Pretoria - Renata Coetzee will be remembered as a South African who through her lifetime of research and books has built both national and international awareness of, and also respect, for the culinary heritage of various cultural groups.
Her latest titled, Food Culture Of The First Humans On Planet Earth – A Feast From Nature, is beautifully produced.
Renata’s major contribution has been scientific. Yet she has always tried to involve every person with stimulating and visually pleasing documentation of various aspects of our cuisine.
One of her most popular books titled, South African Culinary Tradition (Spys en Drank), is about the food culture in the Cape between 1652 and 1800, featuring the influences of the Malay slaves and the French, Dutch and German settlers.
Funa – Food from Africa, is about the food and food culture of the different African ethnic groups and, Cost-conscious Creative Catering, and recently, Kukumakranka – Khoi-Khoin-Culture, Customs and Creative Cooking, which was a translation of the 2009 Afrikaans version about cooking in the past.
The current book, however, is based on research of 15 years with the aim of preserving the culinary heritage of the earliest humans on Earth and their descendants.
What did those earliest inhabitants on our planet eat? A Stellenbosch resident, Renata shares far more than simply ethnic foods – and always has.
When for example she was catering for Anglo American gold mines, she provided 250 000 meals a day for five years that agreed with the cultural preferences.
This is someone who understands that you can only get people to be healthy if you talk in a language they understand.
How then could she not go back to the past of human beings, especially with the Khoi and San people presenting the oldest DNA in the world.
“They’re on my doorstep,” she says. “We are the origin of the world.”
She believes this is the way to understand how our modern palates developed.
Before the meat we see as a staple today, people were much more into insects because of the high levels of protein: “Ant heaps were seen as valuable food sources,” she explains.
All these patterns developed as the brain progressed.
Fish on our coastlines were not initially caught with fishing lines. That is how shellfish became so important. It was a practical thing.
She was also interested in when the Khoi and the San nations split and how their food choices developed differently.
Some held on to the traditional habits, but others started looking for new and perhaps better ways determined by the environment.
The San became hunter gatherers and the Khoi were more interested in small animals as well as starting to look much more intently at the veld and the plants that could be incorporated in their diets.
“How they lived played a large part in their eating habits,” she notes.
That is probably still true today when we think about it.
She explains that she was fortunate to make use of the research, knowledge, skills and support of many experts and friends to add to the richness of this book.
“Because the book covers areas far beyond my field of human nutrition and food culture, I gained valuable information and insight from people in various disciplines.”
She is also hugely grateful to the photographers as well as for the generous access to Africana illustrations at the Stellenbosch University library. The evidence is all in the book and lavishly illustrated.
For the past five years, this busy octogenarian also closely collaborated with Solms-Delta where she has helped establish a unique fynbos garden in which they protect and propagate the rare and highly nutritious plants from early culinary history.
She has also worked with their chef, Shaun Schoeman, to develop dishes using these ingredients for Fyndraai Restaurant. They are worth visiting when next you are in the Stellenbosch area.
For Renata, it is all about collective memories, how people lived and the role food played in their lives.
She believes we should be the custodians of ancient cuisine and that is why she has been so obsessed with research and living examples of the plants that played such a huge role in the past and which she has so passionately written about.
This isn’t a book about recipes though, she explains. It’s about the ingredients, the diet, what and how it was found and how it was applied.
Renata talks about leaves and flowers and stems, berries and apples, wild fruit and how nutritional value was such an important determining factor.
She discovered the different cycles, the illnesses that developed because people would be eating only wheat which would then influence future generations and their eating patterns.
She vehemently promotes veld food as it is balanced and very healthy.
Arguably, that is why the Khoi people are seen as survivors in what seem such harsh environmental circumstances.
It’s amazing if we think of all the vitamins we swallow today simply to keep our bodies in balance – or so we hope – but these early humans had to make do to find the nutritional goodness their bodies needed to stay alive.
The foods available, says this researcher, contained all the necessary nutrients for body and brain development. Insects, rodents, reptiles, mammals, birds, fish and shellfish provided proteins, fats and minerals with shellfish especially an excellent source of fats and oil rich in Omega 3.
“In later years, the herds and flocks of the Khoi and their milk made proteins, fats and various minerals and some vitamins available. The main source of vitamins and carbohydrates was derived from the veld plants, especially the underground geophytes,” she explains.
For those who have a specific cuisine curiosity, this book is something quite extraordinary and so it should be.
This has truly become Renata Coetzee’s life work. She spent the past 15 years researching this specific book, she says, but that’s just part of the story.
This has always been where her food interest has been concentrated.
She couldn’t have achieved this if she didn’t have her nose following indigenous cultures from ancient times.
“It is easy to overlook the importance of this information,” writes Mark Solms in the foreword.
“The ancestors in question included the first people to develop the very idea of a culinary tradition, of a food culture as opposed to mere food.
The transition from foraging, via hunting, gathering, to herding and cultivating, coincided with the transition from the animal to our human condition.”
He concludes: “What could be more important than that?”
Pretoria News
* The book can be ordered from [email protected], (028 316 4852, 082 750 7274) at R490 – an incredible price for something this extraordinary. It is the first book of its kind in South Africa, and evidently in the world, to be printed on environmentally friendly “stone paper” made from crushed stone or construction waste and recycled plastics.