A Return to the Kitchen

Let us suppose that in order to be a liberated woman, you need to renounce skirts, children and home life, and instead embrace office jobs, suits and power positions.

Now let us suppose that in order to empower yourself, in whatever position you find yourself in, you take the power to choose what will liberate yourself, how you will liberate yourself and choose to do what makes you happy and not what is perceived as the 'right' position.

Meet Julia*. She is a graduate of a good Malawian boarding school and of an auto-electrical college. However, she has chosen to learn to cook good, balance, nutritious foods; home grown organic foods, and make people aware of what they eat.

About a year and a half ago, Julia and her husband did the Permaculture Design Certificate and have since moved to Nature's Gift Permaculture farm to continue learning about a sustainable way to grow food, cook food, and live. She now over-sees the Food and Nutrition team on the farm.

The farm employs a number of permanent gardeners and Monday to Friday, Julia cooks or oversees the cooking of lunch for the gardeners, the management team and the volunteers and interns that work on the farm.

The emphasis on the meals is that most, if not all, of the food eaten is grown on the farm. The lunches form part of an ongoing demonstration that people can be completely self-sufficient in feeding themselves. The centre wants to show that sustainable grown food can not only ensure food security but also nutrition security.

The permanent permaculture residents on the farm say the same thing, you can have food security but you also need to have nutrition security is you want to have a healthy country. If you only eat maize, you will become malnourished. Therefore, you have to have a country acknowledges its richness is food resources and is therefore will nourished.

According to management and other workers on the farm, Julia takes huge pride in her garden, as much pride it seems as a person might take in their first big pay cheque or their doctorate degree from a prestigious university.

She learnt to cook from her mother. But she also used her taste sense. In this way she learnt to cook food that she felt like, that seemed like a nice taste combination and that were what she liked (at the time anyway).

Julia has one son, Kevin, and he was born with malaria. But with proper medication and most importantly proper nutrition he is now the fattest, brightest, bouncy-est baby I have seen in a long time. He rarely cries, even now when he is teething.

Just goes to show the importance of balanced, healthy food!