In a time of climate breakdown, corporate capture, and unhealthy diets, can the humble food of Lesotho show us the future?
Over the past few years, the notion that all cuisine can be boiled down to four simple elements - salt, fat, acid, and heat - has gained widespread popularity thanks to a bestselling cookbook by chef Samin Nosrat. This philosophy is alluring for its sheer simplicity. Yet it's arguably still a little over-complex when applied to the minimalism of Lesotho's traditional food.
Take Likhets'o, which takes barely two ingredients (pumpkin and water) and three instructions (cut, boil, scoop) to make. Or Nyekoe, which combines sugar beans and wholegrain sorghum - plus a little cooking oil, water, and salt - to make what can be a full meal. Heat? Absolutely. Salt, fat, acid? Maybe sometimes.
For many, this degree of plainness may sound a little uninspiring. But for Basotho chef Ska Moteane, simple is beautiful. "That's what we've always been like, using clean, clean, clean flavours," she says. "What's unique about our cooking scene in Lesotho is that we really don't have any complicated things that would require, say, lots and lots of spices."
Moteane learnt to cook many of these national recipes about 15 years ago after she moved back home from South Africa where she'd be working. Realising that she'd never be taught how to make the traditional dishes that have been a staple for generations - and finding the recipes nowhere despite scouring bookshops and the internet - she travelled the country collecting stories and instructions. She complied them in her self-published 2012 cookbook Cuisine of the Mountain Kingdom: Cooking in Lesotho. To her surprise, it won the prestigious Gourmand Cookbook award for best African cookbook that year.
Since then, Moteane's celebration of traditional Basotho dishes - and, with them, the beans and legumes that grow so well in the small mountainous kingdom - has only become more salient. In the last few decades across Africa, there has been a sharp rise in the consumption of ultra-processed and fast food. In southern Africa, imports of soft drinks increased by 1,200% between 1995 and 2010. Fast food outlets and the proportion of processed items in supermarkets have exploded.
As in the Global North, this trend has had a direct and negative impact on health. According to the World Health Organisation, the number of overweight children in Africa nearly doubled between 1991 and 2016, from 5.4 million to 10.3 million. Recent studies around the world meanwhile have drawn links between diets high in ultra-processed foods and a global rise in cancer among under-50s. Africa today is facing a so-called "double burden" of malnutrition whereby it is simultaneously contending with undernutrition and issues linked to overnutrition such as obesity, diabetes and hypertension.
These trends in Africa have been attributed to a number of factors such as urbanisation and lifestyle changes linked to shifts in forms of employment. Another big part of the puzzle is trade liberalisation and the arrival of "Big Food" multinationals and their local imitators. In countries like Lesotho, ultra-processed food are becoming both cheaper and ever more ubiquitous, in urban spaces, supermarkets, and through online advertising that portrays Western-style fast food culture as aspirational.
For Moteane, who has become a campaigner for "slow food" and a champion of Lesotho's healthy local fare, the battle for the country's stomach is akin to David and Goliath.
"I see my role as a chef as being to say let's these nutritious crops onto our plate, but we have a big problem because the big corporations have so much money for adverts on TV and the internet to promote this poison," she says. "We are fighting a giant, but it doesn't mean we'll stop."
Through local partnerships and with the support of networks like Slow Food International, Moteane engages in online and in-person educational campaigns around Lesotho extolling the virtues of traditional dishes and warning of the health dangers of ultra-processed foods, especially targeting young people. The conversations are not always easy.
"People will tell you healthy food is boring, that it doesn't taste good, that it's more expensive," she says. "But I tell them to think about what it's doing to their health in the long-term. We are really getting sick because of all the chemicals we're ingesting, and healthy foods are no more expensive especially if you think about the thousands you'll spend going to the doctor in the long run."
As well as its impact of health, Moteane is also well aware of the effects of these food cultures on the environment and the climate. Shifts in behaviour around the consumption of food are part of a more general expansion of globalised food systems in Africa, including how food is grown.
For many years, farmers networks, civil society groups, and environmentalists have attempted to push back at increasing industrialisation of the continent's agriculture. They have urged governments to resist importing a model that relies on super farms using monocropping and vast quantities of chemical inputs. Instead, they say that countries should help farmers use agroecological methods that work with nature to replenish the soil, increase biodiversity, and prioritise local supply chains. Many argue for a shift from a focus on food security - whereby people have enough calories but potentially on somebody else's terms - to a focus on food sovereignty - whereby people control their own food systems.
This too, however, is a battle waged against much better resourced opponents. The vast wealth of agribusiness and agrichemical multinationals gives them the ear of officials in poor countries like Lesotho. Moteane describes confusion and disappointment at her government's agricultural policies.
"They are part of the problem, but I don't think intentionally," she says, citing their provision of subsidies for chemical inputs. "If you talk to these people individually outside the office, they agree 100% with what we are saying, but once in office it's a different story."
The deepening climate crisis only makes the efforts of campaigners like Ska more urgent. The global food system accounts for around one third of all greenhouse gas emissions. This is due to many factors including the production of chemical inputs, the degradation of soils, deforestation, transportation, and packaging.
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In turn, the effects of climate change have devastating effects on agriculture, especially in highly vulnerable countries such as Lesotho.
"We're not sure if winter is still winter," says Moteane. "We're not sure anymore what we can get in what season. Sometimes we do not get any rain. We need to start working on adapting to the current climate while unlearning all the bad habits that are destroying our planet."
For the chef from Lesotho, the intersecting crises of health, climate and food sovereignty may be deeply complex, but the solution to them ultimately lies in the wisdom that has always been contained in the country's traditional cuisine: Simple is beautiful. Simple can nourish. Simple is already more than enough. Many scientific studies have come to the same conclusion. Prioritising plant-based diets, regenerative farming, and local supply chains would do wonders for health, livelihoods, and the environment.
"Sometimes we tend to go after the things that other nations are doing, thinking our own is not good enough," says Moteane. "What Lesotho can teach the rest of the world is what you have in your own space is enough. It is good. Appreciate it."
James Wan is the Managing & Climate Editor of African Arguments. He is the former Acting Editor of African Business Magazine and Senior Editor at Think Africa Press. He has written for Aljazeera, New Humanitarian, BBC, The Guardian (UK) and other outlets. He is a fellow of the Wits University China-Africa Reporting Project and former member of the African Studies Association-UK council.
