184: How Ghanaian Plant-Based Cooking Defies Western Categorization

So I want to start by exploring what your childhood kitchen was looking like because you paint this really vivid depiction in the cookbook.

Can you talk a bit about the role that food played for your family as you grew up?

Yeah, food was synonymous with a lot of our big and even small memories, whether it is a big Christmas experience or just the nighttime meal and all the good conversations.

So much of that evolved around food, and it happened in our kitchen.

So the kitchen was the focal point of our family life and home.

My parents opened up their home to not just their immediate siblings, so my mom, my uncles, my, one of my uncles lived with us full time.

My other uncle would come in and out.

My parents, whenever they employed people to help around the house, they would be coming to the home, my parents' friends.

So it was really hallmark of our lives, and if everything is happening in the kitchen, there's food going to be cooked.

Mm.

So that is what I wanted to capture in the book in terms of food as for my childhood just was not about sustenance.

There was just so much happening around it that it just meant a lot more.

Yeah, I love that, and you make a statement right at the beginning about that, and I think particularly in this current Western context of food really being, you know, this optimized thing or this thing where it's fuel-based only, it's really refreshing to see that message and, and look at how many different forms that can take too.

Yeah, I-- in some ways it's a bit jarring hearing how people talk about food now.

I think that there's two separate avenues.

There's obviously a lot of people who love food, who are just engrossed by it, and it's such a important extension of who they are.

But in another way, just like the productivity bug that everyone is in, everyone-

Mm-hmm

... wants to optimize food as the fuel when they talk about fueling your thing.

You know, high protein, high fiber.

Yes, they're all great for you, but it's so interesting how then food is stripped of all of these unique and important essence.

So it's so interesting being, especially in North America and being in this time and hearing about food, and I want to just bring it back to like some of the fundamental foundations of food, not just about fueling yourself, but what food can carry for a lot of people.

Yeah, I love that.

Can you talk about that in terms of, you know, was food a tether for you? Because I know you traveled and moved around to a lot of different countries, so can you speak to how your relationship with food may be tethered through those experiences?

Yeah.