Many people think Margaret Roberts is a brand. That she is, but she’s also an individual who does exactly what she tells everyone else to do in the way of sustainability, living from the earth and keeping yourself healthy.
When I visit her at her suburban home in Pretoria, where she lives when she’s not on her farm in the De Wildt-Hartbeespoort area, she enquires what kind of tea I would like.
She has to make the choice – after all, she will know which one to pick. Scented geranium or lemon verbena? Scented geranium, because it’s less familiar. We went into the garden to pick it, I was given a few cuttings to grow my own, and the most refreshing tea was made on the spot.
That’s the thing about Roberts, she walks the walk. Her latest book Healing Foods is yet more testimony to that. It’s going to become the go-to encyclopedia for anyone who wants to know anything about plant food.
The world has finally caught up with Roberts, one of the few organic disciples decades ago when it wasn’t yet fashionable – and she’s ready for it. “I was raised by a generation who believed that we should make it better for others,” she says.
She has passed that on and refers to her daughter as someone whose love for everything and anything natural was bred into her.
Among other things, she’s the cook at the restaurant-tea garden at Roberts’s Herbal Centre, where all that is served is produced in the garden. Mother and daughter’s knowledge is being passed on to the grandchildren, who are being raised in the Roberts ethos.
But living in their space, it would be difficult not to adopt this amaz-ing lifestyle.
“It’s how I eat and think,” says Roberts, who not only uses herbs to flavour her food, but makes them a priority in all facets of her life.
It’s something that was passed on from Roberts’ grandmother to her mother.
The trick, of course, is that all of it can be grown at home – even in small suburban gardens, says Roberts, and if you wander through her own pride and joy, she sends you home not only with cuttings but also with fresh fruit, such as figs and grapes, that is in season.
Her first book was published in the early 1980s and she hasn’t stopped writing since.
From her products to telling you how to go about adopting the lifestyle and showing by example through the Herbal Centre, for Roberts it’s all about living and leading the way.
Through the years, she has not stopped exploring and gaining knowledge and as soon as she has enough insight, she passes it on, in a book and through her products.
As with so much of what she does, she turns to the source. She doesn’t use the internet for research. Specifically with plants and herbs, it’s about going back in time and investigating the lives of different plants and how they were used in past centuries.
Technology and fast lives have changed our focus and, more and more, people are noticing the effects of a hectic lifestyle on their well-being.
Naturally, food is the first place to go when looking for alternative options.
There’s an ongoing joyfulness, Roberts says, about dealing in good health. When you hear her talk, the enthusiasm and energy she brings to the topic are inspiring.
Because she has not stopped learning, there’s hardly an aspect she can’t comment on when it comes to health and what we eat.
“Foods and ailments are usually connected,” she says. That’s something we all know, but often choose to ignore.
Roberts’s latest book took five years to write. That may sound like an extended period, but once you begin digesting everything she covers in it, it does not seem such a long time.
She insists that when it comes to health, it’s not difficult to turn most problems around.
“Exam stress, for example,” she says, “is so easy to combat.”
She reels off the tissue salts – another of her fields of expertise – that you need to take. She says she even has a cure for someone who is “befoeterd, beneuk and/or bedonnerd (cantankerous, bad-tempered and/or fed-up)”!
She advocates that people play around with what they eat and note the results. “If you take less of the bad things, the improvement in your health is huge,” she says.
That is what this book sets out to do. It lists the ailments and you can check whether you have them or, if you do, how to treat them with food.
It’s a life-changer, because not only will you find ways to banish some of your ailments, but it could have an impact on your lifestyle, the way your garden grows and how you discover the glory of fruits and vegetables you might not have appreciated before.
She dedicates the book to her youngest daughter, Sandra, who is the one who answered her mother’s call as Roberts did before her.
“Many of the recipes in the pages are hers,” Roberts says. “She cooks with her daughter the way I cooked with her. Her kitchen smells of cakes and jams, pies and soups the way my mother’s and my farm kitchen did.”
This is the Roberts ethos she hopes to pass on down the genera-tions. It’s not a difficult ask with this extraordinary book.
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Healing Foods
By Margaret Roberts
(Briza, R275)
This is one of those books where price shouldn’t be an obstacle. Ask friends to club together when they need to buy a gift because it will become part of your daily life.
What Roberts has done is to make it easy for readers to decipher the way they should eat. Or how foods can, in fact, aid healing. Yes, it would be ideal if we could all follow the Roberts dictum daily, but few can achieve that. At least we can come closer to our goals and reap the benefits of a healthier lifestyle.
She has packed every page with as much information as possible, and done this in a variety of ways.
There’s a list of healing plants in alphabetical order on the inside flaps of the book cover. These lead you to individual plants such as, for example, an onion. First, she describes the onion in all its glorious detail, where it originated and how it developed during the ages. Then she takes you through the growing process and all its uses. A bonus is the health note as well as a recipe on the side.
Each one is treated differently, depending on the information available or what the author wanted to put across.
When she has run through all the plants, she presents the reader with a list of ailments that are further discussed in great detail. Take a common one, such as diabetes.
First, she gives a general description of what type 1 and type 2 diabetes are. She advises sufferers to speak to their doctor and then follows with the danger foods which, of course, start with anything containing sugar.
This is followed by a discussion of the superfoods like wholewheat cereals as well as brown rice and wild rice, oats… it goes on and on.
The book starts with a list of healing foods, a description of what danger and what super foods are, supplements, pharmacologi-cal activity in common foods and then a few chapters on the different ways of using food to cure specific ailments.
She takes specific ingredients like salt, bread, yoghurt or water and has an in-depth look at what their strengths and weaknesses are. What she has done is cross off all the possible health hazards and made it as easy as possible for the reader to follow her path to a much-improved lifestyle.
If you’re a Roberts novice, start with this one. Followers won’t have to be pushed. How can you not heed her advice? This is her life’s work and she knows best.