Ancestral Foods, Cultural Heritage, and Old ways of Living
In my mother’s village, Navorongo, the first meal a visitor is greeted with is ground millet mixed with water in a calabash. It’s called zum, pronounced as, zoam.
Millet is an important rural food, contributing not only to the livelihood of communities but also to how they have been able to financially sustain their families for a very long time. My mother tells me that my grandfather would never leave home without a millet drink in the morning. And when cornmeal became popular, and much more affordable, he refused to drink corn porridges. My grandfather said cornmeal left him hungry, while millet would nourish his stomach much longer.
Photography: Orely Bello
The foods people eat that is indigenous to where they live is crucial to their health and survival as a people. They know their native foods, and their native foods know them. It’s a conversation of lineage. Not only has the foods fed and preserved them, it did the same for generations before.
When I think of ancestral foods, foods that belong to ones ancestral lineage, foods that ones ancestors would recognize on a dining table; I think of how native African foods have always been largely plant-based, comprising of legumes, tropical fruits, root tubers, vegetables, small grains, flowers, and tree barks.
I define ancestral foods as, local, organic, seasonal, and environmentally sustainable foods, indigenous to a particular geographic region that locals have consumed for thousands of years.
One of my uncles in Bolga, a teacher at a polytechnic, who is also a farmer, will not leave home without having his “zum” (millet drink).
When we talk about the future of food, scarcity of water, shortage of growing land, famine, hunger, and many of the challenges we face in our current food system, I think more now than ever the need to grow, eat, and preserve ancestral foods as a response to the current climate and food crisis we face.
Ancestral foods reconnect us to old ways of living, to the knowledge of foods that are drought resistant, to foods that require minimal inputs yet are excellent nutritional sources, to an ecological heritage critical to the sustainability of millions of people around the world. Most importantly for me, ancestral foods represents a cultural heritage, an important family tradition, a nutritional secret, and connects me to an old way of living that is dire to my survival.
