FIRST PUBLISHED IN THE MAIL & GUARDIAN ON 2018-11-02 | FOOD

My first memory of okra is situated on a Saturday night of my childhood in Fordsburg Square, Johannesburg.

I might not have looked twice at the mounds of green, fuzzy, cone-shaped vegetables had it not been for my mother’s audible enthusiasm. Amid the sizzling of kebabs and tikka chicken, and the din of prices being negotiated over the latest Bollywood ballads, the sound of my mother interrogating the vegetable dealer was a sound my younger sister and I could not un-hear.

Where, exactly, were these vegetables from? When did they arrive? What type of vehicle did they arrive on? What else is in season now? Would those be available next week?

“Lady fingers,” she said after a successful round of negotiations, beaming with joy as she pointed to the green, fuzzy cone-shaped things she was about to buy.

“That’s what we used to call them.”

Partly because we had been forced to leave the stall with the five-in-one DVDs, and partly because we had to bypass the baked goods stand with the coconut-ice (a coconut-based sweet) and naan khatai (almond shortbread) – we did not share my mother’s enthusiasm.

After the okra discovery, the weekend jaunts to the Fordsburg Square for food and festivities would now also include a rare-groceries expedition. Had it not been for the supply of ground nuts (freshly unearthed peanuts without the salt and raisins) and madumbis that my parents would boil in salt water and serve as a succulent winter snack, I might have resented the day my mother spotted her long-lost okra.

I did not yet know the feeling of finding a filling for the hole created by homesickness.

I did not yet appreciate how much the foods we grow up with bonds us – not just to those who prepare it for us and those we eat with – but also to a sense of time and rootedness.

I was focused on ‘actual’ Rainbow Nation goals, like achieving my dream of one day owning the entire Kellogg's mini-cereal collection, and this was not the first time we’d all been conscripted into the good-food matriarchy. Many Saturday and Sunday mornings were spent caddying shopping trolleys for my mother through her preferred meat market, Akhalwayas on Dolly Rathebe Road, Fordsburg––where I learned that giblets and offal were also chicken––or her preferred fish shop, The Mediterranean on Jules Street, Malvern––where I was taught how to look a fish in the eyes to determine its fitness for consumption while my mother interrogated the king prawns fresh from Mozambique.

In what I imagine to be my family’s matriarchal lexicon, “good food” has little to do with brand or price.

It is almost devoutly anti-packaging. If the produce cannot be held, lightly squeezed, smelled, or weighed by hand, it almost certainly cannot be trusted. If the spices are sitting uncovered or were packaged a little too long ago, their pungency has definitely been compromised. These rules are part science, part generational wisdom.

When my parents moved with their jobs further away from Johannesburg’s city centre, trips to individual meat, fish, spice, and produce grocers became less frequent as fuel and food inflation rose. Large shopping mall complexes were sprouting in every direction, drawing most economic activities into suburban, brand-conscious bubbles.

My adulthood has since involved me confusing big retail staff with requests for jam tomatoes and dhania (coriander). I’ve even found myself seeking out sellers at farmers’ markets to discuss the price of nuts and flours, pausing to share the distress of the latest dollar price and tips on local substitute products. In these moments, I have never imagined myself more like my mother.

Karma, hey. 

Most recently, my mother responded compassionately to these coming-of-age melodramas by producing an entire box of okra from a market close to her home. She had the same proud smile I recalled from her Fordsburg Square days. Curious, I joined her on one of her Saturday market missions. 

Past the Mall of Africa and into Midrand’s Vorna Valley, past the new complex with another big supermarket, we find ourselves outside Aandal Foods. My mother wastes no time. She’s on the hunt for curry leaves, but gets sidetracked by fresh watercress. I am reassigned the old duty of shopping trolley caddy. We bump into old family friends we haven’t seen in years. They, too, were drawn to the watercress. Discussions of how we’ve been happen in between exchanges on how best to clean and prepare said watercress.

I wander off and meet the owner of the store, Sashnee Naicker. She tells me, through hellos and how-are-yous to customers, of how the store was opened by her father in 2016 and has grown to service both a growing Indian ex-pat community and the existing diverse population of the area. Aandal’s products reflect this: “Indian veg” sits alongside “Durban wild herbs” (greens, not cannabis) and Inkomasi, whilst families of all ethnicities huddle to discuss the curiosities of their own grocery expeditions. The store is filled with the buzz of suburban hunting and gathering.

“I love the way food can bring people together. I love the fact that no two days are the same. I love the diversity of customers and the amount I learn everyday about the products we stock,” Sashnee says.

“What’s nice is building the bridge between diverse people through food.”

Observing the commotion of Saturday mornings at Aandal’s, with my mother somewhere in the thick of it, I can see now what I couldn’t see in my younger, sulkier, days.

Food brings people together long before it is prepared or eaten.

It allows people to share parts of themselves on their own terms. Acknowledging this brings to mind questions about the cultures represented in the city’s food economy. Questions of food become questions of land.

I imagine if this is what a Saturday at Newtown’s old Indian Fruit and Vegetable Market––today’s Market Theatre––would have been like. Thoughts of food security, land, ghettoisation, cultural exchange, social agency, and the joy of belonging linger: begging to be addressed with the mindfulness that food cannot be divorced from land, no matter how catchy the slogan or pretty the packaging.

Small grocers offer a window into the tangible and intangible joys of community-based food markets, but they cannot be so few and far between. Our retail food landscape does not yet adequately reflect the cultural and ethnic diversity of who we are and where we come from.

Who gets to be the arbiter of food access? The cultural authority? The Hypermarket-dependency complex? Please, no. 

The Kellogg’s mini-cereal kingdom can wait.