26 September. New documentary The Ants and the Grasshopper This new documentary follows Anita Chitaya’s journey from her drought-hit village in Malawi to meet farmers and politicians in the US. For ten years, this documentary has been under production in Malawi and the United States.
Raj Patel, a professor of public affairs at the University of Texas at Austin and a member of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems, worked with the Soils, Food and Healthy Communities (SFHC) team for more than a decade, documenting Chitaya’s work in a film called The Ants & the Grasshopper.
Chitaya had first met Lupafya when she visited the pediatric nutrition clinic. The older woman, MamaLupafya as she is called, had supported her in a difficult marriage, one into which Chitaya had been coerced. Through attending workshops hosted by the SFHC, then by finding work as one of its trainers, and through long and difficult work in her home, Chitaya has transformed her marriage into one characterized by equality.
There are times when her husband, Christopher Nyoni, struggles to pull his weight in the house. He is afflicted by night blindness, a possible consequence of his own malnutrition early in life. When it gets dark, he is no longer able to cook or clean and needs help finding his way around the house. But by the light of day, he can be seen hunched over a stove or doing laundry or fetching water—all of which are traditionally women’s work. It is a sign of Chitaya’s success thatNyoni is keen to break with patriarchal tradition: “I do not want my son to get married the way I did,” he told me.
The pathway to transforming this and other gender relationships in Bwabwa lay through changing the culture around food. An initial effort to achieve this shift involved door-to-door organizing. Members of the SFHC would visit households with an expert and offer to teach men how to cook novel foods, such as soy. After an enthusiastic afternoon gathered around a stove, surrounded by exhortations to do better, the men promised they would change. They did not. So the SFHC farmers brainstormed an alternative.
A constant worry for men was the social stigma of doing the effeminate work of cooking. “What if my
friends see me?” asked Winston Zgambo. Having tried to cater to men’s embarrassment by offering private cooking lessons, the SFHC team tried the opposite. They held public cooking competitions for whole families. On Recipe Days, all men were involved in cooking—and it was fun. By gamifying the change in behavior through offering prizes and social recognition for success, the women cracked open the possibilities for changing not just food culture, but inequalities in power within the home.
Data from the SFHC’s work speak for themselves. Participation in the program moved children from being below the average weight for their age to surpassing the average. A recent study in which women farmers showed other mothers how to farm led to a range of benefits, from increased dietary diversity for children to lower maternal depression rates and higher rates of fathers’ participation in chores.
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