Chef Mokgadi Itsweng from South Africa knows that her work is about more than just cooking food – it’s also about teaching its origins. "Chefs are important because they can tell not only the story of the farmer but also the story of the ingredient on a plate," she says. And if it were up to her, those plates would have a lot more millets and sorghum on them.
That’s why, together with other chefs from the region, she will tour South Africa, Botswana and Swaziland this year, educating people about the heritage of various indigenous crops and their environmental and nutritional benefits.
For Mokgadi, it’s all part of helping people make food choices that are healthy for people and the planet.
Her cookbook features sorghum and millet dishes, which tick both of those boxes. But while the grains are native to South Africa, putting the recipes together was an exercise in rediscovery.
“We've got recipes for days that use these ingredients. We just didn't know them, purely because that indigenous knowledge system was broken,” she explains.
Once staple grains in South Africa, sorghum and millets were pushed out by maize during colonialism and further suppressed during the apartheid regime. Anything related to indigenous spirituality, including foraging and growing indigenous plants, was legally prohibited. Hence, for many South Africans both grains are more than just food.
“It is a connector to our ancestors. It's our connection to our culture, our connection to who we are.”
Still, their potential for helping in her country’s struggle with malnutrition is just as important to Mokgadi. Since millets and sorghum provide essential nutrients, they have much to offer to local diets, she says, as even people who eat regular meals often eat foods with too few nutrients. In short, “We need our nutrition back.”
Because they require relatively few resources to grow, bringing back these ancient grains is key to the health of the planet, too, she says.
With her cookbook and events, Mokgadi is part of a larger effort to promote the benefits of millets and sorghum in South Africa, which have brought the grains back onto store shelves.
She hopes other chefs will get inspired to join her: “As chefs, if we create a demand for millets, farmers can sustain their businesses, growing and selling millets, knowing that people want them.”
“It's our food. It is not something new,” she stresses. “If we were able to take up quinoa as quickly as we did, we can take up something that's ours and bring it back onto our plates.”
