Too many cooks can spoil the broth but combine them with township farmers and some Khayelitsha “brakslaai” and it’s a recipe for a potentially thriving business.
That’s the take home message from the first-ever “cook off” featuring eight top Cape Town chefs and township farmers who teamed up on Monday to produce a five-star menu.
For once it wasn’t only the chefs sharing culinary secrets as the farmers dished up several plants usually associated with hiking, not dining. And the delicious result proved what may be lurking in your back yard can be transformed into a tasty meal. Stinging nettles, sand cabbage, spekboom and nasturtiums were some of the ingredients tossed into the mix with more conventional crops. The feast even included plants sometimes used as traditional medicine, such as wild rosemary.
Event organiser Abalimi Bezekhaya, a local farming NGO, said the aim was to showcase local produce, some of it already sold into the local market, but much of it still on the margins of the retail and hospitality sector. Each chef and farmer pairing prepared a separate dish and presented it to the group, with a bit of discussion about the process involved.
“The idea behind it is to understand where the farmers come from and for them to show what they can provide for me and my guests at the hotel,” said Table Bay chef Wesli Jacobs, who teamed up with Driftsands farmer Nomalanga Ruiters from Sunshine Organic Farm and Nursery. “Some of the items are familiar, but there were a couple of curve balls,” said Ruiters of his marrow and baby tomato platter inlaid with spekboom and nasturtium leaves. “Today we played a little with ingredients,” he added.
Ruiters favours indigenous plants “because they don’t need a lot of taking care of”. She also trains local residents to identify and use indigenous plants, either for subsistence or business purposes. She said local farmers could profit from a gap in the market for fresh, organic local produce.
Khayelitsha farmer Zodwa Daweti from Umoya we Khaya produced a new kind of vegetarian fritter made from local Western Cape plants. “I did something that I never did, and the plants grow there in the wild veld — all natural and it is the best.”
“Most of what I use grows nicely there in the Eastern Cape and people go hungry because they don’t know this is food. This has given me an idea, I’m opening my own restaurant in Khayelitsha using the wild food,” said Daweti.
Cape Town author and indigenous food expert Loubie Rusch, who helped co-ordinate the event, said connecting township farmers and chefs could help local indigenous plants penetrate the market and support small-scale farmers.
“This event was about reclaiming the foods that belong here, to bring them back to life again,” Rusch said, citing an example of the local “sandkool” that grew on Khayelitsha pavements. “People tramp on them totally unaware that these buds are nutritious and edible. Part of the interesting dynamics of what was going on today was building new traditions from foods that belong in this place,” she said.
An underlying theme of the day was nutrition and the potential of many indigenous plants to promote good health and sustainable agriculture.
Rusch said scientists were still discovering the nutritional qualities of many indigenous plants, which have not been extensively studied. “The reality is that food is medicine. There may be interest from the Western Cape department of health to start making use of plants to help with wellness. Even though they have not been analysed, we know they are nutritious because people have been eating them for years, long before the colonialists came.”
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