Your grandmother probably knew this plant. Her grandmother definitely did. Somewhere along the way, between the rise of supermarkets and the slow erosion of indigenous food knowledge, millions of South Africans stopped eating one of the most nutritious vegetables on the continent. Amaranth. Known as thepe in Sesotho, Sepedi and Setswana. Imbuya in isiZulu and isiXhosa. Misbredie in Afrikaans. Morogo or marog to people across Gauteng, Limpopo, the North West and Mpumalanga. You may have pulled it out of your garden as a weed without realising you were discarding something worth more, nutritionally speaking, than most of what you buy at Pick n Pay. This article is your reintroduction. Amaranth is not just a survival food or a poverty food or a township food. It is a genuine superfood that health stores in Europe and the United States now sell in capsule form at R400 a bottle. And you can grow enough of it to feed your family from a single five-litre bucket.

Imagine a food crop that you plant once and never have to plant again. A crop that survives drought, frost, poor soil, and total neglect. A crop that produces kilograms of nutritious tubers underground while growing bright yellow sunflowers above the surface. A crop that spreads on its own, feeds your family through winter, and actually becomes harder to get rid of than to grow.