How Ghana’s young chefs are trying to make local food matter again

Abiro Wisdom learned catering, then decided he did not want the life that went with it. At Accra Technical University, the menu was international and highly polished: French, Italian and Mexican cuisine, the sort of training designed to place graduates in big hotels and keep them politely detached from where their food actually comes from. The dishes Wisdom grew up with in Bolgatanga, in northern Ghana, did not make the syllabus. That, for him, was the point.

He later joined the Ghana Food Movement, founded in 2019, and found a group with a rather unfashionable ambition: to make Indigenous Ghanaian ingredients desirable again, not merely symbolic. Ghana imports at least half of its food, and foreign cuisine still carries more prestige than it should. The movement argues that the country’s agricultural north, with its climate-resilient crops and vegetables, offers a practical answer to a food system that has become dependent on imports and oddly embarrassed by itself.

What started as a loose network of chefs, farmers, entrepreneurs and food-security specialists has since become a registered non-profit with its own kitchen in Accra, opened in 2024. The group uses that space to develop recipes and stage monthly pop-ups, dine-and-dance nights, panel discussions and tasting events for chefs and local businesses. The idea is simple enough to irritate the people who prefer food culture to stay decorative: show what Indigenous ingredients can do, and charge for it. Tigernut milk is familiar; tigernut burgers and tigernut kebabs make the point more forcefully.

Aimee Wallin, the group’s Malian-Swedish co-managing director, says the movement wants people to taste its ideas rather than merely hear them explained. That has led it into schools, where children are introduced to local ingredients before imported habits harden into default taste. Wisdom says the broader aim is to raise a generation of chefs who see Ghanaian food as having its own identity, not as a poor relation waiting for approval from abroad.

The politics of this are hardly subtle. Colonial food systems pushed cash crops such as cocoa and peanuts for export, while imported ingredients were treated as superior. That logic has not gone away; it has merely become more polite. Wallin argues that many local ingredients do not need extra agricultural inputs because they are already adapted to the environment, unlike the imported model that keeps countries dependent on foreign seeds, pesticides and fertilisers. When shipping is interrupted by war or crisis, the bill for that dependency arrives quickly.

There is also the matter of taste, which is never just taste. Younger Ghanaians are surrounded by heavily marketed trends such as matcha lattes, bubble tea and smash burgers. The movement does not pretend that nostalgia alone can compete with that. So it offers alternatives with a local accent: moringa lattes instead of matcha, tigernut shawarma instead of meat, plantain worked into several courses, and recipes that treat Indigenous ingredients as modern business, not museum pieces.

This month the Ghana Food Movement won a Champions of Change title at the 50 Best Restaurants Awards for its work. Awards do not repair food systems, of course; they merely notice them. But the group’s real argument is less glamorous and more durable. If Ghana wants control over what it eats, it will have to trust the knowledge already sitting with grandmothers, grandfathers and farmers in the communities. As Wallin and Wisdom see it, the country has spent long enough being told that the west knows best. The food on the plate suggests otherwise.

Written by Christiane Hofreiter christiane.hofreiter@alpineweekly.com