THE incident recounted by the late Ivan Munhamu Murambiwa in our lead story  is more than a passing embarrassment, it is a metaphor for what we lost through colonial disruption and what we are slowly reclaiming: culinary self-determination.

In 2013, a foreign delegate attending the UNWTO General Assembly in Victoria Falls was puzzled to find no distinct Zimbabwean cuisine on offer. It was a moment that exposed how disconnected we had become from our food identity. Fast forward to today, and we find ourselves in the midst of a renaissance, one led by none other than the First Lady of the Republic of Zimbabwe, Amai Auxillia Mnangagwa.

What Amai is doing through her Traditional Cookout Programme is more than mere cultural preservation. It is a revolutionary act, a national response to a historical disruption that replaced indigenous foods with foreign imports and taught us to celebrate our own with shame. The Traditional Cookout movement, which has now culminated in international recognition, including her starring role at the UN World Forum on Gastronomy Tourism, represents a deliberate march back to authenticity and health.

This is not a partisan agenda. It is a nation-building one.

The First Lady’s grassroots campaigns, encouraging chiefs’ wives and rural women to grow, cook and share indigenous crops, serve multiple purposes. They are health interventions in an era of rising lifestyle diseases; they are economic empowerment tools for marginalised communities; they are cultural touchstones in a world rushing toward homogenisation. But perhaps, most importantly, they are declarations that Zimbabweans can feed themselves, on their own terms.

In this context, the story of how colonial policies, aided by ‘madhumeni’, replaced nutrient-rich traditional crops with maize monocultures is instructive. It reminds us that food is not only about sustenance but also about sovereignty. When we gave up our millets, legumes, and wild vegetables in favour of maize and sugar, we unknowingly surrendered parts of our independence. We started viewing mutsine, munyevhe, derere, mhunga and zviyo as weeds rather than blessings.

Amai’s work directly challenges this mindset.

The aim is not just to promote ‘traditional’ foods, as if frozen in the past. The call is to redefine them as national foods, dynamic, evolving, and central to Zimbabwe’s culinary identity. Restaurants, hotels, and homes must serve sadza rezviyo with nyevhe and dried matemba with pride. That, too, is Zimbabwe at its best, not just the mighty Victoria Falls or Big Five wildlife, but the smell of mufushwa nedovi simmering in a clay pot.

Indeed, the ‘front desk’ of any nation is its culture, its food, its people. We must ask ourselves, what impression do we leave when our culinary front is borrowed and bleached?

Indeed, the possibility now exists to take this culinary revolution into formal education. Just as agriculture is taught in schools, why not culinary heritage? Let our children know how to prepare mhunga porridge not as a last resort, but as a deliberate, nutritious choice. Let culinary clubs emerge not just in tourism colleges, but in primary schools. Let our national curriculum nourish the belly and the soul.

Indeed, food is not just fuel. It is memory, medicine, identity, and future. And as we battle for economic stability and cultural clarity, nothing could be more powerful than reclaiming what grows naturally in our soil and celebrating the hands that prepare it.

As we look to the future, may we do so with full plates, filled not with borrowed tastes but with the proud, sustaining, and nourishing bounty of our own land.