Anna Trapido has been named Food Writer of the Year at South Africa’s 2026 Galliova Awards, which recognise excellence in food and health media. The prize marks out a writer known for documenting South Africa’s indigenous and heritage foods rather than restaurant reviews or recipe trends. Trapido has built her reputation around this specialism, working as what she and others describe as an indigenous and heritage food specialist.
That focus places her inside a wider effort, seen across the continent, to record food knowledge that risks disappearing. Older generations are dying and farming patterns are changing fast. South Africa’s own kitchens hold Khoe, San, Nguni and settler influences that rarely reach cookbooks or restaurant menus. Writers in this space often trace a single ingredient or dish through family kitchens, oral histories and old recipe notebooks. That work can take years before a single article appears. The Galliova judges, in choosing Trapido, recognised that slower, research-heavy strand of food journalism.
South Africa’s indigenous and heritage food traditions run wide: wild spinach varieties such as morogo, fermented sorghum drinks and coastal shellfish-gathering practices that predate colonial contact by centuries. Little of this has a fixed place in food media built around restaurant reviews and recipe rankings. Specialists such as Trapido work to change that, one ingredient or dish at a time, and the Galliova win gives that effort a rare moment of mainstream recognition.
Heritage-food writing of this kind rarely pays well, and it competes for attention with faster-moving lifestyle content. South Africa’s awards, including Galliova, exist partly to counter that imbalance by rewarding depth over speed. Trapido’s win follows years of work that treats a forgotten recipe, a near-extinct grain or a family’s foraging knowledge as worth the same careful attention most publications reserve for restaurant openings and chef profiles. For readers in Kerala and the Gulf, used to watching old recipes and crafts fall out of use fast, the pattern will sound familiar. Heritage foodways everywhere face the same quiet pressure from modern diets and shrinking farmland.
A career built on patient documentation
Trapido has spent much of her working life on this patient documentation rather than on-trend food coverage. Profiles of her describe an approach built around long stretches in kitchens, markets and homes, gathering detail that often never makes it past a single paragraph in the final piece. That discipline sits closer to oral history and anthropology than to typical restaurant criticism, even though her work still appears in food and lifestyle outlets. The Galliova Awards cover both food and health media. Trapido’s win places heritage documentation inside that same bracket as nutrition writing and food-safety journalism. That is a sign of how broadly South Africa’s food-media industry now defines its own beat.
Why the recognition matters beyond South Africa
The recognition carries weight beyond South Africa’s own food-media circle. Indigenous and heritage food knowledge across the Global South faces similar risks almost everywhere. Climate pressure on traditional crops, migration away from rural kitchens and the pull of ultra-processed alternatives all erode food cultures built over generations. Writers who document that knowledge before it disappears give researchers, farmers and cooks a record to build from later. Trapido’s award will not solve that larger problem on its own. It does give public recognition to the kind of writing needed to slow it down, at a moment when few other incentives exist to reward that work. Her win is one small, specific marker of that wider, slower struggle.
