Something good to eat

Yes it's really hard to always eat the right thing, especially if you're paying money for it. On top of that you've got to watch your weight, make sure you're getting the right vitamins and minerals, the list goes on.

So growing your own food is probably the easiest way to go about things, but can be really hard to do. What often makes it so hard is often the type of things people try to grow. The fruit and veg we buy in the shops has been selectively bred for specific traits - often what makes them most marketable, things like size and shelf life. To get to this point though, they often become hard to grow, particularly in small quantities and without the use of agrochemicals. And I'm not suggesting that we all should be growing heritage varieties either.

Budding gardeners (yes, I did) often joke that all they can grow are weeds. Well, maybe that's not such a bad thing. At least for one, and I'd be prepared to bet a lot more. Pigweed. The name might get you thinking that you should be growing it for other animals, but humans can eat it too. It is considered a weed and in the US it has become resistant to certain over-relied on herbicides and is causing mayhem for farmers of genetically modified cotton. The local variety, Amaranthus hybridus, is still easy to grow, but is not invasive.

Getting on to the eating part, pigweed has many benefits. One serving of the leaves, cooked like spinach, will provide you with five times the iron you need, twice the calcium, 20 times the vitamin A and nearly half your daily protein requirements. I've yet to eat it, but the next time I'm at Kirstenbosch, I'm going to pick up some seeds, grow it and eat it. It could be a while, but I'll report back!

*Most of the info here was taken from an article in Veld and Flora, December 2010, Volume 96(4)
**Photo from www.southeasternflora.com. Used without permission - please don't sue me.

International eating

Food has gone international in a big way. Walking around Checkers (a local supermarket) in Muizenberg yesterday I was blown away by the amount of food coming from overseas. Agricultural dumping aside, it is amazing to think that the products have travelled hours and hours to arrive in South Africa from Finland, the US, Britain, Germany and the Netherlands. Most of it was packaged food (Idaho powdered potatoes anyone?) but there is a lot of fresh food as well.

I have long sneered at Kerrygold Irish Butter in my local Pick n Pay, but now there is cheese from England there too. Stop for a minute and think about the logisitics of this. How much cheese would you have to send over to make importing cheese from england viable? And how do they do it? The cheese was vaccum packed in England in plastic (with a nice stylised picture of the country side on it), but how did it travel out here? I would imagine on a refrigerated shipping container - using up left over space on passenger planes seems like a bridge too far. So there is a giant shipping container filled with cheese humming away in amongst loads of other containers with who knows what in them (toxic chemicals in some no doubt, as the population of coastal Africa repeatedly find out). I'm not sure about you, but imagining the food I am going to eat in such an industrial setting just doesn't do it for me. However, If you live in a city it is hard to avoid these types of food miles, but there are choices to be made too. My mother has organic gouda in her fridge that she picks up from an equally lovely woman who distributes organic food from small producers. And that is one end of the spectrum - you could just buy local cheese on the shelf next to the imported one.

Returning to the dumping issue. It's an old one, and one that sites like farmsubsidy.org have been going on about for ages. Huge farms and agricultural industries in Europe and the US receive massive (think around EUR 55 billion in the EU alone) amounts of money every year to produce more food than the populations of both regions could ever hope to eat. They feed loads to animals (acknowledged as being a wasteful way of using plant energy as food) but even so there is an amazing amount left over. So what do they do with all of it? Well, Africa is starving right? Ship it over there of course. Good in theory, but when all this cheap, subsidised food arrives in Africa (and you can bet it's not the perishable organic food that's being shipped) it robs African producers of their market. You begin to get a picture of the inequity when you imagine the jumbo jets full of organic fresh succulent beans being flown from Kenya to Europe and the bits of chicken other than the breast (because dieting Europeans want the lean and best meat only) being shipped to Africa.

A huge and complex problem. Or is it? Often when these global issues descend on us all we really feel we can do is stop watching the news - it seems a lot more simpler then. With this issue at least, there is something we can do and it's flippin easy. Check where your favourite food brands come from - it's right there on the label. If they aren't produced in your country, don't buy them. Better yet, buy food with only one ingredient. Think fresh veg, legumes and grains.

With all the gourmet eating that's doing the rounds, it's easy to think that we need to buy food from all over the world. In South Africa though, we are really lucky that we can grow most foods right here. We don't need to buy from overseas to cook amazingly.