Resilience and Collaboration: The Perspective I Bring to IFT

South Africa is a beautiful country, shaped by incredible diversity and remarkably resilient people, and I am proud to call it home. It is also a country of tremendous contrasts.

We have the highest level of inequality in the world, as measured by the Gini coefficient. You can find an informal settlement on one side of the road, where people can hardly scrape together enough money for their next meal, and seven-bedroom houses in sprawling golf estates on the other.

When you live in this reality and see hungry children on the streets, food and nutrition security cannot remain an abstract concept. You think differently about the food that is lost or wasted, about preservation, nutrition, access, and affordability, and about the role each of us can play in addressing these challenges.

My experiences growing up and working in South Africa have made me realize that without food and without feeding people, nothing else can happen. It is why I believe food science is such a noble profession and why the work of food system professionals is vital to the future of our planet.

Given how much food science has come to mean to me, it may be surprising that I found the profession sort of by accident. While still at school and deciding what degree to study, I underwent a three-hour psychometric test only to be told I should not pursue music or drama, which didn’t exactly narrow down my options. At Stellenbosch University, I happened to pick up a brochure about food science, a field I had never heard of, and thought it looked interesting. Halfway through my second year, I was hooked, and the rest, as they say, is history.

What fascinated me then, and still does today, was the applied nature of food science. I wanted to understand how raw peaches ended up in a can or how raw materials became bread. It was the intersection of science and engineering applied to something that is part of all our lives.

Soon after completing my bachelor’s degree and beginning my master’s program, I joined the Department of Food Science at Stellenbosch as a technical assistant. Back then, the department was on the brink of closure because of low student numbers. The food industry convinced the university that it could not afford to lose its food science department, but resources remained limited. We had to “beg, borrow, and steal” to find research funding, equipment, and colleagues across the university willing to collaborate with us.

That necessity became one of our greatest strengths.

Today, we collaborate across medical and health sciences, engineering, natural sciences, and economic and management sciences, as well as with industry partners, and our students work on research that addresses problems the food industry is facing. More than three decades after the department was nearly closed, we now have more students wanting to study food science than we can accommodate.

That experience shaped my belief that the challenges facing our profession and the global food system cannot be solved in isolation. Researchers need to understand the problems industry is experiencing, just as industry needs to understand the expertise and capabilities researchers can bring to solving them. Creating opportunities for different disciplines and sectors to come together is critical to moving our profession forward.

It is this ability to bring people together that I have always valued about IFT. My involvement with professional associations began as a graduate student with the South African Association for Food Science and Technology (SAAFoST), where I served on the council for 25 years, including a term as president. I remember attending SAAFoST congresses as a young scientist and meeting IFT presidents and world-leading food scientists, some of whose textbooks and research papers I had studied.

In the years since, IFT has become an important part of my own professional journey, connecting me with colleagues and perspectives from across the global food science community.

As I begin my term as IFT president, I am truly honored to serve a profession that has enriched my own life and career in so many ways. My experiences in South Africa have taught me the importance of resilience, but also that the greatest challenges we face require us to work together. I look forward to bringing that perspective to my term as president and to all that lies ahead for IFT and our profession.