09 July 2025
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Story Charlene Stanley
Launch of Thinking Through Food at Vrystaat Arts Festival explores South Africa’s rich food narratives.
Attend the book launch:
Date: 15 July 2025
Venue: ATKV Boeke-oase, Centenary Complex, Bloemfontein Campus
When South Africans gather around a table – whether for a family meal or a community feast – it becomes much more than a moment of nourishment. These gatherings are rich with meaning, weaving together identity, memory, and cultural expression. It is this intricate interplay between food and identity that lies at the heart of Thinking Through Food in South Africa: Identities, Embodiment and Representation, a thought-provoking new collection of writings to be launched at the Vrystaat Arts Festival on 15 July.
Co-edited by
Prof Vasu Reddy, Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Research and Internationalisation at the University of the Free State (UFS), alongside Desiree Lewis, Relebohile Moletsane, and Heather A Thuynsma, the volume represents a three-year collaborative effort. The publication brings together both emerging and established voices and explores how food can serve as a powerful lens through which to examine South Africa’s complex social, political, and cultural realities.
“This is a book that prioritises food rooted in South African soil - and our soul,” says Prof Reddy. “It centres local voices, indigenous practices, including decolonial critique, to ask probing questions about why food matters in critical and creative terms. For us, food is never just about food or eating. It is much more than that. Culinary practices and even everyday foodstuffs become sites of knowledge, embodiment, and intergenerational storytelling.” The collection is organised into three thematic sections that together highlight the multifaceted role of food in South African society.
The first section, From Table to Thought, considers how food studies can reveal insights into historical narratives, agricultural systems, and grassroots urban farming initiatives. Essays in this section range from examining the impact of social grant pay points on rural food systems to exploring the economic challenges faced by small-scale farmers in the post-apartheid era.
The second section, Food, Subjectivities, Identities, investigates how culinary practices shape both personal and collective identities. Readers will find compelling discussions on traditional wedding foods among the AmaZulu, recipes as alternative archival memory, and the negotiations of class and race around the South African dinner table. One particularly insightful chapter traces how the braai has evolved from a symbol of white leisure culture into a contested expression of national identity - highlighting how food practices can simultaneously unite and divide.
The final section, Representing and Imagining Food, turns its focus to the portrayal of food in media, literature, and popular culture, exploring how these representations contribute to broader narratives about who we are and how we eat.
A key strength of the collection lies in its interdisciplinary approach and its commitment to fostering new scholarship. Many contributors are postgraduate students whose work was supported by the
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation – underscoring the project’s investment in developing the next generation of critical food studies researchers.
“To study food is to study power,” adds Prof Reddy. “Cuisine is a cultural archive. We eat history. Eating is political. Beyond the sensory pleasures of eating, every bite invites us to think more deeply about justice, sustainability and belonging - including reflection on where our food comes from and how it travels from farm or garden to plate.”
Thinking Through Food in South Africa challenges readers to look beyond simplistic understandings of food as mere sustenance or commodity. It invites us to reflect on how our everyday encounters with food – from the choices we make at the grocery store to the conversations we share while cooking – can reveal and shape deeper truths about ourselves and the society we live in.