Women Who Travel Podcast: Running a Chocolatier and Nomadic Dining Experience Out of Accra, Ghana

05.12.2024 - 23:33 / cntraveler.com

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Selassie Atadika is a chef, food innovator, and the founder of Midunu, a nomadic private dining experience based out of Accra, Ghana. She’s also happened to have visited 40 African countries. Lale chats with Atadika about the rich bounty of diverse cuisine to be found across Africa, some of her most memorable travel experiences, and the enduring intersection of food and politics.

Lale Arikoglu: Hi there. I'm Lale Arikoglu. And this is another episode of Women Who Travel. I'm talking to Selassie Atadika. She's a Ghanaian chef, food educator and also owns an artisanal chocolate business. But more about that later in the show.

Selassie Atadika: I am going to tell you my love story for the food in the continent.

LA: While traveling for the UN, Selassie visited, worked and ate her way through 40 African countries. I'm speaking to her at her home in Accra, in a residential suburb. The windows are open, they're singing from a house nearby as well as the sounds of Birdsong.

SA: I learned so many amazing lessons from country to country. It was interesting to me because I kept thinking to myself that I'm getting an opportunity to see and taste what a lot of people don't know about, including Africans. And so I coined the term new African cuisine when I came back, it wasn't necessarily beautiful or cute or sexy food. It was more about food that had a sense of place. Food that was looking towards the future and not just about what you were eating today, but what are we going to eat in 2050?

Many of the countries that I had been to had this idea whether it was as intense as an Ethiopia when you have visitors at home. If they really want to show you true hospitality, they can actually feed you with their hands. And then in Senegal and in different parts of West Africa, including Ghana, there's a communal plate. So everyone sits around a plate and we share the plate of food together. Even in Ghana, in urban areas, like in Accra, if you go to an office on a Friday, sometimes you'll see the staff. Even in a government office eating a meal together or sharing breakfast together. So it's really about community.

My family moved to the US when I was about six years old. And in our mother tongue, there's a phrase which my dad would always say when he would get home, we'd have meals together. And it would be, "Vamidanu." Vamidanu means come, let's eat. And it was an invitation, and it's always something that you never ate alone, and food was shared and was communal. And so that for me was the first principle was this idea of weed and community.

LA: That saying that your father would use when you would