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Paper short abstract

Through sensory ethnography, this research explores how fire, water, earth, and air shape Southern African foodways, with shared meals as sites of storytelling, heritage, and embodied connection between people, place, and nature.

Paper long abstract

In Southern Africa, food practices are inseparable from the elements (fire, water, earth, and air) and the stories people tell around meals reveal the deep entanglement of nature, culture, and identity. Drawing on sensory ethnography and oral histories, this research documents individual accounts of how elemental forces shape culinary practices, food heritage, and community life. Through first-person narratives, participants describe cooking over fire, harvesting and preserving water- and earth-based ingredients, and incorporating air in rituals and food preparation, showing how these practices encode knowledge, memory, and ancestral connections.

The table emerges as a central site where these elements converge, transforming eating into a performative act of commensality. Shared meals become spaces for storytelling, remembrance, and the transmission of intangible heritage, where flavours, textures, and rituals embody histories of resilience, migration, and adaptation. These acts of eating and sharing reveal social hierarchies, inclusion, and solidarity, while simultaneously reflecting humans’ interconnectedness with the natural world.

By attending closely to lived experiences, this work demonstrates that foodways in Southern Africa are not merely sustenance but active, symbolic spaces where nature is transformed into culture. Elemental food practices, narrated, performed, and experienced, mediate relationships between people, place, and environment, preserving heritage and identity in the face of social and ecological change. This research situates commensality as a dynamic, multisensory performance, where storytelling and the materiality of food entwine to sustain memory, culture, and the elemental pulse of Southern African life.