Chef Pinky Maruping and Chef Mokgadi Itsweng, in collaboration with Unilever Food Solutions, hosted an exclusive webinar on Wednesday, 21 September, to discuss South Africa’s most iconic Heritage Day dishes and how to promote more sustainable eating for Heritage Day 2022. 

With Heritage Day coming up, Chef Pinky saw the perfect opportunity to promote sustainability and biodiversity in ways that incorporate “more than just braai” through some of South Africa’s most iconic dishes and desserts and “speak about other dishes that people love to eat during Heritage Day.” 

“In South Africa, we eat two or three types of crops, chicken and beef, there might be food shortages in the years to come,” says Pinky. 

In the Webinar, hosted by Unilever, Chef Mokgadi Itsweng, author of “Veggie-Licious” and a sustainability advocate, echoes this sentiment, speaking of her trip to Tanzania and the impact climate change has had on the people there, and how the region’s people still cling on to maize, even though it is not a sustainable crop. 

“With climate change, it is not sustainable to grow maize,” she says. She heavily promotes the use of sorghum as a more sustainable replacement for maize, saying that it has a similar nutritional value, is high in protein, and is drought resistant. 

When looking at iconic South African dishes, the two chefs emphasised the idea of replacing traditional ingredients with more sustainable ones this Heritage Day. For example, using sustainable plant-based milk when baking a milk tart or using ground sorghum as pap instead of the traditional maize pap when having a braai. 

Chef Mokgadi also encouraged chefs to get creative in the kitchen when using sustainable ingredients and to “not be afraid of your ingredients”.