The recipe that didn’t need a rebrand

Her grandmother never called it ancestral eating. She called it dinner. She called it the thing you made on a Sunday when the market had good yam, or when the lamb was cheap enough, or when someone was coming round and you wanted them to feel it in their chest before they even sat down. There was no hashtag. No origin story typed out in a clean sans-serif font beneath a photograph of dried spices arranged on linen. Just knowledge, passed hand to hand, adjusted for what was available, kept alive by repetition and by love and sometimes by necessity.

That knowledge is real. The desire to return to it, or to hold onto it, is real. And the harm done when people are cut off from it, by migration, by poverty, by the long colonial project of telling certain communities that their food was inferior, primitive, unhygienic, too strong-smelling for the office, too unfamiliar for the school canteen, that harm is real too. So when a movement rises up to say: traditional food matters, food sovereignty matters, knowing where your food comes from and having the right to grow and eat and cook it matters, that movement is saying something true and something urgent.

But somewhere between that truth and the wellness industry’s version of it, something gets quietly replaced.

What food sovereignty actually means

The term food sovereignty was coined in 1996 by La Via Campesina, a global movement of small farmers, peasants and indigenous communities. It was a political concept, rooted in land rights, in the right of peoples to define their own food systems rather than have them dictated by global trade agreements and multinational corporations. It was about who controls seeds, who controls land, who gets to decide what gets grown and sold and eaten, and who gets locked out of those decisions. It was about the woman farming in the Philippines, the smallholder in West Africa, the indigenous community in Bolivia whose food system had been systematically dismantled to make room for export crops that fed other countries while local people went hungry.

It was, in other words, a concept born from dispossession. From the experience of having something taken.

That context matters. Because when “food sovereignty” migrates into mainstream wellness culture, it tends to arrive stripped of that history. It becomes, instead, a personal practice. A set of choices an individual makes about how to eat. Buy local. Eat seasonally. Return to your roots. Know your farmer. And those things aren’t wrong, exactly. But they describe something much smaller than what the original movement was reaching for. They describe a lifestyle, not a political claim.

When the trend lands, and who it lands on

Think about how “ancestral eating” looks in its current cultural life. The cookbook with the earth-toned cover. The Instagram account with 200,000 followers, fermented everything, sourdough starter named after a grandmother. The wellness influencer talking about “getting back to traditional foods” while selling a supplement range. The retreat where you pay several hundred pounds to learn to cook the way your great-great-grandmother supposedly did, before the industrial food system corrupted everything.

There’s a particular irony here that deserves to be named plainly. Many of the foods now being celebrated as ancient wisdom, as superfoods, as the key to gut health and longevity, turmeric, moringa, miso, teff, berbere, bitter melon, black seed, have been eaten by Black, Asian and minority ethnic communities for generations. Not as a wellness practice. As food. As medicine passed between women in kitchens. As the thing your mum put in the pot without measuring because she didn’t need to measure it. As something ordinary and specific and theirs.

And those same communities watched their food be dismissed, sometimes by the very institutions meant to care for them. Told by doctors that their diet was the problem. Told by schools that their children’s lunches smelled wrong. Told by the housing estate’s one supermarket that the ingredients they needed weren’t stocked. The knowledge was there. The access, often, wasn’t.

Now the knowledge has been aestheticised. Packaged. Sold back, often at a premium, to people who never had to defend it in the first place.

The cost of the rebrand

When food culture becomes a lifestyle brand, a few things happen, and they’re worth sitting with carefully.

The first is that cost goes up. “Ancestral” and “traditional” become premium descriptors. Heritage grains. Small-batch ferments. Ethically sourced this, traditionally prepared that. The woman who has been eating this way her whole life, not as a trend but as a practice inherited from her mother, often can’t afford the branded version of her own food culture. The ingredients she grew up with now cost three times as much in the health food shop as they do in the market two streets over, if she’s lucky enough to live near a market that stocks them at all. The wellness economy has monetised the very thing it claims to be recovering.

The second is that the political content disappears. Food sovereignty as a concept was about structural power: land rights, seed patents, trade policy, the right of communities to feed themselves on their own terms. When it becomes a personal wellness practice, those questions evaporate. The focus shifts from “who controls the food system” to “what am I putting in my body”. Both matter. But they’re not the same question, and collapsing one into the other lets the structural question go unanswered.

The third is subtler, and maybe more painful. When a food tradition gets repackaged for a mainstream wellness audience, it often gets simplified. Flattened into a story that’s easy to sell: pure, ancient, healing, uncomplicated. Real food traditions are none of those things, or not only those things. They’re adaptive. They change with migration and circumstance and what was available and affordable. They carry grief alongside joy. They hold the memory of shortage as well as abundance. A woman cooking her grandmother’s recipe in a new country may be using different ingredients, different equipment, a different stove. The dish is still hers. The knowledge is still alive. But the wellness industry’s version of “traditional food” tends to freeze it in an imagined past, which erases the living, changing, surviving reality of how communities actually eat.

What gets lost when the story gets sold

There’s a woman who knows exactly how much ginger to grate by feel. She learned it by watching, not by following a recipe card. She knows which cut of meat will work with which spice because her body knows it, the same way you know how to walk without thinking about your feet. That knowledge lives in her hands. It was never written down. It doesn’t have a brand identity.

That kind of knowledge is fragile in ways that have nothing to do with wellness trends. Migration disrupts it. Poverty disrupts it. The death of an elder disrupts it. The simple fact of not having time disrupts it, because that knowledge takes time to pass on, and a lot of women are not given time. When food sovereignty is rebranded as a lifestyle movement, it tends to treat the recovery of traditional food as a matter of individual effort and consumer choice. Go back to your roots. Seek out the old ways. But it rarely asks why those ways were interrupted in the first place, or what it would actually take to protect them.

The interruption wasn’t accidental. Colonial food systems deliberately displaced indigenous and traditional food practices. Enslavement severed people from their food cultures and forced new ones. Structural racism has meant that communities of colour have consistently faced worse access to fresh food, higher rates of food insecurity, and less representation in the food industry, while simultaneously watching their food traditions absorbed into mainstream culture without credit or compensation. The trend doesn’t address any of that. It borrows the aesthetic and leaves the history on the floor.

Holding onto what’s real

None of this means the impulse to return to traditional food is wrong. It isn’t. The desire to cook the way your grandmother cooked, to understand what your body was built for, to feel connected to something older and more rooted than the meal-deal aisle, that desire is honest and it deserves to be taken seriously.

What it doesn’t deserve is to be sold back to you at a markup, stripped of its context, and renamed as a personal wellness journey. The food was already yours. The knowledge was already there, in your family, in your community, in the woman who knows things she never had to learn from a book because she learned them from someone who learned them from someone else, all the way back.

Protecting that is a different kind of work from buying into a trend. It looks like sharing recipes across generations before they’re lost. It looks like community growing projects and food co-ops and market stalls that stock what people actually cook. It looks like pushing back against the food deserts that leave whole neighbourhoods without affordable fresh produce. It looks like refusing to let the health system tell a woman that the food her culture has eaten for centuries is the problem, when the problem is far more likely to be stress, poverty, overwork, and a healthcare system that hasn’t always taken her seriously.

Food sovereignty, the real kind, is about all of that. It’s about the right to eat in a way that is culturally meaningful, affordable, accessible and self-determined. Not as a lifestyle choice. As a right.

The grandmother who didn’t call it ancestral eating knew that already. She was just trying to make dinner.