Whatever happened to a tin of pilchards and some stewed morogo, pondered 702 mid-morning host Clement Manyathela ahead of a conversation with registered dietician Reabetjoe Mokoko. Manyathela suggested that healthy eating feels unaffordable these days because we are moving away from traditional foods
“We have shifted heavily towards a Western frame of what counts as healthy, to the point that traditional foods are now seen as inferior, which then feeds directly into the narrative that healthy eating is unaffordable,” he said.
But many traditional African ingredients are just as nutritious and considerably cheaper
Mokoko said social media and changing food trends had played a major role in shaping how we viewed healthy eating
“Social media plays a big role nowadays; things that are trending are hardly ever traditional foods. It’s more of Western diets, quick fixes and things like that.”
She said traditional and cultural foods had increasingly become something people eat on special occasions rather than as part of their everyday diets
“Butinourownhouseholds,thosearethingsthatwedon’tpreparealotof.”
So what about the morogo?
Mokoko suggested that marketing plays a role in the foods we put in our shopping baskets
She said South Africans have come to view greens such as kale and spinach as healthier or more desirable than veggies like morogo
“There’s chasing the status to say, ‘Now I’m making a kale salad.’ Maybe we think it’s uncool to be using morogo, because we go with what’s trending, when it comes to greens in the shops, [and] what seems to be ‘healthy’?”
But kale offers the same nutrition as the morogo that many of us grew up eating
“Look, the greens have plus minus the same type of nutrition, so it’s not like you are getting something extraordinary when you’re eating kale instead of morogo.”
And when it comes to availability of more traditional ingredients, Mokoko suggested that they could be made more accessible if we started buying and cooking them more regularly
Low demand means shops were less likely to stock them in large quantities
“The traditional morogo is not that easily accessible, but it’s because of the low demand, because we hardly ever cooked such things.”
For Mokoko, returning to foods grown and served by our parents and grandparents is not about rejecting modern diets, but recognising that healthy eating can be affordable and also a nod to our traditional cultures
“We have an opportunity here to control the situation by creating awareness of how healthy our cultural foods are and encouraging more and more people to go back to growing some of their own produce as well.”
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