How do cultural perceptions and urban aspirations affect what we eat? In the second chapter of  the Food Dialogues Report, Leonie Joubert looks at Burger King's whopping success in Cape Town, how fried foods are seen as 'modern', and the role food can play in empowerment and mental health.

THE NUTRITIONAL TRANSITION: Across the developing world, the 'nutritional transition' happens as people move to cities, get sucked into the job market, and are exposed to this so-called 'Western diet' that is less diverse, lower in fibre, energy-dense and often nutritionally worthless.

People often want branded, highly processed or fast food because it's perceived to be sophisticated and modern, a perception driven by the aggressive marketing of big-name fast and processed food companies and labels. Modern, urban life often makes a 'slow food' approach to eating difficult.

Urban life steers us towards food that is quick to get hold of (no more hours of slaving over the stove), tasty (packed with sugars, fats and salts that tickle the pleasure centre in the brain) and cheap (factory production lines bring down the cost).

When Burger King opened its first South African store in Cape Town in May 2013, people queued for hours to sink their teeth into their first Whopper burger. A few months later, the financial press reported that the franchise was in fact 'rattled' by the phenomenal success, with an unexpected R20-million in total revenue in just four months, and that they needed to find new suppliers to keep up with the demand for their fast food.

Even Burger King was a little taken aback by how well the brand had done in the Mother City.

Before the big multinational had even set its advertisers loose in the South African market, the power of the brand abroad had already gained traction in Capetonians' imagination.

For many, this is what the excitement of the city is all about: busy high streets, glitzy shops, big name stores selling us phones, handbags, high-end watches, aftershave. For many, these overseas brands are sophisticated, modern and aspirational – and the big name fast food brands are at the forefront of this cultural force. How much chance does a bowl of home-grown salad greens stand against the full frontal assault of a Big Mac or a Hunger Buster Burger?

Culture determines healthy appetite

How we use food is deeply rooted in our cultural attitudes towards it. If we can understand what shapes our views on food, we can better address whether or not people choose healthier foods or not. We would be naive to think that simply giving people healthy foods will be reason enough for them to want to eat it.

Moving to the city can be like a tectonic force in terms of how it changes our perceptions of food. This is part of what's become known as the 'nutritional transition'.

A MOUTHFUL OF BUG: Most South Africans have abandoned a valuable, free and readily available source of protein: insects. 'Termites are buttery and meaty, even when they're raw,' Zayaan Khan says, laughing at the gasps from her audience. Zayaan has drawn from her work with the Surplus People Project and the Slow Food Youth Network to explore ideas around what is indigenous and what is traditional from a food perspective. Her revisiting of our pre-industrial relationship with the plants, animals, insects and herbs is a reminder of where we selected food from within the natural environment, how we shaped the foods as we selected them and used them in different ways, and how that shaped us. From goats, sheep and cattle, and raw milk products, to how we have transformed foods through preserving, smoking, fermenting, sugaring, and even treating in lime, are all a reminder of where we come from, and how we can revive the relationship with the indigenous, and the traditional.

An example to illustrate the point is the responses that a local healthcare-focused civil society organisation, Zanempilo, got from interviewing a group of women in Khayelitsha about their view of certain foods.

'People who boil food are not civilised,' one person said. 'Fried food is attractive, tasty such as Kentucky fried chicken [sic]. If your neighbour boils food, people say she is still backward because the food does not taste nor look attractive.'

Others said it was faster to fry food than boil it, and that fried meat tasted much better than boiled meat.

Another survey, done in Johannesburg by academics from the School of Public Health at the University of the Western Cape for the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), found that some people preferred fried food because it is seen as a mark of 'modern living and wealth, while food that is boiled is considered inferior and demonstrates outdated customs'.

For many, eating meat is seen as aspirational. Tony Gerrans from Compassion in World Farming says that the attitudes he has encountered in Afrikaans communities are often that hunting, braaiing and eating meat are associated with masculinity.

Abalimi's Rob Small says that in Xhosa-speaking communities, those who slaughter animals have a spiritual role.

Healthy habits seen as 'old fashioned'

BACK TO OUR ROOTS: Loubie Rusch from Making KOS wanders the traffic islands, pavements and beaches to collect plants that are indigenous, and are delicious and versatile to eat: wild garlic, dune spinach, spekboom, kei apple, wild rosemary, waterblommetjie, wild plum, veldkool, and many more. Giving these 'foraged' foods much the same treatment as the fresh produce we're so used to buying at the local grocery store, Loubie makes feasts that allow us to return to our roots.

Besides just these cultural attitudes towards food, urban life has torn us from the home kitchen and scattered us about a busy and bustling cityscape, which has disrupted traditional ways of communing over food.

The FAO study says that: 'Traditional meals and mealtimes are replaced by spontaneous often unplanned food purchases on street corners or in small kiosks. The traditional model of one family member taking responsibility for meal planning and food preparation for the household has fractured in most urban environments.

'Increasingly it is street food vendors, cafeterias at work or school and childcare facilities that provide family members with at least one and often several meals per day. Thus, attention to dietary balance and dietary quality, which was traditionally 'intuitive' at the household level, is now subject to wider cultural changes and external influence.'

If we hope to encourage people and communities to return to 'real' food, and to grow their own, we need to turn the tide on many of the attitudes that see growing vegetables as 'old fashioned' or something that 'our grandparents did.'

Empowering through food

MENTAL WELL-BEING: Dr John Parker, psychiatrist at Lentegeur Psychiatric Hospital in Mitchell's Plain, is using a food garden as a way of helping people and communities to reconnect. At the same time as helping to rehabilitate patients in the hospital, the project is giving them valuable skills, which they can take home once they leave. Since the Industrial Revolution, we have 'withdrawn from the uncertain and the ambiguous,' says John. He links a rise in mental illness in our modern world to our disconnection from the natural and the communal. Bringing people together as they grow food is a powerful way to reconnect people with the soil, with nature and with one another, he maintains. The rewards, in terms of seeing how the hospital's patients respond to seeing the fruit of their labours, are immeasurable. Recovery from mental illness is 'a multidimensional interplay between people's experience of their mental health and their circumstances – including the health system, the society they live in, where they live, employment and social support,' explains John. The food gardens here are an integral part of that.

SEED (Schools Environmental Education & Development) is a NPO operating from Mitchell's Plain, and has over a decade of experience in pioneering growing outdoor classrooms in under-resourced schools.

'Empowering people through growing their own food is one way to change attitudes about the aspirational nature of fresh and wholesome food,' says SEED's Leigh Brown. 'We need to boost green careers. People that blossom in the food freedom movement are those who get trained up and are able to find work in the field.'

'People join our programmes to save money and for health reasons,' she goes on. 'Once they are engaged we connect them to the global conversation about food sovereignty – this grows the aspirational nature of fresh green food. Home food gardens boost local adaption to climate change and can give youth with no prospects the potential to join the green economy.'

SEED is using the Rocklands Urban Abundance Centre as a demonstration site for innovative low-carbon possibilities, with integrated education for schools, youth and people from the neighbourhood. They are growing community enterprises for food production and jobs.

Meanwhile Deni Archer's pursuit of 'Food with a Story' captures tales of food that is 'interesting, ethical and artisanal'.