Moringa lattes and tigernut kebabs: the Ghanaians ‘taking back the power’ of their food

From Bolgatanga’s Fields to Accra’s Kitchens: How a Young Chef Is Rewriting Ghana’s Plate

Wanderstayfinder.com – In the northern town of Bolgatanga, Abiro Wisdom grew up eating meals built around crops that had sustained his community for generations. Yet when he completed a three-year catering programme in Accra, the curriculum offered him almost nothing from that world. The syllabus centred on French technique, Italian classics, and Mexican preparations — the staples of international hotel kitchens. The hardy, nutrient-dense vegetables and grains of northern Ghana were conspicuously absent.

“I didn’t see myself there,” Wisdom recalls of the luxury hotel chains his training was designed to feed. “I felt I wouldn’t be myself working there – I wouldn’t be able to talk about the food from where I come from.”

That conviction led him away from the conventional career path and into something far more radical: the Ghana Food Movement, or GFM, an organisation launched in 2019 — the same year Wisdom walked out of his final exam. What began as a loose collective of volunteers, including chefs, smallholder farmers, food entrepreneurs, and food-security researchers, has since evolved into a registered non-profit with its own kitchen, a growing calendar of public events, and a clear political thesis: that Ghana’s broken food system can be repaired from the inside, starting with the crops already growing in its northern agricultural belt.

A Kitchen as a Laboratory

The GFM’s early gatherings were improvised. Members met in cafés and commandeered whatever spare room they could find to stage three-course meals, each built around a single indigenous crop and the many preparations it permits. The logic was sensory, not theoretical.

“[Traditionally] we make tigernut milk, but you can make so many different things, for example tigernut burgers and tigernut kebabs,” explains Aimee Wallin, the group’s Malian-Swedish co-managing director. “We want people to taste what we are about, not just talk about what we are about.”

Five years after formal registration, the organisation now operates a dedicated kitchen where new recipes are developed and tested. Wisdom contributes many of them. The monthly programme includes pop-up dinners, dine-and-dance evenings, panel discussions, and recipe-testing sessions open to chefs and local food businesses. A typical brainstorming session might orbit a single ingredient — moringa leaves, say — and map out every viable commercial application, from a bitter-green latte to a savoury stir-fry, demonstrating that profit margins are achievable without importing a single component.

Why the Plate Is a Political Question

Ghana imports at least half of the food its population consumes. That dependency did not emerge by accident. Colonial administrations redirected arable land toward export cash crops — cocoa, peanuts, groundnuts — while simultaneously elevating imported staples such as milled rice above locally grown grains and tubers. The structural damage persisted long after independence. Modern African economies remain exposed to global price shocks whenever wars, pandemics, or shipping disruptions interrupt supply chains.

The cultural residue is equally stubborn. Culinary institutes across the continent still place Western technique at the centre of their curricula. Restaurants market imported ingredients as markers of sophistication. The implicit message, Wallin argues, is that local practice is deficient and foreign practice is the standard.

“The narrative has always been that our practices are wrong and the west’s practices are right. It’s just super-stupid. Why would you do that when you can just grow your own food?”

Wallin extends the critique into the agricultural-input economy. Seeds, synthetic pesticides, and fertilisers are predominantly manufactured abroad, meaning that even when a farmer grows locally, the means of production remain foreign-controlled.

“Part of the postcolonial agenda is for us to still have to depend on other countries. If it’s not to buy their products, to buy their vegetables, then at least we need to buy their seeds and their pesticides and their fertilisers.”

Many of the indigenous crops the GFM champions — moringa, tigernut, African rice, various leafy greens — are already adapted to local soils and rainfall patterns. They require little or no external agricultural input, which Wallin frames as a matter of sovereignty rather than mere agronomy.

“The one who feeds us will control us and that’s how it is today. So, if we want to control ourselves, we also need to feed ourselves. It’s power. Taking back the power.”

Schools, Pride, and the Next Generation

The GFM has begun partnering with schools to help children recognise and value local ingredients before those foods are fully displaced from the cultural imagination. Wisdom sees this as the longest lever in the movement’s toolkit.

“My goal is that we have a generation of chefs who believe in Ghanaian food and its own identity,” he says. “I’ve come to understand how food contributes to politics, to the economy, how it contributes to self-identity. [Now I can] trace the impact of food on our society, on our land, to the sea, to the farmer, down to how the food gets to the market, then to our plates. As chefs, we have to be able to tell the story of the food.”

This month the group received a Champions of Change title at the 50 Best Restaurants Awards, a recognition that positions its work within the broader global conversation about food-system transformation. For Wisdom and Wallin, the award is less a trophy than a validation of a premise: that the ingredients already in Ghana’s fields, properly understood and creatively deployed, can anchor a food culture that is economically viable, nutritionally sound, and politically autonomous.

The question the GFM poses is not whether Ghanaian cuisine can compete with imported flavours. It is whether a nation that feeds itself can also govern itself — and whether a plate of tigernut kebab, seasoned with homegrown spice, might be the most radical political statement a young chef in Accra can make.