Food That Looks Like Trees

I grew up at a time and in a place deprived of fresh food. Other than meat, that is. During the 1970s, Namibia’s small towns were fresh food deserts, seriously deprived of fruit and vegetables.

To start, there were only a few supermarkets and these were limited to the larger regional towns. For the most part, small family-owned grocery stores supplied what people needed. Tinned foods were popular and fresh food sections in these stores were disproportionally small and stocked with the most basic produce such as onions, tomatoes, potatoes and perhaps a few salad ingredients such as cucumbers and lettuce.

Needless to say, there were no exotic fresh herbs like rosemary, lemon thyme, sage and so forth. People cooked with dried spices and these could be found in small glass containers.

Food and life were simple; stripped of the gluttony of choices that consumers are presented with today.

Perhaps the biggest change with regard to the fresh food business is modern-day transportation.

Back then, if you were to propose importing oranges from Spain or grapes from Portugal, you were guaranteed responses infused with genuine perplexity and befuddlement.

Why? How?

I doubt the average grocer would have any notion of how to bring fresh food from such far-off destinations and sell them here locally and – best of all – make a handy profit. The way fresh food is shuffled across all corners of the globe is a true modern marvel.

People seemed to grow more of their own food back then. Ordinary people like you and me. Especially in urban areas.

Grandpa kept chickens for meat and eggs, and had a large collection of fruit trees: Pomegranates, oranges, navels, grapefruit and figs. Over the many years of moving around the country – Dad was employed at the postal services – we had access to blackberries, guavas, papayas and passion fruit grown in our back yards.

Over time, increases in service charges, changes in municipal by-laws and changes in the philosophical underpinnings of urban housing put an end to much of the efforts of growing food in urban areas.

This happened more or less at the same time as supermarkets arrived on the local food scene.

It is no surprise that I did not like any food that resembled ‘trees’. Broccoli and cauliflower, in particular; but these became the convenient references to all vegetables other than potatoes, onions, pumpkin and green beans on select occasions. In short, and due to various circumstances, we ate vegetables that were cheap and could survive the perils of time.

Our vegetables were kept in a special vegetable basket made from metal and positioned in one corner of the kitchen. The refrigerator was used to preserve perishable consumables such as milk, butter and cream and leftovers.

Did I tell you that at one point we had fresh milk delivered to our doorstep by a guy in a donkey cart every morning, and that this happened at MaltahÖhe?

It would be fair to say that I did not grow up eating vegetables.

I also grew up among people who did not cook a lot of vegetables, and as a result, they were never good at it. To this day, I cannot remember a single vegetable dish from my childhood that stands out to the point of me asking for the recipe. Sad but true. I had to find my way to the vegetable section of the grocery store, and I did so very slowly.

How did I do it?

By means of what Tim Noakes describes as the “second great dietary disaster”: The adaptation of the 1977 Dietary Guidelines of Americans. Guidelines that turned the world off natural fats and onto carbohydrates and “polyunsaturated vegetable oils” (which are not vegetable but seed oils, actually).

It is this change during the 1970s that initiated the great obesity and Type 2 diabetic epidemic that has held the world hostage since the 1980s. Throughout my childhood, pasta didn’t feature strongly in our family meals. What pasta we ate came from a tin and with tomato sauce. Not very tasty, but convenient. Mom made her version of a meat ragu with spaghetti or noodles and finished with cheddar cheese, which, to this day, is still a popular and regular feature on our family table.

But, growing up, that was it as far as pasta was concerned.

Until I went to university during the mid-1980s. There I learnt that it was near impossible to get a date unless you had a serious collection of pasta recipes.

This was the time of my introduction to cheap and convenient food. All of a sudden, we ate bread and baked potatoes and odd-shaped pasta and rice – boiled and fried. If you were a self-proclaimed hippie, you’d add a few scraps of vegetables and call it vegetarian, and if you had extra income from a bar or café job, you’d add meat or chicken.

But grains and starchy food became our staple. Look at what Namibians eat, nothing has changed. Except we are getting sweeter and sicker.

We consume not only vast quantities of carbohydrates, which is metabolised into sugar, but we consume more sugar now than ever before. And as a result, we are sicker than ever before.

Finding my way to the ‘trees’ has been a long and sometimes terrifying journey focused on transformation and healing. Not only did I have to learn how to cook and eat what once was foreign matter to me – broccoli and cauliflower, for example – I had to unlearn the habits of the past that served me well for many years.

Cream of Broccolli Soup

• 2 tablespoons butter

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