Hi there, I'm Lale Arakoglu, and this is another episode of Women Who Travel.

I'm talking to Salasi Atardica. She's a Ghanaian chef, food educator, and also owns an artisanal chocolate business.

But more about that later in the show.

I'm going to tell you my love story for the food in the continent.

While traveling for the UN, Salasi visited, worked and ate her way through 40 African countries.

I'm speaking to her at her home in Akra, in a residential suburb.

The windows are open, they're singing from a house nearby, as well as the sounds of birdsong.

I learned so many amazing lessons from country to country.

It was interesting to me because I kept thinking to myself that I'm getting an opportunity to sort of see and taste what a lot of people don't know about, including Africans.

And so I coined the term New African cuisine when I came back.

It wasn't necessarily beautiful or cute or sexy food.

It was more about food that had a sense of place, food that was looking towards the future and not just about what you were

eating today, but, you know, what are we going to eat in 2050?

Many of the countries that I had been to had this idea, whether it was as intense as in Ethiopia,

when you have visitors at home, if they really want to show you true hospitality, they can

actually feed you with their hands.

And then in Senegal and in different parts of West Africa, including Ghana, there's a communal plate.

So everyone sits around a plate and we share the plate of food together.

Even in Ghana, in urban areas, like in Accra, if you go to an office on a Friday, sometimes you'll see the staff, even in a government office, eating a meal together or sharing breakfast together. So it's

really about community. My family moved to the U.S. when I was about six years old. And in our

mother tongue, there's a phrase which my dad would always kind of say when he would get home,

we'd have meals together. And it would be, va midunnu. Vamidunu means come, let's eat. And it was an

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