For Foodies – The Grass is Greener in Sunny South Africa

By Toni Parsons

London has been home for me for the past two years. In the time I have been here, I have experienced cheese, wine, fruit, sweets, cakes and any other form of sustenance imaginable. Fruits I had never heard of and vegetables I had never even seen. The Heathrow injection is not sneaky, it lives, quite obviously, at Borough Market and at food festivals throughout the year.

London and its surrounding boroughs has festivals and markets that are just mind blowing for anyone even remotely interested in food. I have been privileged enough to travel while I have lived here, and cities like Barcelona, Brussels and Paris feel like a repeat of the same process all over again. When you go there you see foods you’d never heard of and learn ways of preparing food you would never have imagined.

It would be easy to give the impression that South Africa is lagging in this department, or that one needs to leave to discover the vast wonders of foods available. That impression would be wrong. While I have learnt about foods here that I wasn’t aware existed, I have spent a lot of time talking to English people, and telling them about the foods that we eat at home. Many times, they have been as incredulous as I have been – both when I tell them of our food, and of the foods I have discovered here.

South Africans live a lifestyle where our food is predominantly grown on farms, purchased genuinely fresh and has seen some daylight in its time. Our food is not frozen or artificially ripened, we have no need of that, and having real sun ripened food doesn’t cost us any extra. Moreover, our diverse cultures and eating habits mean that although we might use the local supermarket reasonably often, stopping to buy avocados on the side of the road or getting your fruit from a fruit store on your way home is not unheard of. We tend to eat fruits and vegetables when they are in season, and from farms local to us.

This kind of buying and exposure to foods that are in season means that our experience of foods is wider than the average Brit who shops for the same foods at the same shop, day in and day out. South Africans buy different foods at different times of the year, rather than perfect tomatoes available 365 days a year, grown in Venezuela and ripened with a light. We eat what grows on our farms, and not just what the man who owns Spar can order to have in his shop.

Over and above this, if you look at food festivals and markets annually in the UK and in South Africa, the number of festivals available comes in quite close.

Having attended a selection in both the UK and SA, it needs to be said that South Africa’s food festivals and markets beat those in the UK hands down. They are better planned logistically – parking and people management tends to be better. They are generally cheaper to attend for the local. To go to a Food Festival in London is a very pricey affair, and tends to be rather class dominated – it’s not generally available to anyone interested in learning about food. Entrance tickets come in at roughly double the price of a movie ticket, and the food to be purchased once you are inside does not come cheap. There are more Veuve Cliquot sipping yuppies than ordinary people on a day out to taste good food.

I have observed at food festivals in South Africa families from a range of economic incomes, ages and classes – the focus really is on good food and on learning about it, rather than on spending vast amounts of money because you can. You do get the Veuve Cliquot sippers in SA, but you also get the dads in torn jeans and decade old flip flops there to taste some jams, and groups of students having a fun day out.

Moreover, because we have more space, our festivals are bigger and more diverse. Olive oils, cheeses and wines dominate UK festivals. South Africa boasts amazing breads, jams, pickles, varieties of home made beers and other kinds of booze, fresh oysters and mussels to name a few.

For a country still growing into the food and wine festival market, we compete on an absolutely outstanding level, and I can honestly say that in terms of value for money, I have yet to go to a food festival in the UK that competes with any in South Africa.