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People’s Choice: The Top Ten most read food stories of 2023

People’s Choice: The Top Ten most read food stories of 2023
(Photo: Horst Koenemund on Pixabay)
Tony Jackman
By Tony Jackman
15 Dec 2023
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The biggest TGIFood story of the year by far, our examination of grocery titans playing off in the country’s malls, beat off strong contenders. But, with more than 123,000 reads, our story about the Big Three store giants battling for your footfall proved that mall culture is a massive thing in our lives.

Woolworths has always been a hard act to beat for quality food shopping, we wrote in May, but there are challengers in the mall who would lure your footfall out of Woolies’ stores and into their own. And they mean serious business. This was far and away the most-read food story of 2023.

In second place was a very hard-hitting piece about the V&AWaterfront which was shared like crazy on social media and discussed on radio.

Here’s the top 10 in full, followed by the author and the numbers of reads:

1


Woolworths. Checkers, Pick n Pay? Food store giants are battling for your footfall, by Tony Jackman 123,652 (See main photo)

The cult of Woolies has for many years seen moneyed South Africans filling up their trolleys with fine fare on their way home from work and lining up at the tills, happy to pay a premium for quality, we wrote in May. 

This has been the habit of many for years, even decades, since Woolies went with big guns blazing to corner that sector of the growing market, as food turned from mere essential eating into a cultural phenomenon. But now the cult is being challenged, and Woolies is having to look to its well-burnished laurels.

That we even have a nickname for our fancy food store of choice — Woolies — makes it an even higher mountain to climb for both of the challengers. But boy do they mean business, with millions being put into creating eye-catching food departments in their newbuild stores or others that have been and are being revamped. One factor that both Checkers and Pick n Pay have to contend with is the loyalty bond Woolies has with its customer base. Many will not easily be pried away.

Enter, from stage left, Checkers FreshX, and from stage right, a Pick n Pay brand re-envisaged. Holding firm at centre stage is Woolworths, whose top-notch Woolworths Food stores are impossible to miss in many high-end malls, and they too, in their newer guises, have had a smart revamp. 

Click the link above for the full story.

2


V&A Waterfront: consuming itself, a greedy bite at a time, by Tony Jackman 69,669

Victoria Wharf, established in 1992. This then young reporter stood beneath its girders with its architect, the visionary David Jack, before the roof was put on. (Photo: Tony Jackman)



It’s the Monaco of Cape Town, a playground for the super-rich in a city infamously neglectful of its poor, we wrote in February. Cut off, more than ever, from the city of which it is supposedly a part, it has become obsessed with itself and its advancement, the sybarite at the dinner table, the narcissist you once thought you knew. It’s time to hit pause.

Three decades on, developments continue apace at Cape Town’s V&A Waterfront. Will its development ever end before there’s no space left for the ships? Before we all struggle to remember what anything ever looked like in its nascent days?

Revisiting the V&A Waterfront in Cape Town decades after you first stood under the steel girders of what was to become its flagship mall is a strange experience. How could there be so much of everything? How do you find your way any more? Any focus has long perished; in its place, a perplexing maze of brick, steel and glass, punctuated with bobbing boats with their skippers touting for your custom, almost everything designed to enthral and inspire. But collectively its effect is to overwhelm and confuse.

Everything is expensive. The clothes are expensive, the art, the appliances, the food, the coffee, even the Coke. Nothing here (unless you count the ever-obscure fast food section, which has always seemed like a reluctant sop to the rank and file) speaks to the ordinary person with a monthly budget to come out on and all the pressures most of us face. It is there for the fat-wallet tourist more than for the people of the city it is meant to serve. The Waterfront is not separated from the city it serves by design or artifice; it is separated from most of us by having done too much too fast, for too long, and it has lost its charm and character somewhere along the way.

Go away from the Waterfront for five minutes and when you return there’ll be another new development, another renovation, another innovation. Something will be gone, something new will be coming soon, all manner of other things will be pending.

And off it goes again…

Click the link above for the full story.

3


Klein Karoo estate beats world’s biggest producers to win best single varietal olive oil, by Georgina Crouth 54,745

De Rustica estate in the Swartberg. (Photo: Supplied)



When you’re up against the best in the world, you have to truly dazzle to stand out as the best of the best, we wrote in May. And in a blind tasting, uninfluenced by country of origin, colour suggestions, or other biases, only the nose (and palate) truly knows.

A blind tasting of a thousand olive oils has unmasked the world’s finest olive oil and it’s produced right here, on a “farm in Africa”.

The De Rustica Estate Collection Coratina has been recognised “best in class” at the international Evooleum Awards in Spain for 2023, which includes best monovarietal/single cultivar; best Coratina; best “mixture green and ripe fruity”; and best from South Africa.

It then went on to win the “absolute best olive oil” at the competition overall categories, winning 97 points out of 100.

Click the link above for the full story.

4


Fried! – any thought you had that air fryers were a passing fad, by Tony Jackman 35,308

(Photo: Louis Hansel on Unsplash)



In the context of the history of the world, convection ovens were introduced just the other day and air fryers last week, we wrote in April. Microwave ovens? Their days may yet be numbered. Perhaps. But air fryers aren’t going anywhere just yet. Here’s why.

It all comes down to one word: crisp. We like food that is crispy, that has crunch, and it is frying that gives us that pleasure. In a juicy steak fried golden brown but tender inside. In a hasselback potato or a perfect chip. 

Yet, frying went out of fashion in the headlong rush to eat only the healthiest of healthy food, and frying became seen as unhealthy. Which is why you often find the word “healthy” in the labelling and packaging of air fryers. There is still fat when “frying” in one — there can be no frying without it — but there is so little of it that it is considered insignificant or no consequence.

Which ignores one small salient point: yes, we do cook our chips in lots of fat when deep frying them the old-fashioned way in a deep pot of hot oil. But we discard almost all of that fat. Do you really drink the oil? No, we don’t. So the actual difference in the amount of fat used for cooking that chip in a pot of oil and that chip straight out of the air fryer is minimal.

Click the link above for the full story.

5


The rise of the Jozi super-deli, by Marie-Lais Emond 30,001

It’s easy to recognise as a deli. You walk in and have a pretty good idea of what’s going on. (Photo: Adi Cohen)



When David Higgs opened The Pantry, a new Jozi culture was born, we wrote in October. Something like a deli crossed with a posh grocery. Welcome to the Joburg super-deli.

In Jozi are the forerunners of something else, what we could call the super-deli. Pantry by Marble, or what we locals just call The Pantry, probably started it all. We had a good wander around two otherdelis as well: Cremalat in Hyde Park, and @deli by Acsiopolis in Sandton.

Click the link above for the full story.

6


Boeremark in Silverton: from farm to fork with bustling adventure in between, by Marie-Lais Emond 28,723

The Skaapkraal Padstal, one of the big musts of the Boeremark. (Photo: Marie-Lais Emond)



Now THIS is a real market. Bring a torch and some hiking boots to snap up some of Pretoria’s premier farmers’ produce, we wrote in July.

By the time I arrived at seven, there were already hundreds of cars parked and more hundreds trying to do so, a no-nonsense woman in khaki directed the parking in the huge lot, shouting in Afrikaans “Daai kant, verder!” 

There are thousands of shoppers and visitors that get up very, very early on their Saturdays because this place is so worth their while to get the early worms, before the market winds down at 9.30am. Some stalls stay on for a while but, as AB’s friend, Janetjie says, “If you arrive at 10 and know what you want and where to find it quickly, there’s still a chance of getting it, though the market would have started dissipating.”

Click the link above for the full story.

7


Retailer gives fish paste the best news ever: It’s back! By Tony Jackman 28,687

It's true: fish paste is back on Pick n Pay shelves. (Photo: Supplied)



It is confirmed. When we heard it only on Thursday night we thought, nah, that’s too good to be true, we wrote in October. We even checked the calendar: no, it’s not April 1st. So, at cock’s crow on Friday morning, half the staff of Pick n Pay were the target of a barrage of emails from your TGIFood Editor. Was it true? Could it be? Is the dearth really over? Is fish paste back on the shelves?

And the answer was an emphatic yes. What’s more, said a senior group press officer. “It’s back for good!”

But wait, there’s even more: it’s not only Redro that’s back. Or only Peck’s Anchovette. It’s both of them. The brands are in 50-plus Pick n Pay stores throughout the Western Cape as of now, and the retailer promises that they will be in stores nationwide “within the next two weeks”.

Click the link above for the full story.

8


Monis sherry quietly exits the market, by Georgina Crouth 28,347

(Photo: wbe1951 on Pixabay)



Sherry, as a category, has seriously declined and so has its appreciation, we wrote in September. Those who drink it are considered to be niche consumers, who are also not necessarily willing to pay for the investment that goes into the product, an industry insider explained. That’s largely because of the time it takes to produce the wine, and consumers don’t want to pay high prices for the quality, so producers were simply not getting the return on investment.

Cathy Marston blames a lack of marketing in South Africa. In the UK, Sherry is popular, especially among younger drinkers. There, much of the recent success for Sherry came about as a cocktail ingredient, a trend that is yet to pick up here. “It also doesn’t help that almost all South Africans think Sherry is sweet. [My] students are shocked when I tell them that the vast majority of proper Sherry is a dry wine.”

Click the link above for the full story.

9


The Cape Town hotel ‘village’ that guards its architect’s legacy, by Lin Sampson 25,958

Cape Town's Dorp hotel and its owner Gail Behr Clockwise from top left: Gail Behr on the stoep of her Gardens home (image by Jac de Villers); her famous roast chicken, and (below) a wallpaper detail from Dorp Hotel. (Hotel and chicken images supplied; Collage: Tony Jackman)



Dorp Hotel, high up in Schotsche Kloof, took two years to build, but like all great works, it had played in the mind of its creator over most of her lifetime, over numerous houses she had renovated, rebuilt, designed; old barns, suburban villas, tumbledown ruins. Her gift to the Mother City: Dorp Hotel, and her extraordinary roast chicken. We wrote this story in March.

The extraordinary creative force that was Gail Behr died too young but she left a legacy: Dorp Hotel at the top of the Bo-Kaap, Cape Town. It is her autobiography which we can all share.

When it comes to hotels, she has form. She always ran her own houses like hotels but her first venture in commercial hotels was The Grand in Plettenberg Bay, a jewel with high beds overlooking the sea, large jars of Liquorice All Sorts, a lot of sucked peppermint pink and chamomile greens and footstools covered in fuchsia velvet.

Click the link above for the full story.

10


Revenge of the Killer Air Fryer, a modern horror story, by Tony Jackman 23,784

(Photo: Horst Koenemund on Pixabay)



There’s an alien in your kitchen. It’s been there for some time, sitting on the counter, glaring at you. You’re trying to get a handle on exactly what to do with it. Just what kind of a beast is it, really? What kind of a threat does it pose? What is its true agenda? Is it safe? Can you sleep soundly at night? Are we all to be murdered in our beds?

That was my story from February, when we launched our regular AirFryday feature, the latest of which, published today, offers an air fryer recipe for Christmas mince pies. Click the link above for the full horror story. DM

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