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.

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