To take an idea and transform it into an organised and measurable commodity is a difficult pursuit, to say the least. When that idea depends entirely on a wild, real life adventure, you might go as far as to call it a madman’s gamble. Truth is stranger than fiction, and real life does not abide by the rules of traditional storytelling… It does not resolve story conflict with cut-and-dried happy endings.

Riaan Manser and Dan Skinstad took on a seemingly impossible task when they decided to kayak around Iceland, and to begin doing so in the dead of winter. I believe that Cooked In Africa embarked on a heroic journey of its own when Justin Bonello took a chance, believed that the adventurers could do it, and made the solid commitment to back them wholeheartedly in order to create the television programme Around Iceland on Inspiration.  I am extremely grateful for my involvement with the project.  

In a parallel to the way that the show’s protagonists began to feel when they realised the extent of what they had gotten themselves into…  When I arrived here, I don’t think anyone in our team imagined the way things would unfold or predicted the challenges that we would come up against. We all have a sense of pride when we think back to the resolutions that we came to together, and we are better filmmakers and storytellers because of it. 

It is immense courage on the part of Executive Producers, Justin Bonello and Peter Gird that creates the projects that come out of this company, and each member of each project team gains immensely as a result of their leadership. Make no mistake – these stories require blood, sweat, and tears from everyone involved.  Because reality is the main ingredient – things almost never work out as planned.  For the same reason, when a project comes to a close – each member of the team knows a little more about the potential of real life.

I have no doubt that the ideas that come out of here will get bigger and better, the images will become more beautiful, the processes will get smoother, and the company will get stronger. Ultimately, the programmes will go from strength to strength in the quest to inspire audience members to go out on limb in their own lives.

I am sad to the core.

On Saturday I got a call from Bool Smuts of the Landmark Foundation, an NGO that specialises in building the conservation economy. One of their projects is the conservation of apex predators. They had trapped a leopard on a farm near Hermanus – a cause for great celebration, because now it meant that this leopard actually had a chance of survival. Me? I am so amazed that a leopard was found in just off the urban belt of the Western Cape and that it has survived everything we’ve thrown at it. Sad fact is that survival for these predators is becoming tenuous.

Isn’t it scary to think that our wildlife can no longer protect itself and that bit-by-bit it’s all disappearing?

The farmer (who reported livestock losses) had agreed to take part in the Landmark Foundation’s conservation efforts and helped set up and monitor a high-tech trap. So this weekend Bool’s team sedated the leopard and put a GPS collar around his neck. This collar works with GSM technologies, which means that it works with a cell phone signal. If you’re a parent and you’ve got a teenager, chances are you have a rule that your kid has to send you an sms to let you know where they are and that they’re safe. This collar works exactly like that – the Landmark research team receive weekly emails from the leopard telling them that he’s safe and showing them where he’s been. Ultimately one of Landmark’s goals is to understand leopard movements and thus safeguard leopards in a bid to increase suitable landscape and habitats for predators and biodiversity outside of protected areas.

Most farmers, however, are dead set against Bool Smuts methods of non-lethal predator control, so much so that he’s received serious death threats. But Bool is not deterred. And it’s in the spirit of what I’ve experienced and seen that I’m no longer willing to keep quiet either.

The Landmark Foundation has saved the lives of about 40 of our spotted friends, but in that time 38 more have perished as a result of gin traps, poisons and hunting. If you’re wondering why you should care, I’ll tell you: Western Cape leopards are being wiped off the planet at an alarming rate, following the same sad story as that of the Western Cape elephants. The way they’re exterminated is just different: If they don’t get killed in gin-traps, a device so horrific that some animals try to chew off their legs trying to escape, they are poisoned or hunted down.

You’ve got to stop for a moment and think. What has happened to our rhinos? Our lions? Cheetahs? The big giants that once roamed our country freely and without fear? The elephants of Knysna and even Table Mountain? These days, when I drive through Cape Town it’s hard to see it as one of the most beautiful cities in the world. It’s become sterile and almost ugly (luckily we have mountains and an ocean view to blindfold us).

It wasn’t always like this, but slowly and surely the human mindset of ‘everything is rightfully ours’ has taken over and destroyed just about everything in its wake. This human condition is extremely destructive, but luckily there are a handful of brave individuals willing to salvage what’s left through their conservation efforts. But, there is a point where the responsibility stops with them and starts with us.

It’s obvious that not everyone was born a veterinarian or a wildlife researcher, but one thing we all have in common is the power of choice. I’m not saying go out into the bush and try to track a leopard. What I’m trying to get across is that change starts with the smallest of steps, something I didn’t act on until recently. My experiences of the last few years have changed me in way I can no longer ignore.

As a consumer, you have a choice and when you make the ethical choice, you become a protector of our country’s biodiversity. If you’ve been following my work of the last year, you might know about my talk “The Great Food Hoodwink.” It deals with the issues of where our food really comes from and what’s actually in it. Problem is, now, the more deeply I delve into this topic, the more limitations I have on my weekly shopping list and the food I’m willing to buy. I can no longer just buy free-range beef, mutton or lamb. If it doesn’t say ‘Fair Game’ or ‘Predator Friendly’ on the packaging, I might be supporting gin-traps and the indiscriminate killing of leopards and black-back jackal populations without knowing it. And that would mean I’m responsible for killing more than just the piece of meat on my plate.

I’m not one for preaching, but I can’t turn a blind eye. If you’re informed about what’s really going on, then surely you should make the ethical choice and vote with your money. If we don’t start making smarter choices today, the only leopard the generations after us might ever see will be the picture on the South African R200 note. If you’ve ever seen a leopard up close, you’ll understand just how heart breaking the thought of that is.

Read more about The Landmark Foundation and the work they do, see how you can get involved and share this message with your friends.

Justin.

Family run farms used to be the norm until recently. Now only one percent of the food producers in America are family farmers and South Africa is not far behind. It is a worldwide trend. On Justin’s visit to the sheep farm, his host showed him some abandoned farmhouses on the land. Suicide notes scratched into the walls were evidence of the devastating effect the economy has had on small- scale farmers.

In the age of globalised franchises, meat distributers buy their meat in bulk from large-scale operators who usually use feedlots to fatten their animals up quickly. The feedlots control the meat price. In the end the farmers who raise happy animals in wide-open spaces on natural vegetation, get the raw deal. Farming is expensive -overheads are huge. Sheep farming in particular require more labour than cattle farming for example. All of these overheads add up and there has been an exodus of bankrupt farmers from the land. 99 % of the meat you find in your supermarket is produced in commercial feedlots where animals are kept in pens and fed on grains – produced on farms where genetically modified grains have been sprayed with herbicides and pesticides. These are all cogs in the machine called ‘industrialised agriculture.’ It is a war on nature for the sake of creating fast food for humans – the species that has overpopulated the planet.

What makes Karoo lamb and mutton so special and tasty is that the sheep eat Karoo bush and other aromatic herbal plants; this diverse diet flavours their meat. They are not stressed by their living conditions and mature at a natural rate. Sheep lamb twice a year. The lambs are weaned at 5 to 6 months, depending on the state of the veldt-and thus how healthy the are. (The males are usually the ones that are sent to market at this age, and the females are kept as breeding stock.) Lambs usually have their tails removed (docked) at an early age. This is supposed to prevent blowfly – an unpleasant insect born disease, which can kill them. (That’s what they were doing on Justin’s visit.)

The state of the economy is not the sheep farmer’s only woe, they also have to deal with hungry predators. According to Government statistics, sheep farmers in South Africa lose R1.1 billion per year to jackal and lynx, almost four times more than they lose to stock theft by people. Some farmers wage war on the black back jackal and lynx populations by hunting, trapping and poisoning them, but this obviously causes damage to the entire food chain and an imbalance in the eco-system which does not eliminate the problem. Now farmers are turning to ancient shepherding methods, but with a new twist. They are using exotic animals as shepherds.

Alpacas (woolly camel-like creatures from Peru) or Anatolian wolfhounds naturally adopt the flock of sheep as their own and guard them like shepherds. If any predator enters the camp, the alpaca rounds the sheep up into a tight flock and defends them by spitting foul smelling spit at the intruder! (It sounds far out, but try approaching a territorial alpaca and see what happens!) Anatolian wolfhounds give a warning bark at anyone entering the territory where their flock is being kept. If the intruder does not back off, be it a leopard, cheetah, lynx, black-back jackal, baboon, or person, the Anatolian is supposed to attack and fight to the death. The drawback is that it makes it hard for the farmer or staff to inspect the sheep without being attacked. This is not so much the case with the dogs, because the dog will not attack his owner, but alpacas can be quite aggressive. One farmer found he could not enter the area where the alpaca was kept unless he was on horseback! 


Today, the Karoo is looking like the old frontier days again as a new set of colonialists in the form of multinational oil companies began stalking the pristine veldt.
They call it fracking or hydraulic rock fracturing. The mineral rights beneath the land belong to the government. “It’s as if the government has lifted the fence and allowed a whole lot of jackals in,”said one farmer to a city journalist.

The big drawback is the method in which it is done and the process itself can cause underground water to become polluted both with chemicals used in the fracking process, and by the actual gases itself. If this happens it will be the final nail in the coffin for the Karoo farmer. Heaven and earth forbid! For more on this check out http://www.gaslandthemovie.com/ Please help fight for the protection of the Karoo as a natural treasure as well as an essential contributer to our food security.

ENTER IN TWO RELATIVELY EASY STEPS:

Cook one of your favourite family recipes.

Take a picture of your dish. Send your recipe and picture to: info@cookedinafrica.com

Best recipes will be featured on our Facebook page and the public will get to vote for their favourite – so get your friends and family involved!

Entries Close: 31 March 2011.

The winner will get: Cooked Season 1 – 5, Getaway to Africa and Exploring the Vine! Good Luck!!

The people of the West Coast do not only exist, they flourish in their own beautiful way and love with great passion. We were stranded at the car wash with our Harley Davidsons – one of the batteries were flat and we didn’t have jumper cables. Girlie, the car wash owner was more than willing to help. She called her daughter, who tried to get hold of her husband who was doing a paint job for the day. Without any luck she said that she would go home and try to find us some jumper cables. A while later she returned with some she borrowed from a neighbour. She even brought us home-made cookies to cheer us up. She kept repeating: “if only my husband was around today… he would have been able to help you immediately.” The admiration in her voice was remarkable.

According to the Chinese Zodiac calendar, 2011 is the Year of the Rabbit. The Chinese believe that speed, kindness and strength are traits associated with the rabbit. They also believe that people born during the Year of the Rabbit are romantic, merciful and clever.

Nelson Mandela, at age 71, was released from prison on February 11th, 1990. What a difference this icon has made to all generations.
February 15 1564 Galileo Galilei was born in Pisa, Italy. He was the very first astronomer using a telescope.
The best that Achilles, Agamemnon, Hector, Arthur and other heroes of history had hoped for was to be remembered for a thousand years. To be honored for courage, the wars they fought and won. We do indeed pay respect every now and then by making a film or writing a story about them.

Always remember the famous Arab Proverb of the 9th century: “Men Fear Time…… But Time Fear the Pyramid”

History has left us their poems and love. They left us their medicines in their tombs and treatments to show us how great physicians they were and they preserved their knowledge for us.

Care for yourself and take time to define what is important and meaningful in your life. It does not matter whether we write beautiful poetry, build pyramids, bring cookies to stranded holidaymakers, or chasing the seagulls while mom is working on the catch of the day. Each and every act, expresses something essential, and celebrates those things that give life such a wonderful meaning. Proving beyond doubt that we not only exist, but also flourish, love with great passion and live courageously! I salute each and every person on this beautiful planet called earth.

Remember to remember as Shakespeare wrote in his timeless Hamlet: “To thine own self be true.”

Chris Litschka 

You can also buy your own! I bought mine from www.fullcycle.co.za 

This is the nature of factory farming and it is the way that most of our meat is put on the table. 99 percent of our meat internationally is produced this way: in factory farms and feedlots. It is the reason that the price of chicken is still reasonably low and has barely risen despite inflation. Nowadays, chicken nuggets or wings are a cheap take away to eat on the run. In the past, chicken was had as a special occasion novelty. However the real hidden price of this so called cheap chicken may much higher than we can actually afford.

There is plenty of scientific evidence warning that the environmental cost of our cheap meat may be lurking somewhere deeper than our denial allows and is waiting to pounce in a form, which may be harder to fight than any war. It has been discovered that the Spanish flu of 1918 which killed somewhere between 50 and a 100 million people worldwide and it happened in a very short period of time was actually a form of bird flu. It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that the kind of conditions in a factory farm for poultry are the perfect breeding ground for some nasty virus to mutate in. What"s more feeding the birds antibiotics to keep them alive is the best way to help the bacteria mutate to a point where the antibiotics become in-effective. That’s where the cost of cheap meat may cost us more than we want to pay: when we are faced with a pandemic, which cannot be cured by anti-biotics.

The farmer who Justin and crew visits in Cooked 5 Living Free is Jean Groenewald – the owner of Elgin Free Range Chickens. She explains that their mission is to put the “Free”back into free range. By this she means that the chickens are kept as free from stress as possible. They are given as much fresh air and sunlight as they like as they spend most of the day in a green field near their barn, and at night they naturally chose to roost indoors. (Safe from predators.) Where the average factory farmed space allowance for chickens is 35 birds per square meter, here there are 15. So they are not as stressed by overcrowding. She says they are fed top quality maize and soya feed, which does not include any by-products from the meat and fish industry. This makes them strong and healthy so they do not need antibiotics. They don’t leave the lights on all night: they are given between 6 and 8 hours of darkness a night. They try to keep a minimum of workers per shed so as not to bother them too much. One person walking quietly among them. Jean explains that when you remove all stress and feed them well, they build up their own immune system and therefore have no need for antibiotics. The farming is still being done on a large scale, but at least the conditions are much better for the birds- than in the average battery chicken situation.

It is much more comfortable not to have to think about where your convenient breasts and thighs come from and how they got to be so tender, but once you know… it’s hard to stomach those dismembered body parts. The great thing is that we do have options. A lot of people don’t know that you can actually ask for Free Range at your local supermarket roastery. Once you know you can choose, you can get your power back and start voting for better practices through your choice of purchases. The more people know, the more people ask, the more somebody has to do something, and eventually it gets back to the chickens.

I’ve been involved with Cooked since the 1st episode, (except season four because I couldn’t fish in the restaurants!), and seven years down the line Justin has even persuaded me to exchange spearguns and fishing rods for a camera from time to time.

My passion for fishing started as a kid scratching around in rock pools and simply spiralled out of control from there. It now includes everything from flyfishing to chasing big gamefish offshore, with a healthy dose of spearfishing, freediving and underwater videography thrown in for good measure. As my father in law puts it, in my case it is not a passion but an affliction. (He doesn’t understand why, in my spare time from doing fishing charters, I relax by going fishing!)

Anyway, with spending so much time in, on or next to the ocean, one notices changes over time. Sadly, most of them are not normal, seasonal or positive changes. The most recent of those is also one of the biggest I have witnessed. Now that the 13th episode has been aired I can say what’s been bugging me since November. Since that awesome day’s fishing, things have changed dramatically. With the worst tuna season in history, a yellowfin tuna off Cape Point is now almost a coelacanth, more spoken about than seen…

Since October between two boats we have caught less tuna in 10 trips than we did in that one day. The reason, who knows, but here are a few thoughts:

We were recently visited by a scientist from the IOTC (Indian Ocean Tuna Commission), who share some valuable information with us. I won’t bore you with a scientific lecture, but one point stood out. In 2007 it was calculated that the sustainable annual harvest of yellowfin tuna in the Indian Ocean was 250 000 tons. The statistics available for 2007, 2008 and 2009 show that the total catch was in excess of 500 000 tons per annum, more than double.You don’t need a PhD to figure out where that will end.

On the other side of the coin scientists worldwide are saying it is the strongest La Nina year in fifty years. La Nina? The opposite of El Nino, characterized by strong trade winds which generate huge cold upwellings. SA scientists are also saying that the snoek biomass off our coast is the largest in 47 years, no coincidence since it’s a coldwater fish.

I have had reports of similar anomalies in Mozambique and the Seychelles. Is it natural or an effect of global warming? Who knows, but the fact of the matter is that as human beings we are having a massive negative impact on our oceans, be it directly or indirectly and unless we change our attitude and actions soon, we will destroy it.

So we live in hope, perhaps in autumn La Nina will subside and we will have good water in the canyon again and the tuna will return, but until then think carefully about where the tuna you are eating came from…

We stopped our vehicles, and found ourselves locked in a gaze with hundreds of local villagers swooping on fish nurseries with home made baskets, thousands of fingerlings trapped in the shallow flood plains of the Zambezi River. I had never seen such a forceful attempt to gather everything they could, the atmosphere seemed almost desperate. This would probably be their only catch in this area for the season. Cameras rolling we got out of the car and had about 200 people walk towards us and inspect what strange creatures had come to join them on their afternoon harvest.

I suppose most frustrating was not being able to fluently communicate with each other, but a warm smile and a crash course on what a camera does, instantly turns strangers into friends.

But back to what we saw: a foreign site yes, but then, if we look back in history they probably wouldn’t have had to do this, as more natural river flows would have been in place and the ebb and flow of a community living in harmony with nature would have provided an altogether different scene. The road we travelled on seemed to act as a giant fish trap and provided a hearty feast for what was certainly an overpopulated region. The history of War in Mozambique has in many areas decimated natural wildlife, to the point that until very recently if you sat quietly, you would hardly hear a bird or a bug chirp. The impact of technology, agriculture and war in Africa has left a legacy of varying consequences.

A huge divide was clearly evident between our crew and the native people. How could we be so vastly different in every part of our existence and occupy the same space, if only for a moment. The locals are battling to survive as overpopulation continues and modern man seems to have thrown every natural system off kilter. Perhaps it is another species that should occupy this place somewhere in the middle, an alien perhaps? Who knows? The reality is, we will all have to move to that common ground sooner or later to see rural communities and cities prosper with the limited resources available to us.

In the meanwhile this divide, this cultural disparity makes for damn interesting travel and interaction. Solutions in Africa are very slow in taking shape, as travellers we are the eyes and the ears of what truly is happening, and with it perhaps a sense of responsibility to see things working better in the future.

Safe Travels
Darren Putter

When Justin’s producer called me up out of the blue one day and asked if I could quickly research 13 episodes for Cooked 5, I jumped at the opportunity. When I arrived for the meeting, Justin in his high- speed enthusiasm slid a copy of Jonathan Safran Foer’s book “Eating Animals” along the table and said, “Read this!” It slammed into a glass of water and catapulted off the table! Check it out.  

This was the basis for the tone of my research! However, I had to bare in mind the firm contradictory warning – that this was a ‘feel good’ kind of show. A tricky one, because the nature of the subject matter is so shocking that it left me going hungry for a while in horror of what is actually going on in the food production industry. Although I had some vague idea of it, I found it horrifying to read about how animals are treated in large- scale feedlots and poultry farms. It was doubly shocking to me because I grew up on a traditional farm deep in the Karoo herding sheep and cattle in the old organic way.

Even in South Africa –finding organically produced meat is a novelty. The market dictates it. Family farmers still have to send their cattle to feedlots at the end of the day to get a decent price. What that means is being exposed in documentaries like Food Inc.

As I waded through all this information, an insight shone through the lines… one we should all know but may need to be reminded: if we are what we eat, and we are eating the results of man making war on nature, then what have we become? No wonder our culture is bristling with violence. If we eat ‘war’ will our bodies make war on themselves? Isn’t that what cancer is? We have been making war on animals by treating them like machines to produce meat and eggs and milk for us. We are making war with our precious top -soil and fresh water supply through our farming methods. And we have been making war with our oceans through the wasteful greed of our fishing practices. It has been ignorant and egotistical on a massive scale. But we are waking up and we can make conscious choices not to be part of it.

I guess mankind has been behaving like a spoilt child and we are in for a smack from our mother (nature) if we don"t wake up and start to treat her with some respect. (Ok. That’s enough ranting for now!) Luckily, guys like Justin Bonnello are doing a good job of waking up the masses! The up side of all this depressing stuff is that the more information there is out there, the more hope there is that we can become more conscious of what we eat. It empowers us to make the choices as consumers, which can make the eventual changes in the food production chain.

Luckily there is a shift happening and that is the feel- good side of the research I did. As I phoned up farmers and interviewed them all over the country they all used a phrase in common: “We have had a change of mind.” (Those are the exact words of the manager of organic wine farm- La Motte. ) There is a shift of perception happening -especially with the growers of vegetables, fruit and wine. The soil has reached saturation point and the fertilizers and pesticides have stopped working. The soil was dead along with all the creatures that lived in it. They are choosing to abandon the industrial methods and go back to the old ways. The farmers were delighted by the return of many species of birds and indigenous plants as a result of deciding to go organic.

What makes all this possible is that some of the retailers (like Woollies) are supporting and actively encouraging it. They are encouraging it because they know they can sell it and that’s where we come in. Consumers are getting more conscious. Going on this journey in research helped me see it. I want to eat food, which is grown Peacefully and made with Love: food that gives life back to the earth instead of taking it away. Organic farming encourages biodiversity in the soil. It’s sustainable.

I bombarded poor Justin with piles and piles of notes and background information to wade through in- between the millions of other things he had to do while on his Cooked 5 journey. And he pulled it off! Not only that, he is taking it to a new level with the Great Food Hoodwink. Big Respect!