South Africans have starkly unequal access to a healthy diet - the solution requires tackling deep-seated historical injustice

• The food system - made up of all of the activities and actors involved in the production, processing, transportation, selling, consumption and disposal of food - produces starkly unequal access to nutritious foods.
• As a result, many households in the country cannot afford a healthy diet, 27% of children under five are stunted, and the prevalence of diet-related diseases is rising rapidly.
• Black-headed households are seven times more likely than white-headed households to have inadequate access to food.
• Most importantly, elders can help us reconnect with the worldview and values that underpinned indigenous food systems.

Colonialism, violence and dispossession

• Seizure of land from the indigenous Khoi and San people was justified on the basis that they failed to “properly use” the land by cultivating it.
• Colonialism brought with it large-scale, labour-intensive agriculture for domestic markets and export to Europe and its other colonies.
• Forced labour in the form of enslaved Africans and Asians, indentured labourers or captured indigenous people, including children, became common.
• This disdain for indigenous foods has carried on into the present, with traditional foods seen as backwards or poverty foods.

Decolonising food systems

• The food system is highly concentrated, with a few large national and international corporations dominating food processing and retail.
• The call to decolonise food systems is growing globally.
• In indigenous food systems, people often worked collectively – for example, in collective work parties known as ilima in isiZulu and isiXhosa or letsema in Setswana.
• It is not my intention to suggest that all indigenous food systems were the same, but rather to suggest that they shared certain similarities, and that they were violently disrupted by colonialism.