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#TrendingAwards2018: 3 African food heroes

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A food trend report has declared that next year will be the year when African food becomes popular. Anna Trapido looks at three inspirational, local food heroes who are already setting the agenda.

Keeping up with international taste trends can be utterly exhausting. One year the foodie fashionistas declare kale, cauliflower mash and kimchi to be the hot foods for cool people. The next it’s cooking over coals and sriracha sauce that makes the hipsters’ hearts sing.

The good news for South Africans is that in 2019 it will be super-easy to be stylish. All we need to do is be ourselves and bask in the knowledge that the self-appointed global gourmet gurus have designated Africa as the coming year’s epicurean inspiration.

The über-influential London food design studio, Bompas & Parr, stated in their recent Imminent Future of Food Trends Report that in 2019 the “obsession with food from Asian countries will dwindle in favour of African cuisine”.

That’s the sweet stuff. Now here comes the bitter aftertaste. Bompas & Parr go on to justify their statement by saying “Africa is arguably the main remaining world food culture left to be adopted, adapted and commercialised”.

So, this is not admiration with no strings attached. They have in mind to “adopt, adapt and commercialise”.

Anyone else smell the potential for cultural appropriation and biopiracy as central themes for 2019?

To cry foul before even trying to control the culinary agenda is lazy and defeatist. There are African food entrepreneurs (farmers, chefs and healthy eating activists) who are taking the lead in curating our continent’s cuisine. As African consumers it is our job to support them in their epicurean endeavours.

Here are three inspirational local food heroes who showed us in 2018 that they are ready to take the lead in 2019:

POSH NOSH PRINCE: Chef Coco Reinarhz

Chef Coco Reinarhz

Burundian-born, South African-based Chef Fathi (AKA Coco) Reinarhz offers delicious pan-African elegance at his super-stylish Sandton restaurant, Epicure. African indigenous ingredients and heritage cooking methods are given modern gourmet glamour.

Signature dishes include Congolese guinea fowl in palm pulp moambe sauce. Sweet-toothed types adore Ivorian-style fried plantain aloko topped with a swirl of tuile biscuit and a quenelle of ruby bissap (hibiscus) rouge sorbet. What are you waiting for? Epicure is the very best in edible African opulence.

Visit: epicurerestaurant.co.za

HEALTHY EATING GOURMET GURU: Dr Mavhungu Nelwamondo

Dr Mavhungu Nelwamondo uses African indigenous food as part of a strategy to combat lifestyle diseases. Her medical practice is in Houghton, Johannesburg, and she offers healthy heritage dishes at the Bryanston Organic Market.

Whether it’s mufhoho millet melanges, mbuyu baobab and marula nut ice cream or a mushidzhi morogo muffin, the doctor-chef fabulously fuses food and medicine.

Visit: moderntraditions.co.za

FANTASTIC FARMER: Xolisa Bangani

Xolisa Bangani’s Ikhaya Kulture community garden, Site C, Khayelitsha, Cape Town, operates as a hub-space for young people to discover nature and access deliciously diverse varieties of plant-based food, including indigenous vegetables. The recent recipient of a Round Table Global Youth Award, farmer Bangani says that “Khayelitsha is a deprived community with a lack of knowledge and access to information about food, health and the environment.

At Ikhaya we have started a movement to use primal earth connections to revive and re-define our lives as sons and daughters of the soil. We wanted to foster a sense of self-love, self-reliance and self-awareness through gardens and gardening …” He is under no illusions as to the challenge he has set himself because “in order to change the world we must change the composition of the soil.

Changing the sandy soil to loam soil is a serious challenge and very hard work but the aim is to show the youth that everything is possible through the powers of nature. I truly believe that over the past few years we have given young people hope; we have changed the mindset of kids who thought food came only from shelves. Together we have planted and nurtured a food forest.”

Visit: facebook.com/xolisa.bangani.7

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