After beginning their university studies in chemical engineering, Zandile Queen Finxa, 30, pivoted into food sciences, graduating top of their class in consumer science: hospitality management at the University of Pretoria. They are a product developer at Woolworths, where they are the creative force behind the cakes on the bakery shelves and a recipe developer and food writer for Woolworths TASTE magazine. But Zandile’s influence extends far beyond commercial kitchens. They are the founder of The Sorghum Agenda, a food activism project that reimagines indigenous grains like sorghum in gluten-free cookies and retail concepts. This work has gained international recognition, featured at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Nutrivision Nigeria conference and in the documentary Mxsterminds. A former Food XX Women in Food Award winner and a Top 3 research presenter at the Critical Food Studies: Transdisciplinary Humanities Conference, Zandile’s approach to food is scholarly and spiritual. Their master’s research on sustainable indigenous food systems draws on their Basotho heritage and lessons from their grandmother, whose root-to-tip cooking philosophy became a blueprint for Zandile’s decolonial culinary mission.
Chef Lesego Semenya, late, was my mentor, and we both carried the goal of ensuring there was space for our (as township kids) food on the fine-dining tables we catered to as classically trained chefs. Khanya Mzongwana has been pivotal in my approach to food styling, and in looking at food outside of the very clean-cut boxes we often place it in. Chef Anthony Bourdain, late, was very intentional in highlighting the indigenous people of the places he travelled to, and in not aiming to look for the westernised versions (often bastardised) of their food. Mostly, my grandmother — after whom the Sorghum Agenda was created. She used the smallest of foods to make the biggest plates of food and taught me the fundamentals of our traditional food before I even knew I was learning. From her quiet practices of food preparation, the sustainable consumption of everything we made from root to tip and nose to tail (which played an incredible role in my master’s studies in how we are culturally socialised in our food consumption, and the efforts we can make to create sustainable food systems across the larger food system by changing consumer food perceptions of what is “aspirational” food). She taught me to be so stubborn about my heritage that it feels like a woven piece of me, and not just a cloth I wear every now and then.