Professor Rina Swart: Food labelling a potent weapon in the fight to improve public health

Published March 28, 2024, by Georgina Crouth/Daily Maverick

“First published in the Daily Maverick 168 weekly newspaper.

Stock farmers in the Northern Cape are renowned meat lovers, but in Professor Rina Swart’s family, “farm fresh” meant that fruit and vegetables were purchased from Oom Benna, a trader who stopped by every two weeks or once a month.

Swart’s childhood – spent on a sheep farm redolent of dust, dog days and a lingering funk in the air of fatty lanolin wafting from wool sheds, 20km south of the Verneukpan salt pan (“trick pan” in Afrikaans) – meant that quick trips to the supermarket were never on the cards.

Town was 100km away, along an arduous, juddering dirt road. So the Swarts produced what they could, with a small garden where only quinces and figs would survive the farm’s hard water; shopped carefully and made do with what they had.

The simple lifestyle, relentless summer heat, averaging 40°C in the shade, together with her mother’s insistence on salads and fresh fruit cemented an approach to a healthy diet that inspired Swart to study nutrition.

She is a dietician and the internationally celebrated programme leader for nutrition at the University of the Western Cape’s Centre for Excellence in Food Security.

Swart has dedicated her career to improving public health.”

Read the original article here.