Eating Local

Our food journey at Kufunda has been a great learning experience in sustainability, local foods and eating simply. We have had to get used to a new way of buying food, finding and keeping foods.  By Jacqueline 

We live about 25km away on a rough “road” from the type of grocery shops we are accustomed to, and 6km from the nearest market and basic goods shops. The so-called road is rocky and badly rutted in parts, and after rain, parts of the road becomes gullies. So its not an easy pop over to the shops, like we have in Cape Town! Luckily we are living on a farm and in a farming community so there is a lot of food being grown all around us. It has just been a matter of connecting to the right people to access this abundance. Our children have enjoyed being part of discovering new foods and part of preparing it. Azara has contributed to this story so her voice is peppered into this post. Here is a list of some of our local food endeavours:

We have joined the vegetable basket system that has been piloted at Kufunda Village. We get a large basket of vegetables grown in gardens using the biodynamic anthroposophical method. Most vegetables in our basket - carrots, spinach, brinjals, green beans - come from the garden we walk past everyday where the Kufunda farming team works. Other local farmers supplement this with their cabbages, fresh white maize (chibage), butternuts, chillies, garlic, and herbs. So weekly we get a big basket of nutritious delicious vegetables, with no packaging, that is usually picked on the morning we get it. It costs us $8.

Look how delicious this weekly basket of veggies look!

In the week we arrived our neighbour, Christina told us we could buy dry maize from her harvest from last year, and take it to the local mill to get ground into maize meal (wufu), which is the staple food around here. We bought 10kg and now 3 months later, we still have enough maize meal to make maize meal (sadza) and peanut butter maize porridge for breakfast. 

Grinding our sack of maize at the mill 

There is a small herd of cows on the farm, which get milked daily by Alec, the cowherd, and we have been buying fresh cow milk (still warm in the morning!) for $1 a litre once or twice a week. These cows roam the grasslands and Miombo forests surrounding the farm, so we know they are eating a variety of delicious grasses.  

Azara: “I went fruit picking in the forest with my school friends Chipo and Chiedza. We picked some wild grapes, which makes the inside of your mouth itchy! And they are not that nice. Then we picked some brown fruits that are sweet - I can’t explain them. But Chipo my friend knows how to find them and can see the tree from far away. 

We also found little orange fruits with lots of brown seeds inside  - the plant is on the ground - its like a small grass with little fruits on. They taste sweet but with so many seeds they are quite hard to eat.”

The Kufunda team grew chia over the last two years, so there are many kilos stored here, which means we are able to buy direct from the farm for our chia seed supply, which we use in breakfast and desserts. 

In the rainy season from December to February, wild mushrooms grow everywhere in the forest, so through our local village friends, we learned how to pick at least 3 different varieties, Nzeve (ear mushrooms), Nedzi and Chihumbiro, but there are apparently about 20 edible varieties that grow at Kufunda. Stephen writes more about this in a blog post on Mushrooms & Money.

On one of my adventurous bike rides with Trymore Samkange, one of the biodynamic farmers from Kufunda, we visited Mrs Chinotongamira, a farmer living about 4km away. She is growing a large variety of crops, and her groundnuts were ready for harvesting when we visited. I have never really seen ground nuts growing, and the opportunity to get ‘fresh’ peanuts felt like a novelty. On arrival, we were met with friendly and welcoming faces, many of whom were pulling out the low growing plants from the ground and harvesting the groundnuts, which grow on the roots of the plant. I discovered that these men and women were piece-meal workers who were taking part of their payment for a days work in nuts. We set out to do the same, to harvest our own fresh nuts - at $2 for a 5kg bucket. Fresh raw nuts are actually delicious, straight out the ground! With the rest we boiled them in salt water, and then placed them in the solar drier for a few days to create dried salted nuts. It was a great learning experience to make our own snacks.

Mrs Chinotongamira with her fresh groundnuts

Azara: “My favourite food in Zimbabwe is maputi and the fresh maize, because it is not sweetcorn and I really like the flavour. Maputi is popped white maize and we eat to for school snacks - it’s like popcorn. The food I have never had before is maheu. I don’t really know to explain it. It’s like a drink that is fermented, I think? Ah yes, its fermented maize and sorghum and its yummy. Our neighbour has chickens. She has like 40 but has eaten half of them now. I tried eating the chicken but I don’t really like it because I don’t want to eat them after I’ve seen them get killed.”

Summer is also mango and avocado season, so when we learnt about the mango trees that our friend’s uncle had at his farm, we asked if we could buy a few kilos. So one evening around 7pm, Trymore returned from visiting his uncle with at least 10kg of small yellow mangoes in his backpack. Sweet abundance for a few dollars! Half of them were turned into a mango and peach chutney we produced, which we still have. Avocados have just kind of landed in our lap. A friend from the village knows a bicycle repair man who has an avo tree. So whenever he visits ‘MaiBike’ (as he is known) he gets some large sweet avocado pears. We recently visited MaiBike for a bike repair, and paid a round sum for the puncture repair and a bag of Avos. 

This is a traditional cucumber - 'Gaka' complete with spiny outside and sweet seedy inside

The local guard Brian grows cucumbers (magaka), which he sells to us; a lady recently passed through the village selling fresh round nuts, which we bought as we’d never tasted them before; and an old man down the road living and farming on his own, sold us a sack of sweet potatoes as he heard I liked them.  Azara: “Round nuts also yummy - they are similar to peanuts, but a bit more squishy if you boil them in salt”

I have learnt a lot about small-scale farming through all these interactions, discovered a whole new world with biodynamic farming methods practised at Kufunda, and have been capturing as much as I can on film for our documentary series. I’ve also learnt that farming is no easy task, especially when you are dealing with decreased rainfall or pests, or flash floods. But I have also learned that Zimbabweans have a deep and close connection with the earth, and most people know how to grow food, even the city folk. 

Homemade rusks by Stephen 

Sourdough breads still coming out our oven!

Roasted chestnuts harvested in the eastern highlands!

Azara and friends make their own mushroom meal over a fire