Reclaiming Ghanaian Food Identity, with Chef Abiro Wisdom

You know, I was telling someone in another interview that way before food for me was just putting ingredients together, you know, making it look beautiful, making it taste better.

And I mean, hopefully it'd be nutritious, like hopefully.

And then I started getting into spaces where they were talking about world hunger, climate change, sustainability, nutritional problems.

And then I got into some meetings where I was listening to policymakers talk about food and agriculture.

and listen to some food historians and then I'm seeing that, oh, food is actually bigger than whatever I thought it was.

Food is, you know, food is culture, food is politics, food is economics, food is history, food is spirituality.

And so that sort of like gave me that sense of the fact that this thing is way bigger than what we think it is, you know? And that has now led me to, you know, approach food, even menu creation from that perspective to say that, okay, if we are making this decision of eating beans, how does that contribute to the economy? How does that shape policymaking? How does that affect history? How connected is that particular ingredient to spirituality and culture? And so looking at food from that perspective, we've realized that making those little efforts in changing the menu, recommending things, innovating, it goes a long way to shape lives of people because it's going to directly affect the economy.

You know, because

there are a lot of things that we import into the system.

Like I always give this example of vanilla and carcassé.

I say, looking at the statistics, everyone celebrates birthday parties every single day.

And now every birthday don't go without a cake.

And if the most consumed flavor is vanilla, There's an approximation that Ghana imports about $1 million worth of vanilla flavorings into the country every single year.

And my kitchen and I do tests.

And then we realized that Prakase, which is a very indigenous spice that people just throw into palm nut soup and some other soups and some herbal medicines could then be like an excellent substitute for desserts and cakes and, you know, smoothies and ice creams and stuff like that.

That is, if we take that little step of substituting Prakase for vanilla, that is literally saving the economy $1 million worth of importation.

And this $1 million is going to go into the pockets of like the women that are selling this Prakase in the market, the farmer that is producing this in the market, in their farms, you know, land owners.

organic fertilizer produces because these indigenous ingredients don't thrive in organic fertilized lands.

They rather thrive in organic lands.

And so, you know, this is like a whole chain that can be affected by just making one simple decision.

And I mean, some of these crops and foods have sustained communities for generations.

Then all of a sudden they're substituted or they're not being appreciated.

And so, you know, as you start to put them in that back at the center of our plates and help people to see them and create that demand, what do you hope starts to happen?

One of the things that I look forward to impacting people with is helping people reclaim their identity.

Because of a lot of things that have happened in our years for the past century, we've realized that a lot of people have lost the touch of who they are.