Abby and Liesl from the Good Food Club

Could you please introduce yourselves briefly, and share how connected around food?

Liesl: I've lived in South Africa for 31 years since marrying a South African. Originally from the U.S., I'm now also a naturalised South African citizen. We've raised our three children in Rosebank, Cape Town, and they’re all young adults now. The kitchen and table have been at the centre of our family life, where we’ve also enjoyed meals with many friends—near and from far. Abby and I became close friends as we journeyed together around food, for which I’m very grateful.

Abby:  I’m from Cape Town and have lived here most of my life.  I have 3 fun-loving girls and am  married to Mike.  I love road-tripping, crocheting, flamenco dancing and most of all good food.  Most of the time I have a deep curiosity to know more about where my food comes from.  It was almost 2 decades ago that I discovered that Liesl and I shared a similar curiosity to find good wholesome food that has been ethically farmed and produced, and a desire to create pathways that make good food more accessible to others.

What spurred the start of the Good Food Club (GFC)?

When we started our food buying club eighteen years ago, we knew little about the food system that brought food to our shop shelves. We just knew we wanted food made with respect at every step—real food, not factory-processed products full of unknown added ingredients. We had many questions about our food, and the supermarkets didn’t offer any transparency—how was the land farmed, how were the workers and farmed animals treated from field to shelf? It was impossible to find that information on packaging labels. 

We felt the supermarkets gave us limited choices. Specialty health shops offered some better choices, but their prices were high for feeding our families. 

We wanted to buy good food at fair prices. So, we went directly to the people making our food, bypassing the middle people where possible. We began by buying cheese directly from a farm. Then we added other food items, one-by-one. We gathered others to buy with us so that we could access wholesale prices. In this way we became a food buying club, a group of households that buys food together on a regular, organised basis. 

As we grew, we organised our food orders and collections around monthly ‘market days.’ Every club household comes to market day to gather and carry home the food they’ve pre-ordered. 

A lot of food moves on these days, so they are heavy on logistics; but they are also social. Over many market days over many years, members get to know each other at least a bit. We never advertised our club. Our members drew others in, and we grew organically through social connections. We’ve become friends with people who we would never have known otherwise. Our kids grew up with these wonderful people as part of their lives. Our  families have fun memories of what was sometimes a happy,  organised chaos on Market days that often  ended with a meal together around the kitchen counter, with Liesl and Abby resting their weary feet and bodies. 

Other groups started out of our original club, and now there are many food clubs around Cape Town and South Africa organised within a formalised network. (But that will be another story for Jessica Merton of the Food Club Hub to share next week.) 

As clubs, we try to buy from small, local businesses, and we try to get to know the contexts, stories, and the faces—the people—behind the food we buy. As we’ve interacted with producers themselves, we’ve learned more of the realities of our food system. We’ve never stopped asking questions, so we’ve never stopped learning about our food system. We’ve worked hard over the years to share what we learn with our club members, so that we all become more conscious about the foods we choose to buy. We will never stop learning. 

Each club is independent, with its own mix of suppliers, but I think this all works best when connected into the wider network.  I, Liesl, am grateful to be part of the Food Club Hub. It’s  not easy to find information about our food, there’s so much to learn, and there are many complexities to weigh up when choosing which producers to support. There are excellent benefits to working together. 

South Africa has a rich history of community stokvels, whereby people save money together in groups in order for each member to be able to buy food, or something else. Our food clubs, though they are collectives, are different in that we don’t save money together before buying in bulk.

Could you each share one or two stories that share something important about the GFC networks?

L: My youngest child was two when we started our food club. Our kids were raised around the rhythms and cycles of market day activities. Over the years, our home has been part of a growing and changing ecosystem of food activities. One daughter, a uni student, now runs our Good Food Club and I am now her assistant.  My son runs a weekly produce, eggs, and bread order from our home (called ZachyEats). It’s a joy to see them taking this work forward!

We’re also all regulars or even involved at the monthly Mowbray Market, a small-holder farmers’ market that happens in our neighbourhood. Because of their exposure to our food club community, they understand food differently than I did at their age. They aren’t afraid to make foods from ‘scratch’ using good ingredients, and they are the biggest evangelists to their friends and peers. They’ve drawn in a younger generation to these food activities.

L: Eating habits run deep for us, because they’re rooted in cultural and social traditions, and sometimes just habit, cost, or convenience. It can be slow work to make changes to the food we are used to eating. I’ve loved hearing firsthand accounts from our members about changing up what they eat.

One example of this is with meat. I think farmed animals are so hidden from us, that we don’t see the way they are treated as non-sentient beings in ‘factory-farming systems’, as if they aren’t able to suffer. It is truly mind-boggling that we are so disconnected from what a pig, for example, endures to become plastic-wrapped packs of pork chops at the supermarket. And if we could see the pay, the working conditions and emotional duress of the people working in slaughterhouses, we would be horrified by their exploitation and suffering. Meat is expensive, and well-farmed meat can be more expensive for the care given to everyone involved in the farming. 

Through our clubs, we’ve  tried to make it as easy as possible for our members to buy meat coming from farms that we have vetted for good treatment of animals. I’ve watched the omnivores in our family choose to eat less meat, but ‘better’ meat; and I’ve loved the feedback over the years from members who have made changes to the meat that they eat because of what they’ve learned through our clubs. They’re grateful they have access to food coming from good farming. I’ve also watched a meat-eating member make the choices to move to a plant-based diet because of the connection they began to have with farmed animals.

A: One of the things I’ve appreciated most about the food club network is that it facilitates the narrowing of the gap between the farmer or producer and the consumer.  During the early years of running a food club, we started learning about how a loss or event that affected farming could impact the supply chain.  Unlike with retail supermarkets, we have the opportunity to better understand why a product may not be available suddenly or when there is low stock of a certain product.  I can’t remember which year it was, but we were buying pasture-reared chicken from a farmer in the Southern Cape.  The region had experienced severe weather conditions with extremely low temperatures and snow.  At the same time, Eskom was experiencing supply challenges resulting in unpredictable breaks in electricity supply.  The pairing of these events resulted in the farmer losing between 150 to 200 chicks because he was unable to keep the chicks warm during the cold spell. While it didn’t have an immediate effect on the supply of chicken, it helped knowing that in 7 weeks time we as food clubs would feel the impact.  While being able to offer the farmer compassionate support, we were also able to anticipate when the impact would be felt and communicate this to club members. 

How do you see the GFC within a broader food system?

Supermarket companies and a few processors are extremely powerful in our South African food system.  As corporations their priority is to maximise shareholder profit—therefore they won’t make the most ethical choices, or choices for the public good. This drives the industrialisation of farming methods with both crops and animals, and people working on huge farms or processing factories, in supermarkets, and in slaughterhouses don’t fare well in this either. Strong government regulation is needed to keep these big food businesses in check, but in South Africa (as with most countries), our regulations fall far short. These corporations now dictate terms for what they pay farmers, and really, the prices we pay as consumers.

In our rejection of the industrialised food system, we need alternative, nourishing, just foodways. This takes many interventions at different levels of food supply, from growing and producing to distribution to selling to eating. Whatever we’re doing, we should know what part we’re playing in the bigger food geography around us. Our club’s (and network’s) small part in this food geography is to support small, local businesses by offering them market pathways outside of the supermarket system. We’ve created foodways that are relationally-based, with respect baked into the way we do business with the producers we buy from. Ideally, our members are making informed choices for themselves and their family members.  

Producers have the power to set the prices they need to be paid. We trust them to be fair and not greedy in the prices they ask.

Do you know that supermarkets can take 30-90 days to pay producers? How many small businesses have the cash flow to survive that wait? So, we commit to paying our suppliers quickly, within a week of receiving their goods if at all possible. 

Through our direct relationships, we’re able to give and receive feedback to each other as suppliers and customers. There’s a huge amount of trust that grows between the clubs and producers over time.

The GFC’s value within the greater food system definitely offers pathways during times of crisis or during food shortages or global events that impact the food system and supply chain.  For example, a few years ago, all processed meat products had to be recalled due to food contamination risks that had been traced to a few food processing factories. As a result all retail supermarkets had to recall all processed meat products and cured meat products.  Smaller producers that food clubs were being supplied by were unaffected because their production processes were better controlled and at a lower risk of experiencing the same problems and risks of contamination as in the greater food system.   

During COVID many farmers, producers and suppliers came to a complete halt. This resulted in more food waste and financial losses.  It took some time for food club hosts to figure out how they could operate during this difficult season, while for larger retail supermarkets they were able to continue as “normal”.  Once we established practices we were able to continue to support small, local business and regional farmers during what proved to be a very difficult time for them especially as many were not tapped into the retail sector. 

As you continue on your journey, what do you dream of for these and similar networks?

A: One of my deepest desires is to support and encourage the emergence of alternative food networks (alongside the existing alternative community based food systems) that offer people of lower incomes to access good wholesome food at affordable prices outside of the retail supermarket system. 

L: We can’t talk about food without talking about land and systematised racial injustices and the colonisation of the country’s food system. Over the past century, powerful business interests have shaped the farm-scape of the country and changed our diets. Because so much of the food system is now controlled by a few big players, it’s hard for small-scale farmers, producers, and local shops to compete. And at every step—from farm workers to supermarket staff—people often end up working under tough and unfair conditions. I hope that clubs prioritise seeking and supporting more and more black-owned farms and food businesses, and farms that are growing indigenous plants. 

For this reason, I’ve gotten involved with the Mowbray Market hosted by the Trust for Community Outreach & Education (TCOE). I’m passionate about this monthly market because they’re providing the market space for small growers. People from Philippi, Khayelitsha, Brackenfell, MacGregor, Grabouw, among other places, sell their goods there. And a generational fisher family from Buffeljags is there every month with their fish. It has become its own special community where connections are made and knowledge is shared. I witness this magic every month.

How have your dreams shifted over the many years of the food clubs?

A: Being involved in encouraging and supporting alternative food systems in lower income areas.  One important shift was when, at the end of 2023 I decided to take a break from being a food club host mainly out of a desire to reset, re-imagine and to be restored. How I put energy into the alternative food club movement in the future is unknown at this stage for me.  My hope is that it will become clearer in time. 

L:  While our food clubs are helping build better foodways between farms and our tables, there are many around us who don’t have enough income to make choices about their food, so couldn’t be part of our club.  63.5% of people in SA are food insecure. This is a horrifying statistic! There’s so much violence in our food systems. In the industrialised systems, people, animals, the soil, even our shared environment are treated with violence. The daily hunger that too many people here live with is also violent. They can’t eat enough nutritious food because they don’t have enough money to buy it. Nutritious ‘real’ food should be easily accessible to everyone, not only people who can afford the prices. So, while I’m always going to be invested in our Good Food Club and the greater network of food clubs, I’m seeking ways to support people who are doing the sacred work of making sure people in their communities have meals. I think food clubs (as they are now) can have only a limited impact because of the poverty in the country. I’m now busy researching ways of moving healthy, local, well-produced food to communities where the food is needed.

When it comes to working towards a more just, equitable, and local food system, what are your big dreams and what small things are contributing to those?

A:  Prioritising the inclusion for more black and woman owned farmers, producers and suppliers should take front and centre stage moving forward and nurturing those relationships.  

L: Listening to Rowan White, an Indigenous woman from the U.S., on the Spirit Plate podcast deeply shifted how I think about food. In the episode “She Makes an Offering”, she rejects the industrial term "food systems," describing instead the grief and confusion she felt upon realising how disconnected and harmful our current food production is.

I love the way she highlights how language shapes our understanding. English often reinforces a linear, compartmentalised view—terms like "food system" reflect mechanised, industrial thinking. Instead, she invites us to imagine “relational, kin-centric foodways” that honor not just human relationships, but our connections to land, animals, and all living beings.

The industrial model creates detachment and disconnection. But there is so much to learn from Indigenous and other communities who have long cultivated foodways grounded in relationship and care. To move toward a more just and equitable foodways, we must begin in this space of connection—this is where true knowledge of food begins.