Ruthie's Table 4: Afua Hirsch

family and much much more. Lucky us, Lucky me, my grandmother who turned ninety three last week and lived around the corner for me and Wimbledon. She came to the UK with her children, including my mom. In My grandmother is of a generation I suppose of the first mass immigration of Ghanaians to London, and it really was a community and many of them were very highly educated. My grandfather had been to Cambridge in the nineteen forties on

a colonial scholarship. They were diplomats, they were doctors, nurses, entrepreneurs, and my grandmother's house was a place that people who had recently arrived would come stay, be fed. And then I talk about my grandmother's house I can smell it. What do you smell? I can smell fish, dried fish, salt fish, grilled fish. I can smell kenk, which is a very goodame dish which my grandmother actually used to

make and sell at the market. And Kenk has made out fermented corn dough and then you knead it into these dumplings and then you wrap it in banana leaves and then you steam it to eat it. And then you eat it with usually fried or grilled fish, with this incredible pepper sauce called sheet or, which is made out of dried shrimps and pepper. It's very spicy, salty, oily shrimp eads, absolutely delicious. You were growing up and

as English and community, I know, Wimbledon. Did you go to school and eat the kind of school food or did you go after school and need the kind of fast food? Did you experience Sarah, did you always come home to wanted to eat the food of Yeah, we've definitely ate dinner together every day in my house and that was the meal you would look forward to. But

I loved school food, ashamed to say. I just remember really oily lasagnas and lots of puddings because my mom, I think, coming from Ganaan heritage, wasn't a big dessert person, and I was all there for the steamed puddings that Roodie Poly's, the sticky toffee pudding, the crumbles, the pies.

Absolutely loved them. From like about seven. I remember getting well too until about fifteen, and then I started to lose interest in you know, traditional nutritiony balanced meals, and then I started I was a real party girl in my team, so I got into clubbing and we would always have McDonald's at like three in the morning on the way home. Rich in hindsight is terrible, but you get away with a lot, I suppose when you're really when you're that young. But it also is very liberating

that you ate so much as a girl. You know that you didn't worry about you know, how you love to fashion or way. I wouldn't say I didn't worry about it, but I definitely loved food, and I loved food more than I wanted to try and change my body. I do think it was a much less healthy time for girl's body images than it is now. I mean now, of course there's so much pressure on social media, but I also feel really positive about the diversity of images

of women who have celebrated as beautiful. Now it's just night and day from when I was growing up, and I think I find it so much easier to see women who make me feel positive about my body now, and I hope that for younger and women growing up now that that helped shape their perceptions. So that didn't really exist, and I did definitely struggle just because I

was the only black girl in my environment. A lot of the time, you know, I looked different at a different hair texture, I had a different type of figure. There were so many things about me that didn't conform to what was being celebrated. I was this little mixed race girl growing up in a world that at the time, you know, I was born in one, it wasn't as prevalent as it is now. And I very rarely or never saw other people who looked like me, and I was trying to work out where I belonged, you know,

in between these communities. I had this first generation gana in community on my mother's side, and then I had on my father's side, also complicated family because my grandfather was a Jewish German refugee. He had worked really hard to assimilate into Britishness. Understandably, arriving in Britain in nine he wanted to assimilate. He changed his name from Hands to John, as so many people did. He learned English as quickly as he could. He married my grandmother, who

was from Yorkshire. And so even though he also had an immigrant story, a refugee story, a totally different cultural backdrop, he he really didn't communicate it. And he I wouldn't say he hid it. He had just kind of made it disappear over time, and initially I suppose by necessity, and then once you've kind of assimilated, it's quite hard

to celebrate. And I think there was so much trauma in his relationship with his heritage because of what he'd been through growing up in the nineteen thirties in Berlin as a child and seeing the Nazis really kind of destroyed the world around him. No, my father is not I wouldn't say he's much of a cook, but my dad, I think, um, he's really into these am I was reflecting as I was about to come and talk to you, Ruthie.

I think my grandfather, who came from Berlin, I think the thing that I can trace from him that I've inherited that. My dad certainly, how as is lots of pickles, and there would always be pickles, all kinds of pickles. And my dad is a big pickler. He will pickle that, he will pickle pears, he will pickle onions. Is it Yeah, I think it is. It was unusual that you have a passion for Yeah, I never thought about that until today German perhaps that influencer Brellin. When you have the

pickle the cabbage, oh, they will make sour crows. And my dad always pickles red cabbage in the winter. So yeah, still, yeah, I remember so clearly. I didn't go to Garner until I was fourteen, and my first memory was stepping off the plane and two things hit me. The first was the heat, which I thought was the heat from the engines. I thought they haven't turned off the plane engines yet,

still blasting me with hot air, and it was. It took me a minute to realize that's just the air temperature I've never been anywhere, and it's very humid as well. It's a very humid tropical rainforest heat. And the second thing was the smell, And the smell has never left me and I still every time I go to Ghana, um In instantly hit with this intoxicating smell, and I've

tried to work out what it is. I think it's a combination of just heat and sea air because it's very the capital is on the coast and it's it's a quite rough Atlantic coast. There's a lot of sea breeze and mist and salt in the air. And then one of my favorite Ganean dishes, which because the BA flight from Ghana lands basically at dusk, and at dusk is when food vendors in the city start selling this

afterworks snack which they fry outside. It's called Kelly and it's ripe plantain diced that seasoned with ginger, black pepper, tie, a bit of nutmeg, chili and salt, and then it's deep fried, absolutely delicious. I made some last night. Actually season it first and then you do you season it, and then you do take that and you eat it hot. Yeah, you eat it hot. And it's street food. It's street food, and that makes the entire city have a fragrance of

kind of slightly sweet spicy nut meggie air. And I honestly think it's it's a little hint on the air in a cr When you think about Ghana, because you've been there quite often, do you also think about the markets and the smells from the market. I love the markets and remember asking David J about going to the markets with his grandmother. Tell me your images of the market.

When I moved to Garner in two thousand eleven, my daughter was six months old and my partner and I decided we were going to move to Gardner and raise her there for her first few years. And my grandmother came with us, and so did my mother. So four generations of women in my family rearing around a craw together. And my grandmother took me to the market to go shopping. And it's a really big food market called Bachana, and there are these it's a problem, actually, there's so much

rural to urban migration and Garner. Lots of girls and young women from quite poor parts of northern Ghanna have migrated to the city and they they're called Kaya girls. They carry these big buckets on their head and you can basically pay them to follow you around the market. It's not really safe work and they often sleep outside, obviously very poorly paid. So I've never really been to market and seen them before, so that was one thing I really remember that. There was just so much going on.

There'll be fish, there'll be meat, vegetables, everybody's haggling, everybody's talking, They'll be kind of little bits of the market where they sell magical things, talisman's and weird bits of animals. There's just a lot going on. But the thing I

remember is my grandmother haggling with the market vendors. And I think if you didn't know Garner and you saw it, you'd be worried that maybe a fight was about to break out, because it it's very it looks very emotional, and there's a lot of hand gestures and very vexed facial expressions and insults flying around. But actually I think

that's just how you do business. And I remember making a vow to myself that day that I was going to learn that language, because I felt like if you can't speak that language, you just can't really get involved. You know, English is just far too polite, just it's not expressive enough. I just remember seeing my grandmother kind of screwing up her face and waving her arms around and thinking I need to be able to speak to someone like that and embarrassed. I was determined that I

was going to be able to do it. And I have my little daughter on my back in a cloth, you know, which is the wagon and women carry their children around, and I thought, I'm going to live here and I'm going to learn this language. I'm still trying. What are you write to now? What is your next project? So I started my own TV production company, Good and I'm working on a combination of documentaries and dramas. So I'm I'm always challenging myself to try and reach a

different audience. And I love journalism. I will always, i think, write newspapers and magazines. But I'm also noticing I think the things that have often impacted me are fiction, novels, dramas, films. And I'm really interested in reaching people so they think about themselves culturally, not just intellectually. I think that a lot of the change that really takes place on a deep level is when something touches you very emotionally. And I really want to take the message that I always

work towards. I really I care about justice and fairness, you know. I think it's that the DNA of who I am when you look at my family story, I've inherited it on both sides, that yearning towards freedom. I am really curious to see if I can reach people through different mediums. So that's something that I'm really challenging

myself on at the moment. And what about the fact that we're looking at a political situation here with Ukraine and the fact that the effect of more will be feeling the people of Africa because without the grain that is meant to come through Ukraine too good world, but particularly to northern Africa, there could be a huge TV It's already impacting the whole continent of Africa because of energy and oil prices. Again, Africa is a huge oil

producer but still relies on imported oil and gas. It's a huge food producer that still relies so heavily on imported grain. In One of the consequences of colonialism is that African countries don't supply each other, they don't trade with each other. Everything is designed for export to the rest of the world because Africa was integrated into the global economy as a place that you take from, and

that legacy exists in a very literal way. So one of the challenges is that Africa's producing huge amounts of food, but it's all getting shipped straight out of the continent, and you have nations that are in food crisis coexisting with nations that produce food and abundance. So this has got to be an opportunity for people to look again at the structure of African economies. But it's you're you're talking about four hundred years of colonial legacy. It's not

something you can easily overturned. But I think it's a real wake up call to just how something that happens in Europe or something that happens in Russia can have a huge and immediate impact on people's lives on the afric continent. I was in Ghana the other day and everyone's talking about Ukraine that the roads were had half the traffic they usually do because people can't afford to

drive their cars. So that's the reality of globalization, and I think we've got to start upping our game in terms of making sure that countries are self sufficient as much as possible. I was really sensitive, I think as a child to where there was a sense of openness for me, and you know, people now often ask me why I self identify as black when I'm mixed racing. You have one white parent one black parent, and I self identify as black, and I suppose I have leaned

much more towards my Gaean heritage. And I think from childhood, well, it's two things. It's one because the world racialized me as black, you know, and the colonial conditioning we've all inherited, it's created this really nonsensical binary and categorize people, and that was the category that was assigned to me from an early age. But also, I think because Ghanian culture is just so expansive, and you know, it welcomes everybody and will over impress a sense of you have a

place and you have a role. And it was attractive to me because it was a place that I could feel part of something. Even though I should say one of my earliest memories of being my grandmother's houses of all of my aunties, when I say Auntie, you know, all the women who came to the house laughing hysterically

at me when I tried to speak the language. So they just thought it was very funny and they would say they call me or Berny, which means white girl, and they say that the white girls trying to speak to you and it wasn't mean, it's just how And still often are amused by the idea, who's something that someone who has access to kind of you know, the English establishment would choose to try and speak their language.

And I think that's the colonial hangover as well, that you know, many Gnaians come here and encourage their children not to speak their language, which just speak English. But it's really sad because you can be bilingual and and you don't need to downplay your heritage to succeed. So I think that's a journey that many immigrant communities are on well. Also in terms of food, you know, I think that you know, you say that your grandmother identified with cane and food, so she was cooking the food

of the culture. Maybe your mother adapted more And do you think that she adapted more to be in the situation she was in rather than bringing the food of her culture. Did she only cook and food as well? No, she definitely adapted more. And I think coming here as a twelve year old, she had so much of her

formative life in Britain. But it's interesting and I've reflected on it so much more lately that whenever my mom was sick, she would say, I need food of my country, and then she would make and she would always make very specific things. She would make groundnut soup, which is a soup made out of peanuts, ground peanuts, and it's spicy with some kind of tomato broth with peanuts like peanut butter in it with meat, but it's quite light.

And she would have that with ffoo, which is another Guinean dumpling um that you used to kind of soak up soup. And she would rarely make game food except when she was either sick or suffering in some way, and then it would be her definitely her comfort food, and she would always say, I need food of my country. And so it's it's always been. I think when you strip away the layers at the at the root of

who she is. And I think having children and having grandchildren has made her reflect on her and she she does eat the language, and she does go back to Gharner. But I think more frequently since I've become somebody who's who's been so connected with Garner. So yeah, I think her daughter and granddaughter have have have moved her back more in that direction. Maybe then she would have anticipated we've discussed the culture of food and the taste of food and the family of food. That kind of brings

me to the political nature of food. And as we know, during the pandemic, many children this school lunch and so they didn't eat. And I think you said as well that government and society shows itself in the way we feed our children. And what are your thoughts about Parlty. I feel so angry at the way that healthy and nutritious foods have been turned into a luxury for the privilege. I just think it's one of the scandals of our lives.

And when I was in my early twenties, I became vegan, and you know, I'm I've had a privileged life, but at the time I was training to be a barrister, I had to borrow money to pay for my education. I was living below the minimum wage, you know, and as a barrister, people think you kind of enter into this like super huch lifestyle. I earned ten thousand pounds my first year at the bar, and I had tens

of thousands of pounds of debt to repay. It was a real struggle at that stage of my life financially, and I went vegan because I was starting to really think about health and climate and I just couldn't believe how expensive it was to feed myself on fresh and

whole foods. I really struggled. And that's an Oxford graduate who's training to be a barrister, and it for me, it was a real wake up call as to how if you do try and do the right thing, and you do try to be mindful of what you eat, and you do make an effort to source things that are grown locally or produced ethically, you price out the vast majority of people. And that that was a period

that really radicalized me about how I'm fair. This was and also being part of the vegan community, which at that time was very white and very privileged, and I really didn't feel included in that community. And it really made me think about why, you know, all of the black people I knew, and people in underprivileged environs. I was living in North London. You look look at the area around me. Every child went to the chicken shop after school and bought k chicken, which terrified me in

terms of its quality and um production. And then there were all these kind of vegan and raw shops which were for people who just had huge amounts of disposable income, and I I think it's got worse, if anything, and

I feel really strongly about it. And I think there's a you know, there's a there's a race aspect because Black people in America and in Britain are massively overrepresented in heart disease, strokes, diabetes, and struggle to get access to high quality foods, and you know, it's just something

that I think it's just rarely talked about. It's interesting during the pandemic who was There was a piece in the New York Times and who sucked was a woman and she said that if you want to know why I have more African Americans are getting COVID and why they're afraid to go to the hospital, it's one word,

and it's slavery. You know, that really looked back into the history of what the experience of being a slave in the United States was only you know, a hundred and fifty years ago, and you were you weren't allowed into hospitals, you didn't get to see doctors, you were fearful. And with nutrition, it's in every poor community, black or white, they don't get fresh vegetable there's a tendency also to

see that as an American phenomenon. But you know, Barbados is the hypertensive capital of the world because Britain ran its colonies in the Caribbean. It's slave plantation colonies the same way and force people were force fed a diet of sugar, and now you can actually trace the health consequences of that in today's population of Caribbean heritage in Britain. It's such a recent history people, it is still manifested

in people's bodies. And then then there's the other side, which when I go to Ghana, which makes me raging that Honor imports rice, tomatoes, so many foods that grow naturally in Ghana that are not made profitable because the market is flooded with cheap imports from America, from Europe, and instead of becoming a country that's allowed to be self sufficient, all of these market forces, even aid has been made conditional on African countries having to import cheap

products from Europe and America, and you can trace that directly to the nutritional and financial problems that people there have. It's really scandalous, and you know, I just I often kind of wonder why we're not all up in arms about it, but it never seems to be the priority. And so what would you do? How do we reach

this government or the governments we've had every government? I mean, go to hospital and see the kind of food they to schools and see what they feed children, you know, go to food banks and see the food that is given. I think, you know, we started this conversation by talking about the political I think that we really need to reconnect this with the political foundations of society. And I think this is where we talk about class and we

talk about race. And it's so important to understand the history. Why, um do people on lower incomes have access to such bad food. There's this history behind it. There was a decision that was made that um, people need to be fed in a certain way to keep them in a certain position. That African countries have deliberately been starved of their own production to keep them subservient. And I don't think you can understand one with understanding its history. And

these are systems that were created. You know, They're not an accident, they're not something broken. They were designed. So I don't think you can change it without going to the root of why it was designed this way, and people need to understand and feel angry about that. So that's why I do the kind of storytelling I do, because I think that without connecting these dots will always just be superficially talking about improving school meals without actually

looking at the root of the class system. Whole education system was designed to create factory workers for an industrial society that doesn't even exist anymore. And that's the conversation I don't see happening. It often feels like it's superficial, you know, and really well intentioned. And this isn't to undermine the work of the incredible activists who talk about

food and nutrition. It's so important, but I think that joining it up with understanding how class and race works and keeps people structurally in positions where they're not thriving on purpose, I think that's really essential to understand. Um, we spoke earlier about food and culture and food and family and food and comfort. Your mother say she wanted the comfort of her when she was sick, and she

wanted to eat food of her country. And so right now you're writing and you're producing, and you're activism, and there must be times when you are tired, you're feeling whatever it is, and you do do need the comfort of food. What food, um would you turn to? Dear? This was hard to pick because there are many foods

that comfort me. But I think I would have to go when I when I think about in my house, in my home, if we're having a low day, or it's cold and raining outside, or everyone's a bit tired, the thing that I will make on demand is apple and BlackBerry pie, especially in autumn, and I will I grew up with a beautiful apple tree in my garden and I don't have an apple tree in my garden anymore, but I will try and buy apples locally, and we

even pick blackberries and Wimbledon commons some years. And that is the because we have my my partner and my daughter have slightly different taste to me, but the one thing that unites us is the love of my apple pie. So I think that might be my my ultimate comfort food. And I'll even make custard, which is as English as I know where to go delicious. It's so thank you, so much, thank you, thank you. To visit the online shop of The River Cafe, go to shop The River

Cafe dot co dot Ukka River Cafe. Table four is a production of I heart Radio and Adam I Studios. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.