Flavour ICONS
“WE ARE WHAT WE EAT.SO, WHO ARE WE?”
When asking this question, renowned food anthropologist and writer Anna Trapido inspired me to think about how validated we feel when we re-experience the tastes and smells from our childhoods. Her work reminds us how important it is for South Africans to know that our food history is worthy of being archived, cherished and documented. Elegance and beauty exist on a dynamic level in our food, in our cooking and in the different ways in which we eat together. This sentiment is wonderfully captured by the 100 Flavours Exhibition at Maker’s Landing in Cape Town – a great thinking tool for exploring our food identity and stimulating debate.
Curated by Anna, Studio H creative director Hannerie Visser and a number of collaborators, the installation takes visitors on a journey through local ingredients, recipes and tools. From cooking over fire in the Cradle of Humankind in Gauteng, to the ancient honey hunters depicted in San rock art in KwaZulu-Natal and the prehistoric shellfish middens of the Cape West Coast, this can essentially be described as a pop-up museum of South Africa’s culinary history, highlights, ingredients, mishaps that turned into meals (iskhokho), and household items most likely to appear in an average pantry.
It’s a monumental work. As Anna says: “100 is a large number, but also a very small one. There will always be something missing – which is to say that the foods that do not appear in the exhibition matter as much as the ones that do: bokkoms and biltong suspended with string, a can of pilchards in tomato sauce, a pile of addictively sweet , a rooibos shrub, sorghum in its rough and refined forms, , and a myriad more, with detailed explanations about how we came
