigtail, pigtrotters, cow foot, cow skin, tripe, chicken neck to mention a few. How and where these food ingredients are Us, contemporary art from the Caribbean, group show. KAdE, Kunsthal, Amersfoort sourced, and how they are cooked and eaten carry symbolic capital around cultural knowledge, taste, pleasure, affect and identity formation. Conventionally, in preparing parties across the African Caribbean diaspora, for example, music comes first, followed by hot food, and drink, and there some dishes that are de rigueur. However, growing up Black in Britain, did not and does not mean there is a homogenous response to Caribbean cuisine, which is as much to do with exposure, choice and identification.

Self-reflexively, I miss my Mum more than her cooking now, because I cook when she did and more, but in my own style, because it embodies pleasure and love. I also love eating with my hands, and will suck meat and fish bone in public, but this tends to ignite social stigmas about fine dining practices, and what Black bodies should and should not do in the public space, such as our natural hair. Throwbacks to Victorian values of respectability and civilising the Black bodies, these legacies of colonialism that still haunt our everyday lives. These tropes also circulate in hegemonic food discourses in the ways that Caribbean food is repackaged as cuisine and how Caribbean chefs are represented in popular culture.

Tainted Food: Fruit, Supermarkets, and Identity in Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light

Presenter: B. Jamieson Stanley

This paper offers a food studies reading of Zoë Wicomb’s 2006 novel Playing in the Light. I focus on the meanings of supermarkets and fruit that the novel activates to capture shifting ideas about identity and desire in the 1990s moment of South Africa’s political transition. I first situate Playing in the Light in dialogue with queer theory as well as scholarship on supermarketization and neoliberal-era temporalities (in South Africa and beyond). I then argue that Playing in the Light uses shopping at Woolworths as a metonym to expose ways in which neoliberalizing capitalism regiments raced, classed, gendered, and sexual identities through patterns in food consumption. Fruit from the supermarket, in particular, function as a “tainted food,” meaning a food that has negative connotations from a progressive or radical eco/food-political perspective, such as associations with violence, exploitation, or environmental damage.

In the case of Wicomb’s novel, fruit from the supermarket is “tainted” in that it represents the performance via consumerism of an oppressive middle-class cis-heterosexual whiteness. Supermarket fruits are a metaphor for identity, but also more than a metaphor: food delivery mechanisms are materially part of the
production of race, class, sexuality, and gender under global capitalism, governing when and where people shop and determining myriad weekly patterns around cooking, diet, family structure, and sociality. And yet, I argue, Wicomb also uses scenes of fruit-eating to defy scripts of cisheteronormative romance and rigid racial/class categories inherited from the apartheid era; fruit-eating also encodes potentially liberatory ways to identify, belong, and relate with others. Wicomb thus foregrounds the role of a globalized food regime in extending normativity and social inequality, but simultaneously uses the idiom of tainted food to challenge the identity categories and consumer tempos enforced by globalized capitalism, imagining other modes of being.