Making KOS

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Making KOS - engaging people in knowing growing and using local wild foods

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Increasing numbers of people are becoming aware that we have lost touch with the wild foods from the landscapes around us. Along with this, there is a growing sense that we can make a difference to where we are by embarking on rediscovering our local wild foods and re-integrating them into our lives. 

 

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Masterclasses and Dinners - learning about wild foods from Loubie Rusch

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The Masterclases and Dinners that can be booked on this site are my contribution to empowering us as cooks to include wild foods in what we eat. I share what I have learned over the past decade or so of exploring the foods that occur in the landscapes around me here in the Western Cape. The classes and dinners enable cooks to experience preparing and tasting a range of local ingredients in a series of experiences that take place over the course of the year. 

The Masterclasses are in-depth hands-on explorations of one or other of the categories of ingredient into which the wild foods have been grouped, based on the nature of the ingredient. Each cook gets to explore a range of techniques that suit that ingredient category and to prepare recipes that contribute towards the day's menu that are then shared together. Each masterclass category is repeated during the course of the year, as seasons permit.

The categories into which the wild ingredients have been grouped are:

• Leafy greens 
• Succulent leaves
• Winter and spring vegetables
• Wild and aromatic herbs
• Fruits and drupes
• Sea vegetables 

The Dinners are group cooking experiences of a more social nature. The group prepares and sits down to share the evening's seasonal menu together, using recipes and ingredients drawn from across several of the plant categories. The evening can include a mixed group of people who might all have booked seperately to join one of the dinners listed on this site. Alternatively, a Dinner can also be made up of a dedicated private group, and would then be booked personally by email on a date agreed to suit.  

A small range of Making KOS bottled produce as well as wild cocktails will usually be available for purchase at the Mastercalsses and Dinners.


If you are interested in delving a little deeper into the background of wild foods in our food system and the difference we can make in getting to know, to grow and to use them in our contemporary lives, read on.
 

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A bit of background about the Food System - some of its challenges 

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Our magnificent Cape Floristic Region, which sits within the Western Cape, is extraordinarily rich in biodiversity. Its many edible wild plants that thrive in its poor soils and winter rainfall climate, sustained our common ancestry literally for millennia. Relatively recently, however, they have come under threat.

A culture of cultivation emerged only very recently in human history. Travellers had soon started taking food and farming practices with them when occupying or returning from foreign lands. Over time, an industrialised food system, supported by a passive buying public, has taken hold globally. Mass cultivation of just a few seemingly cheap but nutritionally poor foods has come to predominate, accompanied by increasing wealth disparity.

The upshot is that our current agriculture system, based on a handfull of transposed foreign crops, is the single biggest destroyer of what remains of our biodiverse Western Cape landscapes. It is a massive over-consumer of our scarce water resources. In addition, it remains implicated in keeping our majority of post-colonial marginalised communities landless and in poverty.

We no longer know or value the locally adapted nutritious delicious foods that grow wild around us. We here, have become passive participants in a food system that our finite planet cannot sustain.
 

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Loubie Rusch - catalysing a market in local wild foods

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I worked for over 30 years in the elite spaces of Landscape Design, creating local indigenous gardens where and when I could release my clients from their eurocentrism. However, eventually, inner dissatisfaction at not being relevant to the pressing realities of where I am living, finally caused me to shift to working with food. Not only had it always been a deep passion of mine, it would now situate my work in a medium that we ALL share in common. 

I began exploring local wild ingredients and innovating recipes in 2011. From early on, I was sharing this wild foods journey with others in workshops and talks. I sold my small experimental runs of bottled produce to inspire others with a taste of what is possible. My personal exploration gradualy deepened my wish to challenge our skewed food system. The range of collaborations I have been participating in have become instrumental in filling some of the many gaps to be found in academic research and in our dissappearing local knowledge bases. In addition, my pilot cultivation project in Khayelitsha has inspired a number of small scale local growers to also try out cultiIvation. This has resulted in a range of local wild ingredients tentatively finding their way into some of our local kitchens. 

And so now, in redoubling my efforts to encourage many more others to also engage, cooks are being invited to contribute their part in this collaborative learning and sharing space, along with and supporting its innovative cultivation initiatives. The striving for the market to be equitable and restorative both remain critical values in catalysing this evolution. 
 

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Getting cooks involved - and increasing our impact 

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Becoming familiar with our forgotten wild foods is definitely a powerful way of re-establishing a deeper and more caring connection with where we live. And the Masterclasses and Dinner experiences are both playing their part in this familiarisation.
It will however need on-going and more regular usage of these foods to give the marginalised growers who are actively collaborating the confidence to plant and thus to reap benefit from being among the first to undertake doing so. Further, it needs a whole range of cooks activley using an increasing variety of our local wild foods in increasing volumes to support cultivation and access to diversities of local crops. It is in this direction that we will become effective in reviving our biodiverse landscapes into active sustainable use.

The wish to realise this kind of impact has driven me to seek additional public platforms to help spur on the evolution of the market. 

One such platform is an online meal kit company with who I am collaborating in developing indigenous options to offer to their large customer base. A weekly box with accompanying plant information and recipe makes taking up using seasonal wild ingredients really accessible for cooks. What's more, being able to estimate customer orders will make planning wild food crop planting volumes and timing predictable. This will go a long way to removing the risk to frarmers of taking up growing little known or unproven crops. 

And in time, as a varied pantry of indigenous products and ingredients becomes more readily available for ordering, this easier access will make it possible for greater numbers of cooks to embrace experimental wild food journeys of their own.

It is opening up these kinds of alternatives to the existing food system that is giving interested and aware cooks the opportunity to make different and more active choises. The badly needed social and ecological impacts that will result from making use of our local wild ingredients are significant in the repair and healing they can bring to our land as well as to our planet. 


 

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Making KOS