The Word That Stopped Fitting
On titles, proximity, and what institutions miss when the name on the door is wrong.
For over a decade, the word attached to my name was chef.
It opened rooms. It let the conversation start somewhere warm and familiar before it went anywhere true. And it meant that ESG leads, cocoa buyers, and development officers often heard "menu" when I was talking about policy.
This year I turned fifty, and it stopped fitting.
What the Title Obscured
Before there was a kitchen involved at all, the work was humanitarian response. Years in food insecurity and emergency settings across the continent, watching what happens when the systems meant to support people break down. That experience shaped everything that came after: a decade building Midunu in Accra, producing chocolate at origin in Ghana, and always returning to the same question.
What do communities already know that gets systematically underpriced by the markets built around them?
Chocolate makes the pattern visible. The value in a chocolate bar accumulates almost entirely outside the country that grew the beans. The farmer's knowledge, the pruning cycles, the fermentation windows, decades of judgment about the land: none of it appears on a balance sheet. When that knowledge ages out, the industry notices the loss in yield data, years after the loss actually happened.
The same pattern repeats across the food system. Indigenous grains that outperform imports on nutrition and climate resilience, absent from policy because nobody priced them. Preservation techniques that build food safety into the process itself, filed under tradition instead of technology. The knowledge is not missing. It has been miscategorized, and what gets miscategorized gets left out of every institutional response built on top of it.
What a Strategist Asks That an Auditor Does Not
A sustainability consultant measures a supply chain against an external framework: certifications, traceability, carbon metrics. Real. Necessary. And all downstream of a question that rarely gets asked first: what does this system already contain that the framework was never built to see?
That is the food systems question, and it changes what gets commissioned.
For a cocoa buyer or luxury brand. The audit becomes the starting point, not the strategy. The strategy is understanding what the supply chain is losing that the audit will never measure.
For a development finance institution. The question shifts from how to modernize smallholder agriculture to which indigenous practices are already resilient at the scale being funded into existence.
For a cultural institution. African food knowledge moves from a heritage brief to a value brief: knowledge with real commercial worth that has been priced as folklore.
Answering that question cannot be done from a distance. It requires proximity to origin. Being on the land, in the communities, in relationship with the people who hold the knowledge, close enough to hear what the report was too far away to ask.
What Changes Now
Nothing about the underlying work changes. The kitchen remains one of the rooms where the work happens, and one of my favorites. The tables, the chocolate, the writing, the installations: all of it continues.
What changes is that the title finally describes the work correctly. Food systems strategist. Which means the right conversations can start from the first sentence instead of the third.
Call Forward
💼 If your organization is working on cocoa, food security, supply chains, or cultural knowledge, and the response so far has been designed from a distance, this is the work I do: advisory engagements, consulting, speaking, and board service, grounded in two decades of proximity to origin.
👉🏾 Work with me
For the weekly letter on food, inheritance, and value at origin: Substack