1. Home
2. News
3. CoE Articles

South Africa is a land of contrasts, a place of both feast and famine.

In December – as many South Africans prepared themselves for bounty of the festive season – four women shared sometimes emotionally charged accounts of their daily struggles to provide even modest meals in their homes. Their stories were shared during the Local Food Governance Community of Practice (CoP), held at the University of the Western Cape (UWC).

While they were at the meeting itself, the women’s stories took the form of ‘digital stories‘ created with the Sustainable Livelihoods Foundation.

In these digital stories, featuring hand-drawn illustrations, the women narrated the specifics of their food environments. They talked of the choices they have to make between taking a job or staying at home to take care of their children. Of sending their children away into the care of others so they could work and provide some support to those children. Of stretching, beyond reason, the small social grants awarded by the state. Of leaving the relative-plenty of their rural homes to adapt to the contrasting diets of friends and new family in the urban centres.

The stories fit in easily with the aims of the CoP – supported by the National Centre of Excellence in Food Security (CoE-FS) – which had always imagined itself as more than just a talk shop for academics. As such, the CoP had always wanted to draw on the insights of others – from government representatives to small-scale farmers – to understand the complexities of the urban food system.

“These are not abstract issues; these are very real issues, as these stories have shown,” said Dr Camilla Adelle, a founding member of the CoP and a senior research fellow with the Centre for the Study of Governance Innovation at the University of Pretoria.

To offer a different take on those lived experiences, Dr Jane Battersby and Dr Gareth Haysom of the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town had ahead of the screening of the films painted a broad picture of the food environment in South Africa. Battersby pointed out how high levels of food insecurity and childhood undernutrition occur, almost paradoxically, alongside soaring levels of obesity in the country, the result of a complex interplay between contributing systems. She spoke particularly of the influence and power of ‘Big Food’, the “explosion of supermarkets”, and how – even in South Africa’s financially constrained communities – big retailers dictate how people spend their money on food, and on what kind of food.

In turn, Professor Rina Swart of UWC’s School of Public Health (SoPH) complemented that presentation as she shared some of the findings of the SoPH’s Researching the Obesogenic Food Environment (ROFE) study. ROFE aims to understand the changing nature of food marketed in poor communities in South Africa and Ghana. The research has shown how the increase in consumption of ultra-processed food has gone hand in hand with a rise of obesity and overweight in South Africa.

But even if the picture appears bleak, all is not lost. Policy and other strategies can yet address some of these concerns, Battersby noted in a moment of optimism. “I think we’re in a situation where we have a dire set of challenges in the food environment, but I think we’re also in a moment where there are potential opportunities for leverage,” she said.

This blend of knowledges – the lived and the learned – on show at the meeting exemplifies the aspirations of the Community of Practice, added Adelle. “So what we attempted to do here today was marry the data rich academic perspective on why people make the choices that they do about food, with the personal accounts of the same thing but from a lived experience,” she said.