The kitchen that fuels the Akashinga vegan warriors

Since 2018, the Akashinga Back to Black Roots Kitchen and Garden has used a grant from VegFund to expand its mission. In 2019, IAPF’s Akashinga patrols managed one million acres across five parks, and the kitchen served 54,853 meals. The number of acres under management, rangers trained, and vegan meals provided continues to grow. IAPF plans to employ 1,000 female rangers as the Akashinga program scales from five parks to twenty by 2025.

Goals

• Develop healthy, plant-based meal plans and mindset for all Akashinga rangers and staff for the long term
• Extend the program to families of Akashinga staff
• Implement vegan awareness programs for communities
• Graduate leaders from six communities as plant-based mentors to plan, develop, and implement the program in additional communities

Approach

The Akashinga rangers come from rural villages where people typically eat meat. While at camp and on patrol in the field, the rangers eat plant-based meals. When they go home, they are free to eat what they choose, but while most rangers and staff were initially non-vegan, their compassion for wildlife has moved them to protect all animals instead of eating them. According to organizers, most of the women start to change their dietary behaviors at home within 3 to 6 months and eventually shift to plant-based eating.

This shift in their belief system has spread to their families, and most importantly, to their young children, who are now seeing both animals and food in a new light. Over the next five years, the Akashinga Back to Black Roots Vegan Kitchen and Garden will continue to gather data on their own families and how the program impacts their communities.

Akashinga Back to Black Roots Vegan Kitchen and Garden:

• Prepares healthy and tasty camp meals and tactical rations for Akashinga staff
• Focuses on reintroducing and encouraging traditional African eating habits
• Uses local, readily available traditional foods

Under Chef Cola’s supervision, the kitchen provides three meals a day to 171 people housed at IAPF’s camp in Nyamakati. Those on patrol carry rations to sustain them while in the bush. This process can be tricky because temperatures in Nyamakati are extremely hot, making food go bad quickly. And, for tactical reasons, rangers can’t keep fires going for cooking or reheating. The solution? A food dryer prepares dry fruits and vegetables that will travel well and be light in their packs.

Their work doesn’t stop at preparing nutritious meals and rations, though. The kitchen also raises awareness by discussing environmental conservation and animal welfare, from bushmeat poaching to the negative effects that eating meat has on their land and communities.

Setting up the kitchen

In its first two years, Back to Black Roots focused on developing long-term, healthy, plant-based meal plans and mindsets for the Akashinga rangers, staff, and their families. But in the bush, where there is no electricity, training staff on a whole new type of cooking takes extra planning:

• Developing knowledge and skills to run a plant-based kitchen
  • equipment requirements
  • quality and quantity control
  • standard operating procedures
  • standard cooking methods
  • basic knife skills
  • stock/storeroom controls
• Assessing food availability, from sourcing to menu development
• Learning about budgeting, planning meals, and developing recipes
• Starting a garden to supply the kitchen
• Outfitting chefs in uniforms, which encourages seriousness and professionalism
• Acquiring a solar dryer for food preservation

IAPF’s Akashinga Back to Black Roots Vegan Kitchen founder, Chef Cola, took an online course on plant-based nutrition through the T. Colin Campbell Center for Nutritional Studies of Cornell University in the United States. She also engaged a camp nutritionist to assess the Akashinga menu.

As time and resources allow, the Back to Black Roots Vegan Kitchen will expand its garden space and use low-impact tools and technology to reduce the kitchen’s reliance on food sources elsewhere. Plans include:

• Building a greenhouse
• Constructing a cabin for growing mushrooms
• Establishing an orchard to grow fruit such as lemons, oranges, mangoes, bananas, avocados, and sugar cane

Getting the word out

The next stage of the project is all about getting the word out. By advertising the kitchen’s activities in the bush to urban communities, they are able to share a vegan message far and wide. Outreach events that demonstrate the benefits of a vegan life include screening films such as The Game Changers (translated into the local Shona language) and hosting community dinners.

In 2019, Back to Black Roots Vegan Kitchen hosted three 25-guest dinners in Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe. There, IAPF founder Damien Mander spoke to an urban population on the vegan component of the Akashinga Camp (if you have a moment, be sure to watch his Tedx talk).

What’s next?

The Akashinga Back to Black Roots Vegan Kitchen and Garden is working to feed wildlife conservation patrols in Zimbabwe, and it’s ready to scale! When Akashinga began patrolling, rangers saw wildlife as infrequently as once a week. Now, they see the animals that they are protecting during every patrol! In fact, since mid-year 2016, they’ve seen a 90% reduction of elephant poaching. The next goal is to scale up to 1,000 female rangers by 2025, all fueled by plant-based meals. These rangers will patrol twenty parks. They are continuing to inspire the vegan movement in Zimbabwe and across the globe.

Story by Molly Elwood

Images courtesy of Brent Stirton and the International Anti-Poaching Foundation (IAPF)

Image of Chef Cola courtesy of Kim Butts, National Geographic