Discover more about the forces that shape where our food comes from, how much it costs, how it lands on our plates, and whether it leaves us feeling full and nourished in the long term
When a family goes hungry in the city, we often think this is because our farmers haven’t delivered enough food to the market. Or we see it as a failure of the person, which happens in the privacy of their own home and is their responsibility to solve. But if we want to fill the food gap in African cities, we must understand that many city dwellers are hungry because they are poor. And they’re poor because their food choices are shaped by powerful social, economic, political and geographical forces that operate at local, regional and global levels, all of which collide in their neighbourhoods as they try to put food on the table.
Staying trim and healthy in an African city is about more than just making good food and lifestyle choices: why city living leaves many heavy, hungry, and sick.
Although some of the women in the lower-income neighbourhood of Masiphumelele, south of Cape Town, South Africa, are quite comfortable in their heavier bodies, many have taken on board the messages about the health implications of being overweight. Yet their efforts to trim down are often in vain, which shows that making healthy food and lifestyle choices for people living on the breadline is about more than whether they have the strong willpower and all the right information. This story shows the complex political, cultural, and market forces that drive a kind of ‘food apartheid’ in developing communities, where poor people, as Oxfam South Africa says, “have good access to bad food, and bad access to good food”. The upshot is that people are often heavy, sick, and over-burdened with blame.
Supermarkets and shopping malls are often seen as the poster children of the modern African city, but the informal economy brings food and jobs to our cities.
Big supermarkets and gleaming shopping malls are the poster children of what many city developers see as the modern African city. But working away feverishly in their shadow, often unrecognised and sometimes even maligned, is an industrious informal food economy that keeps our cities stocked with food and provides the jobs that give people the income they need to buy their own food. While supermarkets deepen their reach into our cities, often speeding up our dietary switch to packaged, nutritionally poor foods, the value of informal food traders goes largely unseen and often unsupported.
Chicken is one of South Africa’s most popular proteins, and the pathways along which poultry travels to a city like Cape Town are complex: a series of photo essays.
In a city like Cape Town, you can buy chicken on just about every street corner, whether it’s braaied chicken claws from a pavement take-away, or plastic-wrapped breasts from an upmarket superette. Chicken is one of the most popular animal proteins for South Africans. We eat about 1 725 000 tons of it every year (that includes chicken meat for our pets). It’s not clear exactly how much of this meat is locally produced and how much is imported, but we estimate that about a third of it comes from abroad.
No city is an island, surviving as a self-contained economy that meets all its own needs: the story of fish reveals the complex global and regional trade routes that feed into our cities’ food markets.
Where is local government in terms of shaping cities so that people are not just free from hunger, but properly nourished, too?
Once all the market forces that shape the city’s food system have been accounted for, and the different players have had their say, one big question remains: where is local government in terms of decision-making, planning, and crafting policies so that the people living in our cities are not just free from hunger, but properly nourished, too? This is where the big gap still lies: strong local governance.
What the evidence on the ground tells us about cities’ food gaps, and how we can plan for well-fed, well-nourished communities.
There are many ideas that try to explain how African cities feed themselves. Some of these theories may no longer hold true. In this final chapter, we look at what the evidence on the ground tells us about the food gap in cities, and gives some suggestions for how to plan for well-fed, well-nourished communities.