The story of African cuisine's rise to prominence is one of cultural reclamation, culinary innovation, and the breaking down of long-held stereotypes. This journey, spearheaded by talented chefs and food enthusiasts, particularly women, has transformed the perception of African food from a source of shame to a celebrated culinary experience.
A vibrant selection of West African dishes.
Selassie Atadika and the New African Cuisine
Selassie Atadika, born in Ghana and raised in Westchester County, New York, embodies this culinary revolution. After more than a decade of humanitarian work with the United Nations, eating her way through Liberia, South Sudan, Kenya and beyond as she did, she embarked on a culinary career.
In 2014, Atadika brought her ‘New African Cuisine’ approach to Ghana with Midunu, a food enterprise that encompasses white-linen nomadic events, private dining and, latterly, chocolate making.
Selassie’s cuisine has been featured at a State Dinner for the Danish Embassy in Ghana and at the James Beard Foundation in New York City.
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From Humanitarian Work to Culinary Art
Atadika spent most of her career at the UN working on preparedness, planning and response to human-made and natural disasters.
Particularly when you start looking at the resilience of communities, food and agriculture has been central to human civilization and will always be.
During one of her down moments while working with UNICEF in South Sudan, a friend invited her to what he said was the best kebab place in town, so she went to check it out.
Within the first two bites of the grilled beef with a squeeze of fresh lime, she was transported back to Ghana.
With a little translation help from her friend, she found that the chef/owner was a Fulani, [part of] a nomadic tribe who move through large tracks of Africa.
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Due to the war in Darfur, he and some of his group had decided to settle in the village we were in-Wau, South Sudan.
What she was eating is often attributed to the Hausa people and is known as agashe in Sudan, suya in Nigeria and chichinga in Ghana.
She eventually decided to go to the Culinary Institute of America for a formal culinary foundation to accompany the amazing flavors and experiences she had tasted in her travels.
While there, she also noticed the absence of teachings on African cuisine. It added more fuel to her fire and pushed her to start to actively fill this gap.
My dining experiences for Midunu are a celebration of food’s origins, the paths it travels on the way to our tables and the people it brings together through the journey.
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Addressing Nutritional Challenges
Atadika's decision to leave the UN was influenced by her work around the nutritional crisis.
In response to severe acute malnutrition, the medical treatment is a therapeutic product which is essentially fortified peanut butter made in Europe.
We were saving the lives of children with a product derived from a raw ingredient found all around the regions affected by the nutritional crisis.
But we had to import it into the region after it had been [exported to and] transformed in Europe.
She realized during that time that a lot of the solutions to some of the nutritional and agricultural challenges in the continent were right in front of us, and there needed to be a deeper look into the logistics, infrastructure, social behavior and beliefs that needed to be reviewed.
We can’t run away from this harder work.
Preserving Cultural Integrity Through Food
The parallels between her UN work and her culinary endeavors are anchored in the preservation of the integrity of culture.
When she worked at the UN, her underlying responsibility was in rebuilding systems and structures by working to remove bottlenecks and challenges in these systems.
Working with foodways is similar in that she start with the geography and natural biomes to better understand what grows and what we should be eating, look at traditional recipes and techniques, and look for the disruptions to see how they can be regulated through eating and cooking choices.
When she moved back to Ghana, she became obsessed with millet.
Being one of the drought-tolerant crops found in Ghana, she knew it had to become a central part of both rural and urban diets in the face of climate change.
The solution to getting more people to consume products like millet in Ghana requires a concerted supply and demand approach.
Growers need to be incentivised to improve their agro-processing methods while knowing that there is a market willing to pay a bit more for a higher quality product.
Consumers need to see millet as a “sexy” alternative to imported rice by having hotels and restaurants featuring new recipes with this crop.
In turn, the availability of new and fresh recipes using millet would help to get consumers to start trying to use the crop at home.
The ability to purchase cleaned millet in shops and stores in addition to the local markets would also enable more people to access the crop.
When in the kitchen, part of her work is to pull back the pieces of people’s perceptions of, connections with, and understanding of food and keep them central.
Moving from a pop-up to more of a restaurant model required putting in systems and structure based on her cooking philosophy and working style.
She decided to keep the scale of her dinners and events smaller to allow for more attention to detail in our food.
Since much of the existing hospitality industry here is not tied to the principles of local [food], she has had to spend more time building relationships with local farmers and suppliers to explain what she’s looking for while listening and understanding what the availability and their challenges are.
The intimacy of Midunu allows us to opt in to unique and exceptional local ingredients in the season and quantities when they are available, while the larger hospitality concepts have to focus on repeatability and consistency.
Because our menus are dynamic and tell stories about our foodways past, present and future, she also spend a lot of time with my clients.
She try to share some of the “method to my madness” with them.
It is hard to find this dish in the mainstream due to the stigma attached to that lean season, which it was associated with, but the nutritional value of the bean leaves saved many children from malnutrition, and she believe it deserves a place in our culinary repertoire for the future.
It’s been a rewarding experience not only because it helps people enjoy the food on their plate for the evening, but because it also asks diners to rethink their food choices when they are not specifically at our table.
She've also been pleasantly surprised at the scale at which her message has traveled to Ghanaians abroad and adventurous diners internationally with invitations to speak about her philosophy and cook her cuisine at conferences, forums and universities in North America, Europe and Africa.
It’s exciting to get requests for our chocolates from all over the world as well as visits from travelers to Ghana who want to partake in the Midunu experience.
She believe storytelling is a lot of what it takes to show people the value of these ingredients and traditional recipes.
Once people start to understand where the ingredients come from, what it takes to grow, harvest or produce them, they become intrigued.
After that, her only job is to make the food delicious!
She definitely put energy into the presentation of her dishes, but that can only get you so far.
Nobody can deny delectable and craveable food.
It’s not only convincing those who are not familiar with the cuisine or ingredients.
She often find some resistance among my fellow Ghanaians because they feel it’s “local” food and something they eat at home and not worth going out for.
My solution to that is simple: She select and create dishes which they wouldn’t be able to make at home due to lack of time, knowledge, equipment or technique.
In Ghana, we have a set of Adinkra symbols which represent concepts.
