Healthy start
Duquesne-based chef is using her garden to educate her community
Nothing breaks Olafemi Mandley’s heart in the way that seeing people struggling to eat, and “living off of Cheetos and frozen pizzas” does.
Mama Ola, as she is affectionately known by her Duquesne community, for decades has shared the foods she loves with thousands of others through her catering business, Ola Appetit Catering Co. She also has hosted and cooked for 10 iterations of “The Taste of Africa” dinner in celebration of Black History Month.
“Cooking is entrenched in me,” she says. “I’ve always loved eating and making food.”
Her most recent endeavor is the creation of an educational garden in her backyard. She hopes it and the live demonstrations she plans to hold over the summer can serve as a tool for teaching people how to start their own subsistence gardens. Along with potting and growing methods, she’ll cover canning and cooking techniques.
“I had a garden I was not using and only realized how much I have been missing after I started collecting ingredients from it,” Ms. Mandley says. “I’m hoping people can learn a thing or two and then pass it along to others.”
The project came to life through a partnership with the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Ban’ks Sustainability Committee and Grounded Strategies, with the goal of reducing food insecurity and improving access to local food in Duquesne.
Volunteers from both organizations, in late April, helped install new raised beds, planted, moved soil and cleared walkways. They
also constructed a composter in the garden.
To fully understand the chef’s passion for cooking and gardening, one must first witness her other skills: fascinating storytelling and an impressive memory.
“I can vividly remember the first time I tried peanut butter, cookies, cheesecake, and pretty much everything else,” Ms. Mandley recalls. “I’ve also never had a piece of fried chicken or other classic African American foods like collard greens from my mother, nor have I had many sweets.”
Her mother, she explains, didn’t allow her and her siblings to have unhealthy greases and refined sugars, with only one rare exception: Honey Nut Cheerios.
She also remembers her first cooking experience as a preschooler: She sneaked into the kitchen to play around with her sister’s new Christmas gift, a chocolate
-making kit.
”I was having the time of my life”, she says. However, being a 5-year-old who had never tried chocolate, her first cooking product could better be described as a block of cocoa powder with no sugar, milk or butter.
“I remember thinking chocolate is much worse than I was expecting.”
Ms. Mandley credits her cooking style to her dad, who was creative and loved experimenting with different ingredients. She spent her teenage years in Trinidad and Tobago and also gained skills sitting at the table of Elsie Henderson, who cooked for such prominent Pittsburgh families as the Kaufmanns (at Fallingwater), Mellons and Heinzes, along with the Kennedy family at their summer estate in Hyannis Port, Mass.
While Ms. Mandley is among a relatively small number of women of color in
Pittsburgh’s cooking industry, she insists she is not a pioneer. “Women of color before me and from all around the world have paved the path I am on today,” she says.
One of those influential women was Nancy Green, the original face of the Aunt Jemima brand, which was changed to the Pearl Milling Company in 2021.
“I was very mad when they removed her picture from the pancake mix boxes … she was a Black cook, an image you can trust and relate to,” she says.
Ms. Mandley hopes her garden project will bring people together, just as her cooking has done for years now.
“Food is something that we can all enjoy … you don’t need an interpreter to set a plate down and enjoy it,” she says.