What if the food your grandmother cooked was not just a meal — but a memory that could heal you?

In Episode 131 of Listen To Your Footsteps, Kojo Baffoe sits down with Mokgadi Itsweng — plant-based food activist, award-winning chef and author of Veggielicious — for one of the most honest and deeply rooted conversations the show has ever produced.

Mokgadi's story moves from a childhood in Mamelodi and Umlazi, through the kitchens of Brooklyn's Madiba restaurant, a personal health crisis, and back to the indigenous African ingredients her grandmother always knew were medicine. Sorghum, morogo, millet, hibiscus — not bird feed. Sovereignty on a plate.

Together, Kojo and Mokgadi explore grief and purpose, the politics of seeds and who controls what Africa eats, the tension between freedom and structure, raising a child who resists everything you believe in, and why cheap food always costs you more in the end.

This is a conversation about food. But it is really a conversation about memory, identity and healing.

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