Food

Written by Leonie Joubert Edited by Nadine Botha | Designed by Stephen AlfredsAn Oranjezicht City Farm and Cape Town Partnership publication

Dialogues Report

THE

Creating a healthier, more conscious and just food system in the Mother City

LEONIE JOUBERTEmail: leonie@scorched.co.za

Website: www.leoniejoubert.co.za

Twitter: @leoniejoubert

ORANJEZICHT CITY FARMcorner of Sidmouth Avenue and Upper Orange Street, Oranjezicht

Email: cityfarm@ozcf.co.za

Website: www.ozcf.co.za

Twitter: @OZCFarm

CAPE TOWN PARTNERSHIP34 Bree Street, Cape Town

Email: media@capetownpartnership.co.za

Website: www.capetownpartnership.co.za

Twitter: @CTpartnership

#CTfoodreport

About this documentThis report captures the themes and issues that arose in the OZCF Food Dialogues series hosted in Cape Town from May to July 2014. Local science writer Leonie Joubert, author of The Hungry Season: Feeding Southern Africa’s Cities, joined the team to draw out the narratives, extract the themes expressed by the various speakers, and unpack opportunities and ideas that emerged as trends through the discussions.

The draft report was workshopped with the Food Dialogues presenters, through a Cape Town Partnership Green Clusters event.

We hope that this report will inform future food dialogues, workshops and potentially a symposium on the food system in Cape Town.

INTRODUCTION: THE DIALOGUES

1. GOING LOCAL

2. CULTURE: Food at the heart of our community

3. Layout of the city: A tale of two cities

4. Environment: ‘Greening’ up our plates

5. Politics: Cape Town’s veggie patch since the 1800s

6. Health & nutrition: Eat like your life depends on it, because it does

7. Economics: Let’s talk about money

8. Call to action: Change is coming, be part of it

9. Resources: The ‘go to’ list of the food system

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CONTENTS

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FRONT MATTER

INTRODUCTION

THE FOOD DIALOGUES

FRONT MATTER

THE FOOD DIALOGUES

FRONT MATTER

The vision of a garden at the heart of a healthy city

Sessions brought together a wide range of speakers involved in shaping the

food system, providing an opportunity for food growers, academics, activists, writers, nutritionists, food lovers and anyone interested in sustainable approaches to engage in key issues intimately connected to the food we eat and the future of food in Cape Town.

We’ve realised that urban agriculture is as much about people as it is about our planet. Urban agriculture can inspire people to make changes in their lives, improve their health and wellbeing, and adopt sustainable lifestyles. It’s more than growing veggies. We want to educate people, build communities, and rethink how food markets operate. We want to tear down the high walls of our suburbs and recreate spaces where neighbours can meet and mingle, where people use public parks and green spaces, where communities walk, cycle and bus together.

The Food Dialogues were conceived of and produced by the Oranjezicht City Farm (OZCF) as a 10-part series of talks on the food system in Cape Town.

INTRODUCTION

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FRONT MATTER

Our mission is to confront the surrounding environmental and societal issues here in our city, especially with regard to urban sprawl, economic inequality and food justice. And the OZCF Food Dialogues series is a way for us to extend this vision beyond the Oranjezicht City Farm, and to get Capetonians thinking and talking about how we can work together to create a more just and secure local food economy.

FROM BOWLING GREEN, TO A BOWL OF GREENS: ORANJEZICHT CITY FARMThe Oranjezicht City Farm is a neighbourhood non-profit project in Cape Town celebrating local food, culture and community through urban agriculture. We think it makes sense to grow our most perishable, vitamin-rich foods close to where we live. Now, looking back, we can say that the farm has not only preserved open space but offers the community a respite from the quick tempo of urban life. We recognise that more and more people are trying to understand how the food they buy and eat is connected to health and wellness. For some, it’s a reaction to the environmental impacts of industrialised commercial agriculture. For others, a chance to reconnect with nature and their neighbours, spend time as a family or just chill with friends.

OZCF has taken one more step on its journey, raising awareness about issues

We’ve realised that urban agriculture

is as much about

people as it is about our

planet

THE FOOD DIALOGUES

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associated with food and the city: from urban greening and resource use, to food security and waste.

Educational programmes have engaged local and regional schools in helping to develop tomorrow’s leaders. Indigenous culinary plants are being reintroduced for cultivation in local gardens and inclusion in family meals. We have created jobs and are encouraging a local food system. The atomisation that characterises more affluent urban communities in Cape Town is slowly being changed in Oranjezicht to create a cohesive community. Neighbours are working together to beautify, sustain and improve their shared neighbourhood, across boundaries of age, race

and class. There is a palpable sense of pride and belonging that is flourishing in Oranjezicht alongside the beetroots and buchu.

It’s still early days and there is a long road ahead, but spade by spade, seed by seed, we will be walking it together.

FRONT MATTER

We’re interested in the concept of placemaking through food. One of the beliefs that underpins our work is that space matters: bringing diverse groups of people together in a shared, welcoming space leads to stronger and more resilient communities.

There is so much to explore around using edible gardens and markets to animate our local parks, while highlighting how the principles of placemaking can transform public spaces by highlighting local assets and serving

community needs. This is the need to bring people together; make inviting and safe public spaces; reinvigorate neighbourhoods and support small-scale economic activity; provide fresh, high-quality organically grown produce to urban residents; and protect open space and preserve farming around Cape Town.

We hope that you will join us.

Sheryl Ozinsky and Kurt AckermannFounding volunteers, Oranjezicht City Farm

CAPE TOWN PARTNERSHIP: PEOPLE MAKE PLACESThe Cape Town Partnership (CTP) is a non-profit organisation that facilitates collaboration for urban transformation. We connect people and organisations around a common vision and a shared agenda, focussing specifically on change that can benefit Cape Town and the people who live here. We are involved in multiple projects, on different scales, with different focuses that impact a diverse range of people in the Table Bay Planning District (or universally known as the larger Cape Town central city).

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INTRODUCTION

FRONT MATTER

It’s still early

days and there is a long road ahead,

but spade by spade, seed by seed, we will be

walking it

together

We think of cities as places of concentrated humanity, networks of human connections. We do our work in the firm belief that, more than the infrastructure, the built environment, the beautiful natural resources or skyline, a city comes to life every day because of its people – as they congregate in a commonly shared space to work, live, learn and play. If people are to feel truly welcome in the city, then they need to feel that who they are and where they’re from is valued and that they can come here to share this value with others.

Urban agriculture is about more than just green spaces

and vegetables. It can help protect our urban environment while creating jobs and playing an important role in youth education. That’s why the Cape Town Partnership started Green Clusters, a project that focuses on the food system in Cape Town, specifically looking at urban agriculture and how growing local food can stimulate economic opportunities and healthier communities. A city is like the human body: it needs a healthy diet and digestive system. The CTP’s Green Clusters is about helping Cape Town arrive at better answers to questions like “What do we eat, and where is it from?”

Green Clusters looks at how urban agricultural processes and systems can be designed to create opportunities for healthy eating – and a healthy source of income – in Cape Town. These are manifestations of urban dignity, an important principle of the CTP’s work. In its consideration as a land use, urban agriculture brings about many benefits, such as job creation, city greening, flood reduction and social cohesion. Green spaces in and around the city contribute to a low-carbon and ecologically balanced urban environment.

The socio-economic benefits derived from agriculture are turning under-utilised land assets into productive spaces, the potential for entrepreneurial ventures and skills development, and the educational impact created

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THE FOOD DIALOGUES

when you begin to interact with ways food is produced and subsequently consumed.

This report looks at bringing together the people who make food a reality in Cape Town, to collaborate in creating a more sustainable food system in the city. Green Clusters collaborated with OZCF to collect and present knowledge on the state of food in Cape Town and see how the city can feed itself in better ways. It can inform further dialogue, and the direction of the CTP and interested partners, in defining and highlighting the role of food in creating an empowered and resilient city.

Bulelwa Makalima-NgewanaCape Town Partnership, CEO

FRONT MATTERINTRODUCTION

The sessions brought together a range of speakers involved in

shaping the food system. It gave the opportunity for food growers, academics, activists, writers, nutritionists, food lovers, and anyone interested in sustainable approaches, to engage in key issues intimately connected to the food we eat and the future of food in Cape Town.

Maya Marshak and Elizabeth Jengo were the formidable energy that brought together the amazing spread of people

who shared their knowledge, passion and experience in a way that has formed new working relationships and will continue to catalyse action.

To listen to the presentations, please visit www.ozcf.co.za/food-dialogues.

The dialogue continues online at www.ozcf.co.za Facebook.com/OZCFarm Twitter @OZCFarm And every Saturday at OZCF Market Day.

The OZCF Food Dialogues

The OZCF Food Dialogues was a 10-part series of talks that brought together some of the freshest minds to discuss aspects of the food system in Cape Town. It was created and produced by the Oranjezicht City Farm (OZCF), as a platform for sharing ideas to foster a healthier, more conscious and just food system in the Mother City.

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FRONT MATTER

The presenters 1. Urban farming and our hungry cityLeonie Joubert (author and science writer)

Kurt Ackermann (Oranjezicht City Farm)

2. Food flows and farmland: understanding Cape Town’s food systemsDr Gareth Haysom(African Food Security Urban Network, University of Cape Town)

Deni Archer (Food with a Story)

Nazeer Sonday(Philippi Horticultural Area)

3. Creating a space for urban agriculture: three stories of struggle and success in urban agriculture in Cape TownPat Featherstone (Soil for Life)

Mzukisi Zele (Tyisa Nabanye)

Robert Small (Abalimi Bhezekhaya)

4. (In)edible environments: food production and the environmentDr Thokozani Kanyerere(University of the Western Cape)

Matthew Koehorst (Greenpop)

Saul Roux (City of Cape Town)

5. Growing food and placemaking in the cityDr John Parker (Lentegeur Psychiatric Hospital)

Jenny Louw (Earth Artist)

Sheryl Ozinksy(Oranjezicht City Farm)

Zarina Nteta (Cape Town Partnership)

6. Soul food: culture and horticultural diversity in Cape TownZaayan Khan (The Surplus People Project, Slow Food Youth Network)

Loubie Rusch (Making KOS)

7. Food gardens as ecosystems and farming with natureLeigh Brown (SEED)

Marjolijn Dijksterhuis (Gardeners Glory Honey)

Skye Fehlmann (Naturally Organic)

Tony Gerrans (Compassion in World Farming)

8. Food and the bodyBeatrice Rabkin (Nutritional Therapist)

Sunette van Zyl (Nutritional Therapist)

9. Food waste: transforming food waste to being a resource in Cape TownKate Hamilton (FoodBank Cape Town)

Melanie Ludwig (Zero to Landfill Organics)

Omeros Demetriou (Food 4 Thought)

Nicholas Wiid (Western Cape Government)

10. A tour of food growing sites in Cape TownAs part of the Food Dialogues series, we hosted a tour of urban farming projects in the Philippi Horticultural Area, Gugulethu and Mitchell’s Plain. The tour also marked the launch of the City of Eden’s Food Route Tours by Anna Shevel. The tour included visits to two land reform farms in Philippi: a community garden run by the Vukuzenzela Urban Farmers Association (VUFA), and Sibongile Sityedi at the Gugulethu Comprehensive School. The non-profit public benefit organisation SEED, in Mitchell’s Plain, demonstrated their permaculture gardens, and related educational and empowerment projects.

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THE FOOD DIALOGUES

GOING LOCALCHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 1

This report, and the OZCF Food Dialogues series, is about ‘going local’. It’s about challenging the industrial scale of the modern urban food system, and the social, environmental and food injustices that spring from it. It’s about looking for alternatives to the large-scale model of agricultural production and how this model trickles down through the entire food value chain.

beyond the urban food garden

Going ‘local’ is about more than just growing food within the

confines of the city to meet our need for fresh whole foods. It is about looking at different ways to shorten the value chain, and to localise how we ship, store, process, pack, sell, select, eat and commune around food, and what we do with the leftovers.

We recognise that we can’t localise the entire food system. For instance, Cape Town

needs several times more land than it has, in order to provide the city with all its food, according the University of Cape Town’s Dr Gareth Haysom. And we don’t have the right climate to grow the full diversity of food we eat. But we can look at ways to reduce the huge distances that urban, industrial life has put between our food and us, be it physical distance between farm and fork, or the attitudes we have towards food.

Where we can localise the food system, it can have the following positive spinoffs:

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• Preserve the nutritional content in fresh produce, because of the shorter distances and time between harvest and consumption.

• It’s easier to return to whole foods. The long distances between farm and fork means retailers often choose foods with a longer shelf life that can withstand the extensive handling that happens along a long value chain. This pushes us towards more refined and grain-based foods, and away from fresh produce that perishes quickly and damages easily. Think of the difference between mealie meal and spinach in terms of shelf life, its ability to withstand handling, and its nutritional value.

• It reduces the carbon and water footprint of the food, which are important aspects of the sustainability of our food production system.

• It decentralises the food system, putting it back in the hands of small

What is ‘food security’? We, as Capetonians, are ‘food secure’ if we have access to

healthy, safe, affordable, culturally appropriate food every day. Whether or not we go hungry or get nourishing food is not only

about whether we grow enough food or have enough circulating in the city, it’s about who has access to that food, every day, and

what choices we make with that food.

The notion of food sovereignty takes this a step further, asserting the right of people to be in charge of their own food systems.

Cape Town needs

several times more land than

it has, in order to

provide the city with

all its food

GOING LOCAL

businesses and informal traders (farmers, street traders, independent retailers, small processors, etc), instead of being controlled by a few industrial-scale operations in the agribusiness, food processing and retail sectors. This allows alternative and parallel value chains to thrive, it creates local jobs across the value chain and keeps money within the community.

But remember: • Localising the food system

does not mean merely growing more food within the city in order to keep Capetonians well fed and properly nourished. Producing more does not guarantee everyone will have fair and equal access to that food, or that they will even choose that food if they do have access to it. Urban agriculture is only a part of the solution to getting the right food onto our plates.

• We need to understand the other drivers behind why people can’t access or won’t choose wholesome, nutritious food: poverty; market forces; the city layout and how that impacts on where people live and work in relation to food hubs; transport, and people’s time and money; and also cultural grooming and the ‘nutritional transition’ towards branded highly processed, high-sugar foods.

We already know the value of growing some of our food within the borders of our city. What this report hopes to achieve is to help us rethink the notion of food, community and the entire food system.

Our aim is to find ways to ensure that all Capetonians – rich and poor – have a fair chance of getting wholesome, affordable, nutritious food onto their plates every day.

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CHAPTER 2

CULTURE

CHAPTER 2

Food at the heart of our community

When Burger King opened its first South African store in Cape Town in May 2013, people queued for hours to sink their teeth into their first Whopper burger. A few months later, the financial press reported that the franchise was in fact ‘rattled’ by the phenomenal success, with an unexpected R20 million in total revenue in just four months, and that they needed to find new suppliers to keep up with the demand for their fast food.

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Even Burger King was a little taken aback by how well the brand had done

in the Mother City. Before the big multinational had even set its advertisers loose in the South African market, the power of the brand abroad had already gained traction in Capetonians’ imagination.

For many, this is what the excitement of the city is all about: busy high streets, glitzy shops, big name stores selling us phones, handbags, high-end watches, aftershave. For many, these overseas brands are sophisticated, modern and aspirational – and the big name fast food brands are at the forefront of this cultural force. How much chance does a bowl of home-grown salad greens stand against the full frontal assault of a Big Mac or a Hunger Buster Burger?

How we use food is deeply rooted in our cultural attitudes towards it. If we can understand what shapes our views on food, we can better address whether or not people choose healthier foods or not. We would be naive to think that simply giving people healthy foods will be reason enough for them to want to eat it.

Moving to the city can be like a tectonic force in terms of how it changes our perceptions of food. This is part of what’s become known as the ‘nutritional transition’.

An example to illustrate the point is the responses that

a local healthcare-focused civil society organisation, Zanempilo, got from interviewing a group of women in Khayelitsha about their view of certain foods.

‘People who boil food are not civilised,’ one person said. ‘Fried food is attractive, tasty such as Kentucky fried chicken [sic]. If your neighbour boils food, people say she is still backward because the food does not taste nor look attractive.’

Others said it was faster to fry food than boil it, and that fried meat tasted much better than boiled meat.

Another survey, done in Johannesburg by academics from the School of Public Health at the University of the Western Cape for the United

Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), found that some people preferred fried food because it is seen as a mark of ‘modern living and wealth, while food that is boiled is considered inferior and demonstrates outdated customs’.

For many, eating meat is seen as aspirational. Tony Gerrans from Compassion in World Farming says that the attitudes he has encountered in Afrikaans communities are often that hunting, braaiing and eating meat are associated with masculinity. Abalimi’s Rob Small says that in Xhosa-speaking communities, those who slaughter animals have a spiritual role.

Besides just these cultural attitudes towards food, urban life has torn us from the home

CULTURE

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The ‘nutritional transition’Across the developing world, the ‘nutritional transition’ happens as people move to cities, get sucked into the job market, and are exposed to this so-called ‘Western diet’ that is less diverse, lower in fibre, energy-dense and often nutritionally worthless.

People often want branded, highly processed or fast food because it’s perceived to be sophisticated and modern, a perception driven by the aggressive marketing of big-name fast and processed food companies and labels.

Modern, urban life often makes a ‘slow food’ approach to eating difficult. Urban life steers us towards food that is quick to get hold of (no more hours of slaving over the stove), tasty (packed with sugars, fats and salts that tickle the pleasure centre in the brain) and cheap (factory production lines bring down the cost).

kitchen and scattered us about a busy and bustling cityscape, which has disrupted traditional ways of communing over food.

The FAO study says that:‘Traditional meals and mealtimes are replaced by spontaneous often unplanned food purchases on street corners or in small kiosks. The traditional model of one family member taking responsibility for meal planning and food preparation for the household has fractured in most urban environments.

Food and gardens: rediscovering a sense of place Dr John Parker, psychiatrist at Lentegeur Psychiatric Hospital in Mitchell’s Plain, is using a food garden as a way of helping people and communities to reconnect. At the same time as helping to rehabilitate patients in the hospital, the project is giving them valuable skills, which they can take home once they leave.

Since the Industrial Revolution, we have ‘withdrawn from the uncertain and the ambiguous,’ says John. He links a rise in mental illness in our modern world to our disconnection from the natural and the communal.

Bringing people together as they grow food is a powerful way to reconnect people with the soil, with nature and with one another, he maintains. The rewards, in terms of seeing how the hospital’s patients respond to seeing the fruit of their labours, are immeasurable. Recovery from mental illness is ‘a multidimensional interplay between people’s experience of their mental health and their circumstances – including the health system, the society they live in, where they live, employment and social support,’ explains John. The food gardens here are an integral part of that.

Increasingly it is street food vendors, cafeterias at work or school and childcare facilities that provide family members with at least one and often several meals per day. Thus, attention to dietary balance and dietary quality, which was traditionally ‘intuitive’ at the household level, is now subject to wider cultural changes and external influence.’

If we hope to encourage people and communities to return to ‘real’ food, and to grow their own, we need to turn the tide on many of the attitudes that see growing vegetables as ‘old fashioned’ or something that ‘our grandparents did.’

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Modern, urban life

often makes a ‘slow food’ approach to

eating difficult

CHAPTER 2

Empowering throughfood SEED (Schools Environmental Education & Development) is a NPO operating from Mitchell’s Plain, and has over a decade of experience in pioneering growing outdoor classrooms in under-resourced schools.

‘Empowering people through growing their own food is one way to change attitudes about the aspirational nature of fresh and wholesome food,’ says SEED’s Leigh Brown. ‘We need to boost green careers. People that blossom in the food freedom movement are those who get trained up and are able to find work in the field.’

‘People join our programmes to save money and for health

A mouthful of bug Most South Africans have abandoned a valuable, free and readily available source of protein: insects.

‘Termites are buttery and meaty, even when they’re raw,’ Zayaan Khan says, laughing at the gasps from her audience. Zayaan has drawn from her work with the Surplus People Project and the Slow Food Youth Network to explore ideas around what is indigenous and what is traditional from a food perspective. Her revisiting of our pre-industrial relationship with the plants, animals, insects and herbs is a reminder of where we selected food from within the natural environment, how we shaped the foods as we selected them and used them in different ways, and how that shaped us.

From goats, sheep and cattle, and raw milk products, to how we have transformed foods through preserving, smoking, fermenting, sugaring, and even treating in lime, are all a reminder of where we come from, and how we can revive the relationship with the indigenous, and the traditional.

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CULTURE

BACK TO OUR ROOTS Loubie Rusch from Making KOS wanders the traffic islands, pavements and beaches to collect plants that are indigenous, and are delicious and versatile to eat: wild garlic, dune spinach, spekboom, kei apple, wild rosemary, water-blommetjie, wild plum, veldkool, and many more.

Giving these ‘foraged’ foods much the same treatment as the fresh produce we’re so used to buying at the local grocery store, Loubie makes feasts that allow us to return to our roots.

reasons,’ she goes on. ‘Once they are engaged we connect them to the global conversation about food sovereignty – this grows the aspirational nature of fresh green food. Home food gardens boost local adaption to climate change and can give youth with no prospects the potential to join the green economy.’

SEED is using the Rocklands Urban Abundance Centre as a demonstration site for innovative low-carbon possibilities, with integrated education for schools, youth and people from the neighbourhood. They are growing community enterprises for food production and jobs.

Meanwhile Deni Archer’s pursuit of ‘Food with a Story’ captures tales of food that is ‘interesting, ethical and artisanal’.

CHAPTER 3

LAYOUT of the CITY

CHAPTER 2

Now consider what it’s like for all those similarly time- and cash-

strapped parents who have to return home each night and make sure their children go to bed on a filling meal.

Where in that long day must they find the time to buy the groceries, haul them home and then prepare the main meal of the day? This is one reason why many people might choose food that’s fast and easy to prepare, which might be highly processed just to fill the belly and drive out hunger, but not feed the body with the real nutrients it needs.

This is the reality for many people living in South Africa’s cities, which still echo with the imprint of the apartheid

A tale oftwo cities The reality of a Thembisa mother, whose story features in the National

Planning Commission’s Vision for 2030, is such: she travels sometimes five

hours a day, too and from her job in Brummeria. She spends half her monthly

income to pay for this transport. She has to use multiple taxis and trains and

walks long distances on foot.

state’s segregationist planning that separated white, from coloured, from black. Cape Town is no different, and this notion of separate development is what turned the Cape Flats into what was once called the ‘dumping ground’ for black people in the city. The racist policy pushed the artisan and working classes out onto the edges of the city, creating enclaves of poverty that still exist today.

This means poorer people have to travel greater distances to get to and from work, something that costs them enormously in both time and money. Economics professor with the University of Cape Town’s (UCT) Environmental Policy Research Unit (EPRU), Anthony Black

reminds us that the apartheid-era design of our cities means that finding employment and commuting to work are difficult and costly for poorer people, and effectively constitute a tax on the poor and become a barrier to employment.

THE SICK CITY The city makes us fat and sick. The rising rates of obesity in South Africa mirror similar trends around the world. In the past, the medical community blamed the individual for eating badly and not exercising. But there has been a sea change in attitude regarding this. The medical journal, The Lancet, in its special report on obesity in 2011, says rising obesity is the normal response of

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farmer. Since then he has infused an ethos of respecting the land, taking care of it and of people. It’s an ethos where surplus is shared and where people use technology that isn’t harmful to the environment, thereby spreading the wisdom to other young people so they can learn self-reliance.

When he asks kids in schools where spinach comes from, they often say ‘from the store or from Shoprite’. That’s something Mzu’s organisation hopes to change, as it trains up youngsters in food gardening from their plot in Tamboerskloof, very close to the OZCF.

For Mzu, access to land and water are two of the biggest challenges for township families who want to grow their own food.

‘Urban planners need to think about how to design the city and living spaces to accommodate food growing. People in the City Bowl may not be food insecure, but people on the Cape Flats are. Homes are small, with confined gardens,’ he says. ‘There are public open spaces but they aren’t designated for community gardens. We need to address that at a city planning level.’

Tyisa faces an uncertain future as it is on land that is under threat of development and the operation has no formal lease.

Right now, 60% of South Africans live in cities and this is likely to increase

considerably in the future

normal people to an abnormal environment.

What is it about the modern urban world that creates this ‘obesogenic’ environment? It has to do with:• The sprawling layout of

the city that pushes us into automated transport and discourages walking and cycling. Also, work and recreation is often sedentary with machines doing most of the ‘heavy lifting’ these days.

• The kind of food available is often cheap, highly processed and energy dense, and is high in sugar and refined carbohydrates.

• Cultural attitudes towards foods often encourage us to buy ‘sophisticated’ branded foods, which enables the ‘nutritional transition’ to the Western industrialised diet.

• Our dependence on these foods, which is being seen as addictive behaviour.

To fix the problem, we need to look at the way the city, our food and its inhabitants relate to one another. That’s not to say that the individual isn’t responsible for his or her lifestyle and food choices, but as the UK’s House of Lords report on rising obesity in Britain put it, the modern urban life makes it too hard to make the right food and lifestyle choices, and too easy to make the wrong ones.

If we only focus on individual behaviour as the root of the

epidemic, we’ll only focus on education and encouraging personal behaviour change as the solution, and it is unlikely to have much success. There isn’t a quick fix and we need to take a more sophisticated view of things, particularly as people continue to move to the city. Right now, 60% of South Africans live in cities and this is likely to increase considerably in the future.

LAYOUT OF THE CITY

PLANNING FOR A HEALTHIER CITY Mzukisi Zele, from the civil society organisation Tyisa Nabanye, says where he grew up in the rural Eastern Cape, there was ‘food everywhere’. But when he moved to Cape Town, he found that people wanted to be employed, rather than work at home in order to grow their own food.

He started out selling fruit and vegetables as a vendor in Philippi, but what he really wanted was to become a

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CHAPTER 4

ENVIRONMENT

ENVIRONMENT

CHAPTER 3

‘Greening’ up our PLATES

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Every calorie of food we grow, harvest, ship, process, package, chill, cook, eat and throw away uses up resources from the environment: the soil and its nutrients, water, fertiliser, fuel, and so on. It also impacts on the environment by using its waste-absorbing systems: fertiliser runoff pollutes our rivers, ploughing up land eats into grasslands and wetlands, and shunting carbon emissions into the air drives up temperatures and alters the regional climate.

We need to think carefully about how we grow our food and what kinds of food we choose to eat, if we want to tackle core issues of how sustainable our diets are.

ENVIRONMENT

THE BIG OFFENDERS: MEAT AND DAIRY The industrial-scale farming of meat, dairy and poultry is not sustainable. It usually means animals are kept in confined feedlots, and are raised on foods they’re not evolved to eat. Cows are grass eaters; chickens forage for seeds, bugs, worms and the likes; pigs are omnivores.

The industrial-

scale farming of meat, dairy

and poultry is not

sustainable

Most of these animals are fed grain in the mass farming system. Not only is this diet unnatural for them, but growing grain for this purpose uses up land that could be used to grow a greater and more appropriate diversity of crops. The conversion rate of grain calories to meat calories is also very inefficient.

The scale of animal farming also has considerable environmental impact in terms of transforming landscapes, water usage, and pollution in the form of greenhouse gases

(mostly from burping ruminants and manure).

The animals often have to be dosed up heavily with antibiotics to avoid diseases common in such overcrowded conditions.

‘The World Health Organisation is really worried about this overuse of antibiotics,’ says Compassion in World Farming’s Tony Gerrans. ‘The World Health Organisation says we’re just 15 years away from a post-antibiotic environment. Diseases spreading from industrial farming are going to become a significant public health issue.’

Facts worth remembering: • The Global Landscapes

Initiative at the University of Minnesota says that 55% of food-crop calories go directly towards nourishing people, while 40% of the world’s cereal harvest is used to feed animals.

• According to Prof Jonathan Foley, director of the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment, every 100 calories of grain fed to animals gives us only about 40 new calories of milk, 22 of eggs, 12 of chicken, 10 of pork or three of beef.

• The US Centre for Energy and Environmental Studies states that ‘producing 1kg of beef requires 15 times as much land as producing 1kg of cereals, and 70 times as much land as 1kg of vegetables’.

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• ‘100 calories of animal feed produces as few as 17 calories of meat and dairy products,’ says the United Nations Environment Programme in its 2013 report ‘The Environmental Food Crisis.’

• The 2010 UNESCO report ‘Energy Smart Food for People and Climate’, states that it takes over 15 000 litres of water on average to produce a kilogram of beef, compared to around 1 200 litres for 1kg of maize and 1 800 litres for 1kg of wheat.

As communities become wealthier and more industrialised, we tend to increase our meat, dairy and egg consumption. This means the environmental footprint of our diet increases. The root of the problem is the industrial scale at which modern agriculture is trying to meet this growing need.

‘When livestock are raised in intensive systems,’ says the FAO’s ‘The State of Food Insecurity in the World’, ‘they convert carbohydrates and protein that might otherwise be eaten directly by humans and use them to produce a smaller quantity of energy and protein. In these situations, livestock can be said to reduce the food balance.’

Tony argues that we need to change the entire economic model driving industrial-scale farming, which overlooks the

costs to animals, the people handling them, our own health and the environment.

PUT OUR ANIMALS BACK ON TO PASTUREThis isn’t a call to cut out meat, dairy and eggs completely, but to change the way we farm the animals that provide us with important food, and to eat more diverse diets. We need to do this for three reasons: it’s better for our health; it’s better for the health and well-being of the animals; and it’s what South African soils are best equipped to do.

According to a WWF report on agriculture in South Africa, only one third of the country’s soils (12% of the total area) are fertile enough for crop production, compared with 69% of the country that is suited to grazing. So it makes sense to rear livestock on the

veld, which is a more ethical and environmentally sound way of rearing animals. As Tony Gerrans of Compassion in World Farming points out, these animals evolved roaming and grazing on the veld.

It’s also better for our heart health. In most of our food crops, the leaves are high in Omega 3 fatty acids, which we need a lot of; seeds are higher in Omega 6 fatty acids, which we need fewer of. Grass-fed animals, in turn, will have higher Omega 3s in their meat, milk and eggs, while grain-fed animals have higher levels of Omega 6s. We need more O3s and fewer O6s in our diet for optimal heart health.

only one third of the

country’s soils (12% of the total area) are fertile enough for crop

production

30

CHAPTER 4

ENVIRONMENT

A third of all food produced

around the world goes to

waste

CALL TO ACTION: CONSUMER POWER The consumer has the power to change the market, merely by making certain choices:• Eat less meat. Try a meat-

free Monday. Use meat to flavour food rather than as the main portion of the meal. Don’t be afraid of less conventional meat cuts and offal (a delicious soup made using bones gets the goodness of the marrow and ensures there is less wastage of the animal carcass, for instance).

• Try to eat meat, dairy and eggs from free range and pasture-raised animals. This will encourage suppliers to stock ethical

products, while supporting ethical producers and encouraging others to change their farming practices. In doing so we can work towards more accessible ethical sources on a larger scale so they are not only available to wealthy consumers.

• Pay attention to product labelling.

• Educate others.• Support local producers,

especially small-scale and organic farmers, as well as informal traders selling fresh produce.

The story of the fly and how it could save the world

Farming with baby flies sounds a bit grim, but it’s a possible answer to the challenge of keeping affordable protein in our diets. AgriProtein Technologies is a company in Stellenbosch that’s working a test case factory that uses the blood waste from abattoirs to breed and feed fly larvae. The larvae are then dried and fed to chickens and fish.

Chickens would normally eat this kind of bug in a free-range situation anyway, so this is a way of closing the nutrient loop, explains Jason Drew, whose brainchild the project is.

At the moment, huge amounts of wild fish are harvested from the sea to feed to aquaculture fish. Often, this is to produce smaller quantities of protein than is taken from the ocean in the first place. Rearing farmed fish on dried fly larvae can help preserve wild fish stocks.

31

FISH, THE FORGOTTEN MEAT South Africa has 2 500km of coastline. For some of us, the fish that comes out of these oceans is a significant part of both our culture and diet. The industry has also been an important part of the economy for many communities, Cape Town in particular.

Nonetheless, it’s an industry going through a difficult transition as ocean fish stocks drop, government reworks its policies around access to fishing quotas and small-scale fishers in particular feel marginalised in the process.

BUT WHAT ABOUT STARCH?The problem with grains, potato and other starchy staple foods is that they form the basis of the urban diet that’s high in refined and processed foods, which are high in energy but low in micronutrients. The scales of

economy of industrial food processing means these foods are cheap, so we choose them over other healthier whole foods. They are also often tasty and addictive, and have a long shelf life, which is what cities need when our food must travel so far from farm to fork, and then sit on the shelves for a long time. This is part of the very diet that’s making us fat and sick.

Now consider all the hidden costs of this diet – the environmental costs of bulk farming of starch for such foods, and the health costs of a diet that leads to obesity, heart disease, diabetes, certain cancers and even dementia – and the real costs

manure, particularly from cows, is the most

viable source of compost

and nutrients for small

food gardeners

of this ‘cheap’ and ethically more dubious diet also begins to look unacceptably high and unsustainable. The industrial food system means we are taking good wholesome calories from the farm – calories that were environmentally costly to produce because of all the natural resources they used – and are putting them through an industrial food processing system that refines them, strips them of their nutrients and leaves us eating large quantities of ‘dead’ calories. This is another wasteful use of the soil, water, atmospheric space and other environmental resources that were needed to grow the food.

32

CHAPTER 4

Trading fish for fresh produce Some of the fishers on the Cape West Coast, such as those in Elandsbaai and Doringbaai, get up at 3am to head out to sea, and return at about 8am with a fresh catch. They’ll often stand at a traffic intersection or down on the beach all day, trying to sell their catch. Some days they’ll sell something; other days, nothing.

‘They tell us they need to sell their fish to buy veggies,’ says the Surplus People Project’s Zayaan Khan.

‘The idea of alternate economies could work for them. The fishers have fish, but they aren’t eating it daily. They aren’t getting vegetables, either. They could explore a system of exchange within the community of healthy localised food so they don’t need to go to the supermarket.’

Meanwhile right here in Cape Town, our snoek fishermen sell their catch from the back of bakkies because health and safety regulations make it hard to sell to the formal retailers, says UCT’s Dr Gareth Haysom. Some of these retailers are also selling imported snoek.

FAT, PROTEIN AND CARBS: SEARCHING FOR THE BALANCE Many leading health institutions are calling for a review of the United States dietary guidelines that have informed food policy and nutritional advice for over three decades. The guidelines give us the so-called ‘prudent diet’ food pyramid: lots of grain-based carbohydrates, vegetables, moderate amounts of protein and very limited fat.

Now, the Harvard School of Public Health and many others are redrawing the food pyramid, calling for a significant reduction in the quantity and type of carbohydrates we eat, and a return to fat, including limited amounts of saturated fats. (See ‘Busting the low-fat myth’ on page 47.)

While the protein portion of the diet should remain the same, increasing fat means a return to plant fats such as those found in nuts, avocado pear and coconut oil. It also puts butter and animal fat back on the table.

What does this mean for the sustainability of our diet, though, if we are being urged to increase some of our animal product intake?

Investigative journalist Nina Teicholz, in her book The Big Fat Surprise, shows why medical institutions like those

at Harvard are now dispelling what’s been dubbed ‘the low-fat myth’. In doing so, she concludes her book by reflecting on the ethical and environmental challenges that come with a call to return to animal fats in the diet:

‘The environmental questions… are complicated: cows produce methane, which contributes to greenhouse gasses, and they consume a relatively large amount of resources, compared to growing fruits and vegetables, but red meat may be more nutrient-dense per unit of resources consumed and it also provides necessary nutrients not found in plant foods.

ENVIRONMENT

‘So it’s possible that the greater good health enjoyed by a nation eating more meat might save on healthcare costs, thereby evening out the overall ledger. And as a thought experiment: What if we return to eating tallow and lard again, thereby deducting the demand we place on our land to grow the soybean, rapeseed, cottonseed, safflower and cord that are expressed into vegetable oils?’

CITY BYLAWS AND THE ‘SCOURGE’ OF LIVESTOCK The city has strict controls over keeping farm animals and poultry in residential areas, making livestock farming even at a small-scale difficult. But the manure, particularly from

33

In nature, there’s no such thing as waste‘There are 3.7 million people in Cape Town, and we send 1.7 million tons of waste into landfills yearly,’ says Melanie Ludwig from Zero to Landfill Organics.

Much of the organic material going into landfills is from food waste, dead animals, abattoir waste, garden waste and so forth. It’s possible to divert this valuable material from the waste stream that would otherwise take it to landfills.

Food waste includes fruit, vegetables, teabags, meat, bones, bread, cakes, dairy, eggshells, seafood and so on. Rather, it can be recycled appropriately and used in some way to help grow the next harvest of food, bearing in mind that plant matter shouldn’t be composted with animal matter.

Melanie says they currently compost 20 to 30 tons of food waste a month.

cows, is the most viable source of compost and nutrients for small food gardeners. Rob Small of Abalimi argues that the city should be encouraged to loosen up its restrictions on tending livestock in order to keep this important part of the farm system in place for small local farmers.

WASTE NOT, WANT NOTA third of all food produced around the world goes to waste. In some wealthier communities, it’s as much as half. That’s not just a waste of the calories and nutrients in

the food, but it’s a waste of all the environmental resources that went into growing that food, and of the waste-absorbing capacity of the environment when that food rots.

At the same time, one in five South Africans go hungry every day. When food and other organic waste goes into a landfill, it rots in the confines of this low-oxygen space and releases the potent greenhouse gas, methane. All

There are 3.7 million people in

Cape Town, and we send 1.7 million

tons of waste into

landfills yearly

the nutrients in that ‘waste’ are also lost. If food that is still safe to eat gets thrown out by either retailers or private households, that’s food that could otherwise be used by people struggling to access food.

A better way to store spinach leaves, celery and similar plants is to

treat them like flowers: cut off the brown ends and put them in a vase with water, rather than store

them in the fridge. They’ll last a lot longer. The more

we educate ourselves about how to handle and store food, the more we can avoid unnecessary

waste.

Did you know?

If we want our cities to be more resilient, we need to change the ‘linear’ movement of food to become ‘circular’: food ‘waste’ coming out the bottom end of the food value chain must be fed back into the top through appropriate recycling.

FOOD FORWARD – THE PROVINCE RESPONDS The Western Cape Government recently launched the Food Forward project under the 110% Green Initiative. The aim is to address food waste and loss by reducing inefficiencies within the food value chain.

Part of the process is to take tours across the province to highlight issues along the food value chain. These will include organisations that

34

CHAPTER 4

Rescuing foodFood banking is a solution to the environmental and ethical problems associated with food waste, explains FoodBank’s Kate Hamilton.

The FoodBank is a global network that rescues edible food before it’s thrown away and distributes it to people in need.

‘We try to fill the gap by taking food from where there is an excess, to where there is a need. We provide the logistics behind that.’

The recently launched Food4Thought is a community-based networking platform that links up Cape Town businesses with non-governmental organisations that help with feeding people in need.

one in five South

Africans go

hungry every day

ENVIRONMENT

are actively involved with food waste issues, such as industry associations, research institutions, agri-producers, food processors, distributors, retailers and waste handlers.

‘The idea is to get businesses and organisations to commit to tackle an aspect of the food waste problem, whether this is a reduction of food waste, an increase in their own food waste responsibility, or simply adding a piece to the food waste research puzzle,’ explains the Province’s Nicholas Wiid.

‘Through visiting certain municipalities, we hope to learn from others, thereby mobilising stakeholders in the food space to adopt more efficient systems. One way to do this would be to link stakeholders with each other, in order to minimise food losses, wastage and sending valuable compostable material to landfill.’

35

CHAPTER 5

POLITICS

CHAPTER 5

Cape Town’s veggie patch since the 1800s

38

The open farmlands and wetlands in the Philippi area of the Cape Flats have become contested territory. This is the last remaining piece of an area that has been regarded as Cape Town’s vegetable patch since the late 1800s. It’s hard to say precisely how much fresh produce it feeds into the city’s food system every day but we get at least 40% to 50% of our cauliflower, carrots and lettuce from the Philippi Horticultural Area (PHA), according to a report written by Dr Gareth Haysom and Dr Jane Battersby from the University of Cape Town’s African Food Security Urban Network (AFSUN).

POLITICS

But our city’s growing population also needs somewhere to live.

People move here from elsewhere in the country, and natural birth rates also push up numbers. There is a huge housing shortage, with 300 000 families waiting for homes, although the plan to rezone the PHA isn’t for low-cost housing.

Nazeer Sonday, with the Schaapkraal Civic and Environmental Association, is spearheading a lobby group that is calling for the protection of the PHA from development.

Reasons to protect the Philippi Horticultural Area (PHA): • A local source of fresh

produce that has a lower carbon footprint and greater nutritional value because of the short distance between farmer and fork.

• Jobs are created directly by farming for people living in neighbouring communities, mostly in surrounding townships and informal settlements (2 000 to 3 000 jobs, depending on the season, two-thirds of which are for women.

• ‘Downstream’ employment and business opportunities linked to informal food markets.

• It helps recharge the Cape Flats aquifer.

39

A hedge of bitter almonds There’s a small hedge in Cape Town’s Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden that’s the remnants of the country’s first ‘gated community’, the first form of apartheid that was about exclusion of ‘the other’ and an attempt to stop people foraging for food.

Planted over 350 years ago, it became a thorny barrier to keep the ‘troublesome’ Khoi people and their cattle out of the Dutch settlement in the Cape. Governor Jan van Riebeeck ordered his men to ‘plant and sow bitter almonds and all kinds of quick-growing thorn bushes in the form of a land barrier so thickly that no cattle or sheep will be able to be driven through it’, thus inventing the concept of a ‘gated community’, according to South African History Online.

CALL TO ACTION: NAZEER SONDAY WANTS HELP SAVING THE PHA:• Consumers can ask

supermarkets to label PHA produce so they can seek it out at their local grocery stores and support Philippi farmers.

• Lobby city and provincial politicians to halt the 570ha Oakland City Development.

• Lobby government to declare the PHA South Africa’s first ‘agricultural conservation area’.

• Ask the Public Protector to investigate the Ministry of Local Government, Environmental Affairs and Development Planning Anton Bredell’s decision to support the 570ha Oakland City Development.

‘PLACE’ AND ‘PLACEMAKING’: THESE ARE POLITICAL THINGS‘Placemaking’ is the idea of building communities around places. It’s a way of planning and using public spaces that promotes wellbeing and health in a community. Food has the ability to be at the centre of placemaking.

‘Places are already there,’ says Zarina Nteta of the Cape Town Partnership. ‘We can’t necessarily make places and we don’t want to entrench social, economic or cultural divides any more than are already there. What we bring to those places, is what matters. It can be a political act – how do we use and plan around ‘place’ in a way that challenges or overcomes the apartheid-formed spaces?’

40

CHAPTER 5

The saffron pear tree‘Urban agriculture is as old as the city,’ says Zayaan Khan, quoting something Cape Town’s head of the Directorate for Economic and Human Development, Stanley Visser, told her during an interview in 2011. The history of Cape Town is a history of foraging, settlement and domestication.

‘People have always foraged here, collecting fish and fruit, or growing food. These are the things that built the city.’

The saffron pear tree in the Company’s Garden apparently dates back to about 1652, making it one of the oldest fruit trees to be planted in the Cape by the first Dutch settlers. It is one of the last vestiges of orchards that used to feed the Mother City’s growing population.

Most of the early fruit trees have been cut down, as the developing municipality has grown and changed. Some cities have been known to get rid of fruit trees because they can be high maintenance, dropping leaves and fruit that need to be cleaned up or clog storm water systems.

Perennial food-bearing plants such as avocado, nuts, fruit trees and olives planted in public and communal spaces could reintroduce the idea of foraging, as well as give communities ways to come together as they navigate the sometimes tricky relationships that develop as they work to manage these communal resources.

Putting food

back into public

spaces is a political

act

POLITICS

Putting food back into public spaces is a political act. Planting fruit and nut trees in public spaces, and claiming public road verges, traffic islands and allotments for growing food for the community, are all ways of not just getting more fresh produce into our cities but changing attitudes towards food, community and public spaces

FOOD SOVEREIGNTY The notion of ‘food sovereignty’ is as much about making sure that people have access to healthy culturally-appropriate food, as it is about people having ownership of the food system. It’s about communities not being the passive recipients of a trading system that has an unequal share of the power to decide who has access to what food, where, and at what cost.

Supporting local producers, informal traders and other links in the food value chain is about doing just that – giving local communities food sovereignty.

41

Market Day at the OZCFThe OZCF Market Day has taken on the function of a lively new public square.

Many people enjoy hanging around the OZCF farmers’ market, whether they’re there for a bunch of carrots or a head of lettuce, says OZCF’s Sheryl Ozinsky. There’s a lot more going on than the exchange of money for food at community markets. Someone might be collecting signatures on a petition. Another playing music. Children darting about.

‘Placemaking’ is the idea

of building communities

around places. It’s a way of

planning and using public spaces that promotes

wellbeing and health in a community

People sampling fresh produce, and talking to farmers and producers. Friends and acquaintances stopping to chat.

Michael Pollan, American food activist and writer, reports that one sociologist calculated that people have 10 times as many conversations at farmers’ markets than they do in the supermarket.

Farmers’ markets put the relationship between consumers and producers on a new, more neighbourly footing, enriching the kinds of information exchanged in the

transaction, and encouraging customers to regard their food rands as ‘votes’ for a different kind of agriculture and, by implication, economy. It seems that people get more satisfaction from eating when it’s not just affordable, but has ethical and political value as well.

Promoting farmers’ markets throughout the city will help to support local producers, create a space for community engagement and promote access to nutritious food. This also recognises the legiti-macy and importance of the informal food system.

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CHAPTER 5

POLITICS

43

FOOD DIALOGUES REPORT02

CHAPTER 6

HEALTH & NUTRITION

FOOD DIALOGUES REPORT 02

CHaPTER 6

‘Eat like your life depends on it, because it does’

‘Eat food, mostly plants, and not too much,’ suggests author and journalism professor Michael Pollan, whose books cover the rising food movement. It’s a great way to keep things simple in a world where we are bombarded with new ideas in nutritional science, and fad diets.

To summarise Michael Pollan’s simple advice on how to eat in a fad-

cluttered world: • Eat food that looks like

the original thing: think fresh cheddar rather than spreadable cheese in a jar, apples rather than apple juice, or pork chops rather than polony.

• Mostly plants: reduce meat; go with leafy vegetables mostly, which are high in Omega 3 fatty acids, and aim for a rainbow on your plate; fewer grains, which are the seeds of plants and higher in Omega 6 fatty acids.

• Not too much: everything in moderation.

Another way of putting it: eat food that was recently alive.

In a world filled with fad diets and changing ideas about healthy eating, these are probably the simplest

46

ways to escape the trap of the so-called Western diet that is steering us away from the foods our grandparents would recognise (think: fresh produce) and towards highly processed foods that are a shadow of their former selves (think: sugary breakfast cereals).

Growing vegetables, fruit, nuts and so forth within the city is a great way to make sure that food that was ‘recently alive’ is on hand. Now we need to tackle the tricky issue of localising protein production too, in a way that is ethically responsible to animals and doesn’t import the pollution problems associated with farming livestock into the city. Aquaculture, eggs and meat from free range chickens, and dairy from small livestock might be a way, if city bylaws can accommodate this.

Poor nutrition, and the burden of the lifestyle-related diseases associated with a diet that’s high in calories but low in micronutrients, also undermines the treatment of other serious illnesses, such as HIV and TB. Consider the amount of money already spent by the healthcare system in terms of trying to prevent or treat these diseases, and then add that these efforts are undermined by poor nutrition. That means that a lack of access to wholesome foods has a broader cost, which we often don’t factor in.

BUSTING THE LOW-FAT MYTH: WHY WE NEED TO CUT SUGAR, REDUCE CARBS, GET BACK TO FATAn idea emerged in the United States in the 1970s, linking heart disease with a diet high in saturated fats. The result was the government-developed dietary guidelines, which spread throughout the Western world and stated that we should eat a ‘prudent diet’ low in fat, high in carbohydrates and with moderate amounts of protein.

But the Harvard School of Public Health is at the forefront of busting what’s now being called ‘the low-fat myth’. Here’s why we can put butter and cream back on the plate, and why we need to ditch margarine, bulk-servings of carbohydrates and all that sugar:

Previously, we were told to avoid saturated fat because it pushes up one form of cholesterol in our blood, the low-density lipoproteins or LDL, which clogs arteries and causes heart disease.

If that alone is measured as an indicator of heart disease, it’ll be a red flag. However, according to the Harvard School of Public Health, only reading LDL levels in the blood overlooks the fact that there is also ‘good’ cholesterol (high-density lipoproteins or HDL), which is the ‘garbage truck’ that mops up excess

cholesterol. Then there is also triglycerides, fat particles travelling in the bloodstream.

For optimal heart health, we need low LDL, high HDL and not too many triglycerides, says Harvard in its public advisory on the shifting consensus on fats versus carbohydrates.

Since we were told to cut out saturated fat, these now bland, unsatisfying foods were topped up with easy-to-digest carbohydrates like bread, white rice, potatoes and sugary drinks, or with fat-free or low-fat ‘health’ foods that are high in sugar or refined carbs.

Research now shows that these foods are as bad for the LDL/HDL/triglycerides balance in our blood as eating too much saturated fat. Even though saturated fat pushes up ‘bad’ cholesterol (LDL), it raises ‘good’ cholesterol (HDL). According to Harvard cardiologist Prof Dariush Mozaffarian ‘saturated fats... are relatively neutral for heart disease risk’.

HEALTH & NUTRITION

47

lack of access to

wholesome foods has a broader cost, which

we often don’t

factor in

If these are replaced with carbs, it’s as bad for the heart as eating too much saturated fat. It can even be worse for people who are carbohydrate intolerant, where the body doesn’t process sugars and starches well.

Reducing carbohydrates and returning to fat, including moderate amounts of animal fat, will help turn the tide on the rising problems of obesity, heart disease and diabetes.

The only question is how much carbohydrates to cut, and how much fat to add.

For the best overview of the debunking of the low-fat myth, see Nina Teicholz’s The Big Fat Surprise. The investigative journalist spent nine years tracking the source of the original claim that fats are linked with heart disease and that a high carbohydrate diet is the healthiest option. Teicholz unearths what she says are ‘overzealous researchers, [who] through a combination of ego, bias and premature institutional

48

CHaPTER 6

Sugar makes us sick and

is also addictive

consensus, have allowed dangerous misrepresentations to become dietary dogma’.

A THOUGHT EXERCISE: THE ‘POLLUTER PAYS’ At the moment, parts of the private food sector benefit from our dependence on (and sometimes our addiction to) certain highly refined but nutrient-poor foods. Yet in many cases it is the state that has to pick up the healthcare costs in terms of treating the obesity, diabetes, heart disease and cancers associated with eating this diet.

In environmental law, there’s the principle of ‘the polluter pays’. If a mining company pollutes a wetland, in theory the company is responsible for covering the cost of the cleanup.

our children

need special protection from high

sugar foods, as

well as the marketing forces that push them

on us

It may be useful to see certain elements of the food industry as polluters of the nutritional landscape and then find ways to make them contribute to cleaning up the problem.

A sin tax, similar to that applied to alcohol or tobacco, isn’t the answer, because people often still find ways to afford their favourite ‘fix’. But some market mechanisms need to be found.

SUGAR IS THE NEW TOBACCO Sugar used to be a condiment we added to food to enhance its flavour, like a sprinkle of salt or pepper. Today refined sugar from sugar cane and corn syrup from maize are used in such quantities that it’s often treated as a bulking agent. It’s also hidden in many unexpected places and in many processed foods, even savoury ones.

This kind of sugar doesn’t only rot our teeth. It’s at the root of obesity and diabetes, and is even now being linked to heart disease, certain cancers and dementia (the US Brown Medical School is linking high blood sugar and insulin exposure in the brain with Alzheimer’s, and they are proposing that this degenerative brain disease be called ‘type 3 diabetes’).Sugar makes us sick and is also addictive. There is a strong lobby emerging in parts of the UK and Europe that calls for us to consider legislation that restricts sugar in a similar way that policy has responded to tobacco.

Our children, in particular, need protection from the over-exposure they get to sugar during their early years when their brains are still underdeveloped, impulse driven and prone to learning

HEALTH & NUTRITION

49

Naturally processed foods

Not all processed foods are ‘bad’. Traditional ways of preserving perishable foods are still a great way to give fresh foods a longer life and boost our nutrition. These include smoking, fermenting, sugaring (in moderation), pickling, salting and even treating with lime.

addictive behaviour. In its 2011 ‘Special Report on Obesity’ – a call to action in addressing obesity – medical journal The Lancet says our children need special protection from high sugar foods, as well as the marketing forces that push them on us. This calls for a response from policymakers in government.

Think of refined sugar as the ‘anti nutrient’ – it strips the body of certain micronutrients while being digested and only gives energy in the form of glucose in return.

Monocrop sugar cane farming also has a huge environmental footprint in terms of water use, fertiliser run off, loss of wetlands and biodiversity, and using up atmospheric space through the carbon emissions used to farm, harvest, process and ship sugar.

Yet it gives nothing to us other than dead calories. Again, this raises questions about how responsible it is to use

environmental resources that could be used to grow ‘real’ food, instead of this ‘dead’ nutrient.

What you can do:• Stop drinking refined sugar,

or keep it as a rare treat. It’s in sugary and fizzy drinks, in very high quantities, which are often ‘invisible’ to us, in that we drink them down quickly without thinking how much extra calories they add to our daily intake. Don’t be fooled by the ‘health’ claims of certain drinks like low-fat drinking yoghurts, which also have extremely high sugar levels. Even fruit juice should be limited – rather eat the fresh fruit, which is loaded with fibre and releases the sugar slowly into the body in a way that doesn’t spike insulin as much. One glass of fruit juice could have several fruit servings in it and releases that fructose too quickly into the blood stream.

• Hunt out the hidden sugar. Read food labels. Sugar is often hidden behind different masks (oligofructose, polydextrose, corn syrup solids, glycerin, diatase, ethyl maltol).

• Lobby for retailers to get rid of the ‘aisle of temptation’ in stores that stock sweets at children’s eyelevel at the checkout queues.

• Lobby for government to consider sugar restrictions in certain foods and to have greater transparency on labelling.

• Fix the system, not the individual. While each one of us must take responsibility for how much sugar we consume, if we keep focusing on education and behaviour change for individuals as the root of the issue, we’ll never fix the problem. We need to see where the food system fails us in this regard.

50

CHaPTER 6

Food shopping:a guide for the flummoxed

In a world where we’re often overwhelmed by so many calories but not always enough goodness, here are some tips on how to shop for real food, from nutritional therapists Beatrice Rabkin and Sunette van Zyl.

‘Eat like your life depends on it,’ they say, ‘because it does.’

Buying in the supermarket or online • Shop in the outer aisles,

which are usually where the fresher produce is packed out.

• Choose colourful fresh foods, so there is a ‘rainbow on your plate’, or aim for biodiversity.

• Write a list and stick to it.• Never go shopping hungry.• Buying frozen or dried

foods online, in bulk, is a way of cutting down costs and is often delivered free.

Read the labels• If you don’t recognise,

or can’t pronounce or spell the names of the main ingredients, you might want to avoid them.

• Ingredients are listed by volume, so if the first three or four ingredients are refined or sugared, think twice.

• Be wary of ‘all natural’ labels.

• Be wary of food that’s advertised by cartoon characters, because it’s targeting kids, it’s often refined and is trying to blur the lines betwee the need for food and an emotional connection with it.

• The fewer ingredients in a product the better, try to avoid foods that contain more than three to four ingredients.

Know your fish • SMS the name of a fish to

079 499 8795 and receive a text message back saying whether it appears on the WWF-SASSI sustainable fishing ‘green’, ‘orange’ or ‘red’ list.

• Smaller fish have lower exposure to mercury because of their place in the marine food chain.

Farmers markets and local producers• Supporting urban farmers

such as the Abalimi community gardeners or many of the small commercial Philippi farmers keeps money within the community, boosts their own business viability, and is a great source of organic, seasonal fresh foods that are chemical free and sustainably farmed.

Some more rulesof thumb • If it colours the milk, don’t

eat it.• Try to choose foods that

have more than 5g fibre per serving, and less than 3g sugar.

• The ‘dirty dozen’ are the vegetables that tend to carry the greatest pesticide residue because of how they are farmed or the nature of their skins. These are apples, grapes, strawberries, peaches, sweet peppers, celery, nectarines, cherry tomatoes, cucumber, snap peas, potatoes and chillies.

HEALTH & NUTRITION

51

FOOD DIALOGUES REPORT02

CHAPTER 7

ECONOMICS

FOOD DIALOGUES REPORT 02

CHAPTER 7

Let’s talk about money

54

This is how the profit-driven nature of the food system in a free market

economy can shape the kind of food that’s available to us in different neighbourhoods in the city.

The food deserts in Cape Town, like many South African cities, are different to those in developed world cities. Supermarkets aren’t retreating from poor communities, they’re actually expanding. Dr Jane Battersby and her colleagues at UCT’s African Food Security Urban Network (AFSUN) recently mapped where the Cape Town’s supermarkets are. They found that most of them are in wealthy suburbs, where the highest income areas have nearly ‘eight times as many supermarkets per household as those in the lowest income (areas)’.

However they are expanding fast into low-income areas. ‘The number of Shoprite-owned stores has increased from 38 in 1994 to 82 in 2012,’ says Jane, ‘and much of that growth has been into low-income areas.’ But AFSUN says the kinds of foods that supermarkets stock in township communities is often highly processed, nutritionally poor and cheap. This means they’re speeding up the nutritional transition, causing people to move from traditional diets to ones that include more refined, processed, energy dense foods that are low in nutrients.

The idea of a ‘food desert’ comes from Europe and the US where, in the 1990s supermarket chains were pulling their stores out of poor inner city neighbourhoods because they weren’t turning enough profit. The result is that people living there couldn’t find wholesome, nutritious, affordable foods that were close to where they lived. Meanwhile supermarkets, which often have more affordable healthy foods because of their bulk buying capacity and scales of economy, tended to put stores far out in the suburbs, catering for wealthier people who, importantly, had private transport.

ECONOMICS

KEEPING MONEY ‘LOCAL’When social grants are paid out at, say, a community hall, people often spend it at nearby hawkers, street traders and other vendors. This means local people buying from local people – money comes into the community from the state and remains within the community, circulating and boosting the neighbourhood economy.

In some township communities, shopping malls are moving in and national retail chains are opening stores . Many of these large retailers now pay out social grants on behalf of the state, instead of through state facilities, such as the Post Office or a local community hall. This means that people go directly from their grant pay-out queue, into the store where they spend their money.

The result is that money is siphoned out of the community and into the national retailer’s profit margins. This means that informal markets, which are important for local economic development, might dwindle.

WHEN FOOD MARKETS ARE ‘OFF GRID’ Township traders, hawkers and other informal food traders are an important but often invisible and under-appreciated part of our resilience against hunger as a city. They may not be able to match supermarkets gram

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for gram on price, but they can ‘leapfrog’ parts of the formal food system in a way that benefits the poor. They are often more flexible and responsive to their customers’ needs, than formal retailers: their stores pop up wherever their customers are, which helps families save on the considerable transport costs of having to travel outside of their neighbourhood to buy food. They aren’t constrained by formal opening and closing times. They absorb a lot of the second- or third-grade produce that is rejected by retailers and would otherwise go to waste. They often allow customers to buy on credit, which helps for low-earning families who might run out of cash at different times of the month.

Unfortunately, as Jane writes, while ‘supermarkets are generally free to do business without any significant degree of regulation… the urban informal food economy… is regularly the target of control, regulation and draconian eradication policies’. Operation Clean Sweep in Johannesburg in 2013 is a case in point, where informal traders were evicted from the inner city.

Street traders are threatened by city policy that doesn’t see their value to the food system, and also by the competition of the supermarket system that might put them out of business.

BOOSTING THE LOCAL ECONOMY The OZCF has created four full-time and 11 part-time jobs for previously unemployed people. The Saturday Market Day has generated about 100 part-time jobs and an annual contribution to the local economy of about R15 million since it first started trading in April 2013.

No one knows how much money changes hands among the thousands of informal roadside food traders around our city. The informal food economy – right from the niche farmers’ markets like the OZCF market, through to the hawkers who sell oranges and avos at the traffic lights – plays an important role in the city: • They keep food flowing,

including into parts of the city where formal retailers don’t reach.

• They create jobs, not just in agriculture, but in shipping, packaging, independent retail, and informal township and street trading.

• They keep money circulating within the community economy, rather than allowing it to be siphoned out into big national retail chains.

The formal retail sector, civil society, local and provincial government all have their part to play in nudging the system

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CHAPTER 7

When social grants are

paid out at, say, a

community hall, people often spend it at nearby

hawkers, street traders

and other vendors

ECONOMICS

in a direction that allows individuals and communities to have greater power in the food system that impacts them. Nicholas Wiid, with the Western Cape provincial administration, says that the province’s Green Economy and the Food Forward projects, are geared towards merging ‘green’ approaches with the economy.

‘We are applying a ‘transversal’ approach as a way to break down the silos of government. Although the Green Economy programme is only two years old, we can already see the benefits of integrated decision making and project implementation,’ says Nicholas, ‘We have taken great strides in positioning the Western Cape as leading green economic hub of the African continent.’

He says provincial government has an important role to play in terms of creating an enabling envi-ronment that unlocks economic opportunities in the green economy. The work being done by government in this space has a strong focus on attracting investment into the region as this supports job creation, in particular low-skilled employment opportunities.

WHY WE CAN’T LEAVE THE MARKET TO JUST ‘BE’ The government has largely had a ‘hands off’ approach

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to the formal food industry, allowing it to self-regulate in terms of the kinds of food it produces, and the way it markets those foods. Now the medical fraternity is calling for a firmer hand from policymakers. The Lancet’s ‘Special Report on Obesity’ in 2011 points out that self-regulation hasn’t worked, that the profit-driven nature of the private sector is too powerful a motivation to continue selling highly processed, refined and sugared foods associated with the growing health problems tagged to the Western diet and urban life.

Children in particular need protection, according to The Lancet, since their brains are still young, immature and impulse driven at a time when exposure to this food will leave them vulnerable to learning addictive behaviour that’s hard to break later in life. This calls for legislation in a way that throttles the overexposure that children get to certain foods, and that protects them from the powerful advertising and marketing forces that promote these foods.

Policy can also be used to reduce the amount of hidden sugar in foods.

Often, when legislation is punted as a way to control the food industry, detractors say we shouldn’t be creating a nanny state. As health writer Mandi Smallhorne argues, the current laissez-faire system

actually limits our freedom of choice. The food industry, she says, is already ‘nannying’ us.

‘For example, the fact that manufacturers are allowed to put sugar in just about anything, without any restrictions, takes away my choice. If I don’t want food that is overly sweetened or salted, the industry doesn’t give me that choice.’

CALL TO ACTION: PROTECTING THE INFORMAL TRADER We can lobby the city and the private sector to protect informal traders, both from a policy level and from a market competition perspective. If researchers are able to map the reach and quantify the impact of these informal markets, it can give greater weight to the argument for why they need to be fostered.

CALL TO ACTION: INVEST IN THE INFORMAL TRADER Sometimes, we eat with our eyes first. If fresh produce is displayed in a way that makes it look lovely, and is sold in a place that’s clean so we know the food’s safe, this will boost consumer confidence and sales for the informal trader.

The city, province and private sector can invest in stallholders and other roadside traders, helping them keep their trading area clean and safe. Traders could also benefit from learning basic business skills, such as how to plan for and invest in their small businesses.

THE CLOUT OF THE MIDDLE CLASS It’s being called the ‘Tim Noakes effect’: middle-class Capetonians have adopted the high-fat and low-

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Filling a vacuum Kieyaam Ryklief is an emerging farmer in the Philippi Horticultural Area. For years, he was frustrated by the fact that he couldn’t sell his small farm’s fresh produce into the formal market. Retailers, he said, were reluctant to put new farmers ‘on their books’. He wasn’t producing big enough volumes to meet their needs, or to make it viable to sell at the Epping fresh produce market.

At the same time, immigrant communities in Cape Town were frustrated that retailers weren’t stocking their favourite fresh veggies from back home: okra, kale, rapeseed, African spinach, mustard, even the leaves of broccoli and baby marrow plants, most of which they cook up like spinach.

Zimbabweans, Malawians and Angolans came to Kieyaam’s farm and asked him to grow these on their behalf. Now, whenever the harvest is ready, word spreads by text message and word of mouth. People arrive on the farm either in groups or alone. They harvest leaves themselves, pay the farmer directly in cash in the weighing shed, and then head off to markets across the city to sell – everywhere from the main train station in Khayelitsha to Masiphumelele in Fish Hoek and a taxi rank in Strand.

The informal market responded naturally to a vacuum.

Food to eat, money to live Abalimi Bezakhaya is a great success story of community gardeners in township neighbourhoods such as Philippi and Khayelitsha, which have extremely high levels of poverty, unemployment and informal housing. Gardeners also sell half their harvest via a box scheme, run by a partner organisation called Harvest of Hope, which mostly goes to middle-class neighbourhoods in Cape Town. This way farmers earn money to meet other important household needs – buy electricity, pay for transport, get school shoes for the kids – while also getting nutritious food onto their plates.

carbohydrate diet that this sports scientist is advocating with such enthusiasm that there’s a shortage of double cream yoghurt and cauliflower (a starch substitute) in stores. The market demand is so powerful that dairy producers are reducing the amount of sugar in some of their products.

Middle-class shoppers have enormous power to sway the market, simply by how they choose to spend their money and where they choose to shop. This force can be used to push the market to respond, and may also stimulate lower-

ECONOMICS

income communities to copy their behaviour.• By choosing to shop from

small farmers, farmers markets and all manner of local food suppliers, rather than large retailers, shoppers can have an impact on creating jobs in those communities, keeping money within those communities, and helping to stimulate business.

• As more and more people demand meat, dairy and eggs that are grass-fed rather than grain-fed, farmers will respond.

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the current laissez-

faire system actually limits our freedom of

choice

A PAYING JOB – WHAT MAKES FOOD GARDENS FAIL OR SUCCEED? Urban food gardens are an important way to help trickle-feed much-needed fresh produce into our kitchens. They’re also a key way to remind urbanites, who are now so far removed from the soil that gives us our food, that growing food is something that needs time, dedication, skill and plenty of resources. It teaches us the real value of food.

While food garden initiatives are often well meaning, there are very real reasons why they fail. We must bear this in mind when we craft policies and development projects that are geared towards addressing food and hunger issues in the urban context. We must also guard against getting locked into urban gardens as the only solution.

It’s useful to understand why some food gardens succeed, and why others fail, because

Township traders, hawkers

and other informal

food traders are an

important but often invisible

and under-appreciated part of our

resilience against

hunger as a city

CHAPTER 6

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Food from the size of a doorSoil for Life works with people to encourage home food gardens. Not only does this give a family ready access to healthy fresh produce (a family of four can be fed all-year round off a piece of soil the size of a door, if done right), but it allows them to earn some extra cash if they sell their goods, and often gives people a sense of purpose and pride, too. People learn gardening skills, composting and soil preparation, as well as the value of eating these foods.

it means we can be more intelligent about planning and rolling out other similar projects in future.

Urban food gardens in poorer communities often fail, not due to a lack of interest, but because the investment is too high. One lady, explaining to University of Cape Town researchers about the communities she works with in Philippi on the Cape Flats, pointed out that the people she trained in food growing

were often so poor that they had to be very strategic about how they used their time and labour. For many, they needed to trade their labour for work that paid in cash this week so they could buy food immediately, rather than invest in the promise of fresh vegetables in a month’s time. This is particularly true when considering that one bad heat wave or pest outbreak could destroy such a large time and resource investment.

Researchers looking at success rates of some food gardening initiatives in poorer communities found that the ones that worked were often those that employed people from a community to work in the gardens for a wage. Gardens that provide jobs first, before food, often succeed.

Take home message: People choose to buy certain foods over others, or to invest in growing their own food, for rational financial and practical reasons. It’s important for city planners and civil society organisations to remember this, particularly when thinking of starting up food gardening initiatives in poor communities. The best intentions to support struggling families might fail because of the tough financial realities they face.

ECONOMICS

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Urban food gardens are an

important way to help

trickle-feed much-

needed fresh

produce into our kitchens

CHAPTER 8

CALL TOACTION

CHAPTER 8

Change is coming, be part of it

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We’re seeing it in many different groups who are agitating for us to rethink the

food system – citizens,

certain farmers, academics,

religious groups and civic

organisations

R ight here in our city, groups of ‘knowledge generating’ people are

coming together to share ideas and find practical solutions to often intractable problems facing us in the modern world.

The Food Dialogues was a chance to begin an exchange of ideas that can sow the seeds of change to challenge ‘conventional orthodoxy’, says Dr Gareth Haysom. ‘I see this in the food system, and right here in Cape Town. People are starting to challenge the orthodoxy, ask questions, push boundaries.’

We’re seeing it in many different groups who are agitating for us to rethink the food system – citizens, certain farmers, academics, religious groups and civic organisations. The better understanding we have of the food system, the more each one of us can understand where we have the greatest opportunity to influence change.

THE CITIZEN AS AN AGENT OF CHANGE At a city level, citizens have the power to bring about change, both through how we spend our money, and lobbying retailers and government.

HOW WE SPEND OUR MONEYBy choosing food that is grown locally, in ways that are ethical towards labourers, animals and the environment, or animal products from pasture-reared and free range animals, we can nudge retailers towards stocking more of those sorts of foods.

If retailers need to source such foods, farmers will begin to farm it in this way. Consumer spending power at the lower end of the value chain can force change all the way back up the system.

ADVOCATE FOR CHANGEWe can ask retailers to label locally farmed foods, such as that coming from the Philippi Horticultural Area, so that consumers can choose this food over produce that has been shipped in from further afield. The more consumers buy from these local suppliers, the more it will stimulate the local farmers and surrounding economy.

We can call for local and provincial government to see the value of productive agricultural spaces within the

Rising food prices ignited the Arab Spring, showing that hunger or the fear of hunger can catalyse social upheaval so powerfully that it can unseat a government.

city limits, and to integrate their protection into the city’s development policy. Additionally, we can improve the understanding of the benefits of urban agriculture, and through policy, incentivise property owners and developers to incorporate food production into housing developments.

CALL TO ACTION

HOW GOVERNMENT CAN RESPOND The City of Cape Town has commissioned a study of the food system in the city, which will help policymakers respond appropriately to the challenges of keeping Capetonians well fed and properly nourished.

Government can work in several ways to help society respond to urban food security:• Host and participate in

cross-sectoral discussions and think tanks that bring together researchers, civil society, the private sector

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(formal and informal) and citizens in order to map the urban food system and tailor-make solutions to specific problems in the system. It’s important that policymakers keep in mind that effective responses to hunger and malnutrition are about much broader issues than merely ensuring there is more food entering the urban system. Other important factors determine whether everyone has access to healthy, affordable foods and how they then choose to use that food. Cross-disciplinary thinking and research can help bring to the surface all those other important factors such as economics, the geography of the city and cultural attitudes towards food.

• See the value of locally farmed fresh produce, and conserve what remaining spaces there are for this sort of farming, be it small emerging and commercial farmers, community gardens or household gardens.

The Food Dialogues was a chance to begin

an exchange of ideas that can sow the

seeds of change to challenge

‘conventional orthodoxy

• Acknowledge the value of the informal sector and actively set out to protect and foster it, from informal food gardeners, right through to spaza shop owners and street traders.

• Take an integrated approach to development planning. ‘We need to consider development hierarchies and how we incentivise certain kinds of developments,’ says the Cape Town Partnership’s Zarina Nteta. ‘How do we define and prioritise ‘productive’ land? For instance, development might favour manufacturing or housing opportunities because that might be seen as more profitable, whereas the approach should rather be integrated into what the community needs to sustain itself.’

An integrated approach to urban planning will help policymakers to balance the city’s and communities’ different needs. ‘For instance, policymakers can make a strong case for housing and food production to be integrated in the same way that housing and transport corridors already are,’ says Zarina.

There’s a groundswell right here in Cape Town that is reflecting the rising food movement around the globe. Activists are fighting to save the vegetable garden of Cape Town, the Philippi

The power of the people In 2011, a private property developer bought the rights to a large stretch of farmland in Philippi, and tried to have it rezoned to allow for a 6 000-unit housing project. This triggered a groundswell of response from civil society organisations and the public, which resulted in the development being put on hold.

‘We lobbied to point out that this development wouldn’t be in our interests, or the interests of the city,’ recalls activist Nazeer Sonday.

The situation isn’t resolved yet, but he points out that this ‘good news story’ shows the power of community activism.

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CHAPTER 8

Horticultural Area, from being turned into another tarred-over suburb. There’s a similar rallying to halt a shopping mall development in Princess Vlei. It’s also in the City of Cape Town’s commissioning of a food study to understand the often hidden forces behind how food gets to the city and moves around it. It’s in the call to get ordinary citizens to return to the soil so we can learn to grow food again, the way many of our grandparents did. And it’s there in the call to protect street traders whose business practice is a form of economic resilience. The OZCF Dialogues series started out as a single, 10-part exploration of urban food growing in Cape Town. It’s fast

growing into exactly the kind of ideas exchange space that can bring together new, fresh, inspiring ideas from people across the wider food system to see how we can challenge the current way in which we grow, move, store, package and use food.

By producing this document, the partners in this project hope to spread that message across the city – to thought leaders, policymakers, business people, residents and beyond. It is also intended as a tool and resource to bolster the efforts of those already at the vanguard of the city’s urban food movement.

Let’s create a healthier, more conscious and just food system in the Mother City, together.

There’s a groundswell right here in Cape Town

that is reflecting the rising food movement

around the globe

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FOOD DIALOGUES REPORT02

resourcesCHAPTER 9

FOOD DIALOGUES REPORT 02

CHAPTER 9

The ‘go to’ list of food system resources

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OrganisationsAbalimi Bezekhaya, abalimi.org.za

African Food Security Urban Network, www.afsun.org

Biowatch, www.biowatch.org.za

Donella Meadows Institute, www.donellameadows.org

FoodBank, www.foodbank.org.za

Food 4 Thought, www.food4thought.org

GRAIN, www.grain.org

The Gravel Garden: A South African Seed Company, thegravelgarden.co.za

Living Seeds: Heirloom Vegetable Seeds, livingseeds.co.za

Masifundise Trust with Coastal Links, masifundise.org.za

Oranjezicht City Farm, www.ozcf.co.za

SEED, seed.org.za

Slow Food, www.slowfood.com

The Surplus People Project, www.spp.org.za

ArticlesAgriculture: Facts & Trends – WWF-SA

Can community-based organic micro-farming create food security? – Rob Small

Community Stories – Soil for Life

DIETS: Low carb and high fats, could this work for you? – Leonie Joubert

The Environmental Food Crisis: The Environment’s Role in Averting Future Food Crises –

United Nations Environment Programme

Food security: The optimal diet for people and the planet – Leonie Joubert

Harvest of Hop, a Case Study: the Sustainable Development of Urban Agriculture

Projects in Cape Town, South Africa – Dawn Elizabeth Kirkland

How John Muir Is Revolutionizing the Farm-to-Table Food Movement

How to Start a Garden with Only a Few Cents

Hungry for Land: Small farmers feed the world with less than

a quarter of all farmland – GRAIN

Livestock’s Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options

- Food & Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

Lost in translation: carbs, fats and our sick nation – Leonie Joubert

Towards a Social Gardening movement in the townships:

An overview of Abalimi Bezekhaya’s work in Cape Town – Rob Small

Whole Systems Thinking as a Basis for Paradigm Change in Education:

Explorations in the Context of Sustainability – Stephen Sterling

United Nations Food Crisis Document 2009

Urban Agriculture from a Social Perspective: A study of the Social Benefits of Urban

Agriculture in Cape Town’s Township Communities from 1987 to 2007 – Shirley Dunn

BooksThe Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet – Nina Teicholz

The Concise Guide to Self Sufficiency – John Seymour

Eating Animals – Jonathan Safran Foer

Field Guide to Fynbos – John Manning

Food from the Veld: Edible Wild Plants of Southern Africa – FW Fox & ME Norwood Young

Forest Gardening: Cultivating an Edible Landscape – Robert Hart

Growing Stuff: An Alternative Guide to Gardening – Richard Reynolds

Grow to Live – Pat Featherstone

Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives – Carolyn Steel

The Hungry Season: Feeding Southern Africa’s Cities – Leonie Joubert

In Defence of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto – Michael Pollan

RESOURCES

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I Write What I Like – Steve Biko

Leipoldt’s Cape Cookery – C Louis Leipoldt

Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason – Michel Foucault

The Natural Way of Farming: The Theory and Practice

of Green Philosophy – Masanobu Fukuoka

The Omnivore’s Dilemma – Michael Pollan

The One-Straw Revolution: An Introduction to Natural Farming – Masanobu Fukuoka

People’s Plants: A Guide to Useful Plants of Southern Africa

– Ben-Erik van Wyk & Nigel Gericke

Sowing Seeds in the Desert: Natural Farming, Global Restoration

and Ultimate Food Security – Masanobu Fukuoka

Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System – Raj Patel

23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism – Ha-Joon Chang

WebsitesThe Alan Chadwick Legacy Project

Environmental Working Group’s Dirty Dozen & Clean Fifteen

Food Matters: creating sustainable and fair food systems

Food not Lawns

The Guerilla Gardening Homepage

Jane’s Delicious Garden

Making KOS

Waste to Wealth Africa

The World’s Healthiest Foods

Zero to Landfill Organics

Films, documentaries and video clipsThe Edible City

Fed Up

Finding The Spring – John Parker

Global Gardener: Permaculture with Bill Mollison

How We Can Eat Our Landscapes – Pam Warhurst

The Hungry Season

Looking for the optimal diet for us and the environment: Leonie Joubert at TEDxCapeTown

Ron Finely: A guerrilla gardener in South Central LA

The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil

Spring Project Lentegeur: Lentegeur Psychiatric Hospital

The Story of the Fly and How It Could Save the World – Jason Drew

Workshops and training programmesBuilding Local Food Systems: a Handbook

Klein Karoo Sustainable Drylands Permaculture Project

SEED Applied Permaculture Training Course

Soil for Life Public Workshops

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IMAGES COURTESY OF:Coco van OppensFiona MacPhersonHetty ZantmanJill ChenLeigh PageSarah Goodman Bruce SutherlandLisa BurnellRGBStock.comSheryl Ozinsky

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