Abstract
Over the last 20 years, we have witnessed worldwide a renewed interest in local food products and traditional cuisine. Addressing this demand, the catering industry has played a pivotal role in reviving local food heritage and traditions. While several studies have explored the evolution of this trend in Europe, little attention has been given to this phenomenon in contemporary Africa. To partially fill this gap in the literature, we conducted an ethnographic study to investigate the role of the catering sector in recovering and promoting food and gastronomic heritage in Nakuru County, an emerging Kenyan agricultural and tourist hub. Specifically, we aimed at understanding the main drivers behind the offering and demand for traditional ingredients and recipes. Fieldwork was conducted through the analysis of 41 restaurants and hotels, and data collection was completed through semi-structured interviews with 51 professionals, including owners, food and beverage managers, and chefs. We reported 33 recipes and ingredients tied to Kenyan culinary traditions. Some differences in the role of Kenyan cuisine emerged, with the differentiation mostly linked to the customer profiles. In particular, attention toward traditional foods was more accentuated in restaurants aimed at middle- and high-income Kenyan customers and for specific products namely African leafy vegetables and indigenous chicken, locally known askuku kienyeji. Concurrently, we discovered that the inclusion of these products on the restaurant menus implied an incipient localization of the food supply chains based on self-production or direct commercial relationships with small-scale producers. The research highlighted how the relaunch of traditional food and cuisine develops from a demand for healthy and natural products rather than a search for cultural authenticity. Based on the specificities of the local market, this fosters the creation of alternative supply strategies to cope with the poor quality of ingredients, price fluctuations, and discontinuity of the supply. In this sense, the research suggests also considering tangible factors linked to the technological and logistical conditions of the trade and safety of food to understand the drivers behind the rediscovery of local and traditional foods.
Highlights
Since the blooming of the so-called “Green Revolution” post World War II, the quest for agricultural productivity (Patel, 2013) has led to the loss of food biocultural diversity as well as to an overall standardization of the world foodscape (Bégin, 2016), driven by the industrialization of food production (Clapp, 2012)
We argue that the return to local and traditional food is mostly linked to quality, safety, and traceability issues as well as to the emergence of more health-conscious eating habits, especially among Kenyan high- and middle-income customers
The national economy still relies heavily on agriculture, though the nation is facing fast urbanization, with an annual growth of 5% among the urban population and with 33% of the total population living in urban centers (United Nations Department of Economic Social Affairs Population Division, 2017)
Summary
Since the blooming of the so-called “Green Revolution” post World War II, the quest for agricultural productivity (Patel, 2013) has led to the loss of food biocultural diversity as well as to an overall standardization of the world foodscape (Bégin, 2016), driven by the industrialization of food production (Clapp, 2012). The situation that emerged during the twentieth century has shaped the dietary regimes and culinary practices of the living ethnic and indigenous groups that traditionally inhabited the Kenyan territory (Maundu and Imbumi, 2003) In this context, two main changes have arisen: on the one hand, there has been a standardization of the diet of the Kenyan population, driven by the adoption of staple foods (e.g., maize, wheat, rice, potatoes, cabbage, and kale) and dishes (e.g., cornmeal ugali, chapatti bread) that have become the common denominators of the national population’s diet (Raschke and Cheema, 2008); on the other hand, gastronomic contaminations have developed as a result of British domination and increased participation in global trade, with the introduction of exotic ingredients (Owuor and Olaimer-Anyara, 2007) and cooking techniques (Cusack, 2000) as well as with the internal migrations from rural areas to the main urban centers of the nation, which have led to a diversification of the urban foodscape (Mwangi, 2002)
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