Food, land and seed activist Zayaan Khan

Pizza is just pizza, except when it’s political. Food, land and seed activist Zayaan Khan delights in the fact that baked dough with toppings can be both of these things at the same time, because food is how she tells the story of life.

For Khan, food, its origin stories from seed and land, and its potent symbolism of access, control, gluttony and waste are at the centre of what’s worth standing up for. And it’s how she’s come to add “activist” to the list of nouns that describe her.

Pushing back, challenging the status quo and walking unexpected paths came with Khan’s growing up years in the 1990s. Democracy arrived as a shiny new promise, then corroded fast into the rust of disappointment and more unanswered questions.

“I was about 10 years old when apartheid ended and it was like everything was going to change. But one year became a presidency term, another 10 years and now another 10 years,” says Khan. Her parents were among the people forced out of District Six. It yoked to her heritage hardened layers of rupture, disruption, separation and segregation.

Studying journalism at Rhodes University in the early 2000s was meant to be freedom from school but it only deepened her disenchantment. 

“I wasn’t learning anything and it wasn’t challenging so I dropped out and turned to plants and studied horticulture and landscaping instead. You can study plants for 150 years and there will still be something to learn.”

Plants, the environment, biodiversity and the interconnectedness of land, seed, rights and life moved into even sharper focus when she starting to work at the Surplus People Project (SPP), an NGO based out of Salt River that had as its mission statement: 

“Challenging neoliberal capitalism, power and patriarchy and to promote and advocate for agrarian reform for food sovereignty with strategic alliances… in the Northern and Western Cape.”

The reality beyond mission statements though was that Khan was still handing food out to people begging at traffic lights and living in one of the most beautiful cities in the world with one of the ugliest stories of inequality to tell.

“I grew up with the history of separation, with a chip on my shoulder of not being white enough but at the same time having privilege compared to others living in a city like Cape Town.

“I expected from democracy a response to poverty, not further alienation of people in need. I guess I also expected some kind of freedom and that never happened,” she says.

Her focus on land and its complex, varied meanings to different people also deepened her work of looking at humans’ relationship with food. Food and food rituals, after all, mark belonging and culture and connect us to those who’ve come before us. She also points out how industrialised food production has put distance between humans and indigenous knowledge; and consumerism in overdrive plays into the hands of corporate power with its patents and price tags.

“I do want to give voice to these ‘inanimate’ things like land and seeds and part of how I work is to find a way for people to hear the message,” says Khan. 

Khan says it’s become a journey that’s allowed her to know herself better, to find peace in her frailties, her body, her identities, and her religion. In turn, it allowed her to work with more personal authority and that in turn has had great impact.