Food for Thought a Life in Four Courses

Food for Thought A Life in Four Courses

TRANSCRIPT OF PODCAST EPISODE 8: Jessica Eaton

Jessica Eaton is from Botswana in Southern Africa and now lives here in Edinburgh. In this episode, she talks to us about her family heritage and shares her lasting memories of the foods of her childhood.

Interviewer: Can you tell me your name and your age?

Jessica: Twenty-six. I’m from Gaborone, Botswana in Southern Africa though I was born in Johannesburg. I currently live in Edinburgh

Eh I think it’s more difficult to describe where I am from and what community I am part of than most people would find it to be. My mum is from South Africa and her family arrived in South Africa from Europe in the 1700’s as part of the, as part of a big wave of people who came to South Africa during that period. So her family has been there as far back as we can trace and she really has no, certainly has no recollection but no trace of family from, that pre-dates her South African heritage. So, on her side the history in South Africa and in Africa runs really far back. My dad is from Botswana. He is a fifth generation citizen of Botswana and I’m a sixth generation citizen of Botswana. So his family has been in that country since before independence certainly and then prior to that came up from South Africa. His mother was, sorry his grandmother was married to a man from New Zealand who came out to fight the Boers who are white South African farmers and ended up marrying one. She was Afrikaans speaking and he was obviously English speaking. He didn’t apparently speak a word of Afrikaans and she didn’t speak a word of English so no one knows how they communicated with each other during their long marriage but they did. They managed to have a long and happy marriage together. So besides my great grandfather who was from New Zealand, all of my family is from either South Africa or Botswana. And just to add, I would probably describe myself as being part of one of the smallest minority populations in the world. Though my skin is white and one probably doesn’t associate white people with being part of a minority ethnic community, I certainly part of one being a white citizen of Sub-Saharan Africa which makes up only about 3% of the population of Botswana so we really are part of a tiny minority eh in a country that is primarily black and dominated by um black African people who speak Setswana. So my heritage is African and white English speaking South Africans and citizens of Botswana.

There are few things that I like more than food and it’s certainly played a big role in my family growing up. Both my parents regard a meal at the dinner table all together in the evenings a really important part of family life and my mother is a high school teacher and encourages all the parents who she has contact with and all her students to have meals with their family at the dinner table as much as, as frequently as they can. Because she sees it as a really important way of children being able to share their stories with their parents and the parents being able to share their stories and their work life, their work days with their children and that is certainly a value that my mum and da brought to my household growing up. My mum, as I said, is from South Africa so a lot of the food she cooks is influenced by South African themes and cuisines. South African food is not, you can’t really describe it as one cuisine, it really depends on the region of South Africa that you are from. Coastal regions obviously have a lot of seafood influence and 1 inland there is more game meat in the dishes but um the food that my mum cooks is quite influenced by Afrikaans and Creole cooking. And to describe a traditional did that my mum made growing up for us is called bobotie which is a South African, Afrikaans influenced dish which is made of meat and sweet raisons with almonds and an egg yolk topping. Doesn’t sound very great, it sounds like a bizarre mix of ingredients but a lot of South African food involves meat and fruit so the sweet and the savoury together. It’s one of my favourite memories of growing up is having bobotie at the dinner table. On my dad’s side he, his cooking and his childhood was quite influenced by, again Afrikaans cultures but further north than my mother’s family and my dad often cooks Sunday roasts which are influenced by the Afrikaans heritage that he had growing up. Typically there will be three meats. So there’ll be a pork, sorry there’ll be a lamb, a beef and a chicken. Afrikaners, the joke is that that Afrikaners from that region view chicken as a vegetable! So the third meat is kind of seen as a vegetable because they take their meat eating very, very seriously. Eh I think I would be remiss to answer about food being a Southern African without talking about a braai which is our word for barbeque. And that is just cooking meat out on the um open fire preferably outdoors in good weather and having a few cold salads to go with the meats so those are some of the things I ate growing up and have very fond memories of them.

A lot of the recipes that my mum has and she often shares with me via Whatsapp, come from a book of recipes that she has from her mother and that her mother has from her mother which tend to be newspaper cut-outs or magazine cut-outs that are then been posted on A4 pieces of paper and bound into books that have been passed down through the generations. And it sounds, it sounds quite, it sounds kind of like I’ve made this up but it really is true! And whenever I ask my mum to send me one of the recipes that I fondly remember from my childhood, she often takes a photograph of the handwritten recipe and then WhatsApp’s it to me so it can kind of show you how things have changed. And I probably won’t have a bound book of newspaper cuttings or magazine cuttings to give to my children, probably just have a collection of WhatsApp screenshots but that’s ok! At least the food will taste the same and hopefully be enjoyed in the same way.

Botswana is a pretty hostile environment. Most of the country is covered by the Kalahari Desert so growing, having a vegetable garden is very difficult. Only the people with the greenest fingers could manage that so there is not really a culture of locally sourced or organic products. A lot of the country is still very eh, rural, lives in very rural areas and tends to be quite poor so the concept of heirloom tomatoes or fancy carrots is not really a trend that has made its way to Botswana. Eh certainly people in rural communities will be either gathering vegetables of fruit from nearby environments or planting basic crops but we live in the capital city of Botswana where there is very little open land where you could have a vegetable garden so we, the ingredients that we use in our food at home has been store bought and mostly imported from South Africa where there is obviously a lot more fertile environment to grow this kind of thing.

Wealthier people in Gaborone would tend to eat out more frequently and cook less at home because they would have both the mother and father holding down a job. And in fact I hear quite often from my mother who is a high school teacher that the children mention that their parents never cook for them at home and as parents gets busier and as women tend to have full time jobs obviously the tradition of making a family meal falls away which is unfortunate. But I think that, that has a huge impact on the kind of food that wealthier people eat and that they are eating out more frequently or ordering in. Eh poor people do tend to cook for themselves more, just because it is obviously the cheaper option and tend to eat a lot less protein. So poorer people in Botswana and more rural people will eat a lot of samp and pap which are staple maize based products and only on special occasions will people be able to have access to protein, at weddings or at funerals. So yes, I think there is certainly a very big difference in the way that people eat depending on socio-economic status in Botswana. Which is a shame.

Weddings and funerals, like in most societies, are taken really seriously in Botswana and a few hundred people will gather and there will often be a cow or a lamb slaughtered for the event so there will be a lot of protein on offer at events of that kind. Um, so I actually think that socio-economic status has less of an effect on the kinds of foods that are eaten by people at special events. But on a day to day basis, poor people certainly are having less access to protein and um eating less healthy.

Interviewer: Could you talk to me about any food traditions around a particular life event?

Jessica: Eh I think I probably choose to talk about a braai on a Sunday which is a very typical southern African, probably typically white Southern African event which normally surrounds a rugby game but could also be on, during a cricket match or a tennis match. Typically surrounds sport, there will be sport playing in the lounge and because it tends to beautiful weather in Botswana and South Africa year round. There will be doors opening out onto a patio or a garden where the men will typically be outside doing the braai and the ladies inside doing the salads and maybe drinks and cold maybe cold meats and all of that that accompanies the meat. But I think I will say that braais are quite, the roles involved in a braai and quite gender specific. So you do tend to have men outside smoking a cigarette, having a beer, doing the meat and that’s really the men’s space and they have their own conversations and the women will be inside in the indoor kitchen doing things, preparing food in there. Obviously that has changed over time and at a braai of people who were my contemporaries would be a lot more integrated but during my parents time certainly braais would be quite divided along gender lines. But the kind of eaten, typical braai food would be a Boerewors role which is a kind of spicy sausage inside a bread roll. Very simple, quite similar to a hot dog but just much better and a more delicious sausage that you can only get really nice made at home typically out of beef but could be out of game meat. And I have very fond memories of braais growing up and I’ve had a few braais in Scotland um when the weather is nice enough to have a barbeque in the Meadows.

I think the reason that the braai is popular in Botswana and South Africa and other southern African countries and in Australia as well is because the weather is beautiful almost all year round so it always braai time in Botswana. It is almost time for a cold beer and to stand in the sun even if its winter. Whereas in Scotland obviously it rains a hell of a lot of the time and so it’s not really braai weather and so I think that tradition will probably fall away a bit if I were to continue to live here or live in another cold climate. Eh as far as the general tradition of cooking and the foods I grew up on continuing, I think unfortunately a lot of it will probably fall away in my generation and the next because I live in Scotland even though I grew up in Botswana and will probably to live here for a few years and it’s unlikely that I will go home any time soon. My brother is living in America and I think it is unlikely that he will go home any time soon and so I think as the world becomes more globalised and people live further and further away from home and have less and less contact with their families and their home countries, unfortunately those traditions do tend to fall away. I admire Indian culture particularly because I really feel that Indians, no matter where they live in the world, have access to Indian grocery stores and they make a big effort to use spices from home, to make their special foods on their special occasions. So I really admire that culture for its relationship with food. I recently went to India and was really blown away by the role that food plays in the lives of Indians and how central it is to their culture and how they really continue to eat the way that that their parents ate no matter where they live.

I just think that food is such an unbelievable important part of culture and building friendships and raising a family and I know that sounds quite serious but I really, I really do feel that and I think we eat three times a day if we are lucky and I certainly look forward to every meal I have because I absolutely love eating. Whether it is a simple omelette or a creative paella or an amazing eh burger, I love to eat and so I think about food a lot and I think it’s played a very important role in the relationship that I have with my mum and my dad and my brother. And I hope to continue that tradition in the future.

This episode was produced by Emma-Jane Harrington and Ciarán Earls. Interview was carried out by and transcribed by Emma-Jane Harrington. Food for Thought is brought to you by MECOPP and funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund.