A few months ago I was driving towards Muizenberg along the M3, heading for a dive or possibly the pretence of a dive just so I could stop in Simon’s Town for a chocolate eclair. And on the side of the busy freeway was a sight so Mad Max, so dystopian, I almost smashed my car into the middle-mannetjie oleanders.

Walking along the side of the road was a man so blackened by dirt that if it wasn’t for the streamers of his crow clothes flapping, he would have merged with the tar. Dangling from one hand was a huge dead hadeda, its wings dragging along the road, head bobbing. Maybe it was breakfast, or possibly lunch, destined to be spit-roasted on a fire in the encampment that has sprung up in a swampy hollow just a blood spatter from Cape Town’s fancy suburb of Constantia.

It was the only evidence I’ve seen that the roadkill food trend had finally reached our shores.

The image stayed with me the whole morning, as I milled around the South Peninsula, where people in expensive comfortable clothes pay other people in expensive comfortable clothes to teach them how to forage kelp and confetti bush to fashion into lasagne. I wondered quite a lot about sewage and whether it infuses kelp with a certain umami flavour.

After burning my nose and trying to lie on a beach near a bouncy Rottweiler, I stopped off at the organic shop on the way home and witnessed a shopper demand that the cashier not scan her items as the rays from the scanning device were harmful not just to her but to the groceries she had bought. Brain damage is real, people.

I browsed the fridges, prodded some cashew cheese, bought a pear and ate it while driving, scanning the road for Mad Max. And I thought what a funny world this is. How is it that millions of people have nothing to eat while others have so much to eat? And why is it that cities plant poisonous oleanders on highways? And why is kombucha even a thing?

This year has been interesting, if not predictable, as far as middle-class food trends go. Because I chose to do a humanities degree, due to my passion for Descartes’ evil-demon theory and a possible crush on a sandal-wearing boy whose name escapes me, I am now poor. So I cannot comment on what’s been going down in fine-dining restaurants. But I believe pork belly is no longer the plat du jour, and I’m optimistic that “soil” is now just that: loamy, filled with earthworms and, in my case, a substrate in which half-dead cherry tomato plants can wither.

But I am middle class enough to know that vegetables are in, juicing the hell out of them is too, as is kimchi, fermented gnats (nah, I made that up), meat that isn’t meat, turmeric, charcoal bread (even our local Spar sells it). And kombucha.

In 1623, when I was a naive humanities scholar and Descartes was in his prime, my housemate and I unwittingly made kombucha. We had skin problems and I was a bit fat, so when my housemate’s mother gave us a jar of tea topped by a wobbly, gelatinous disc that she swore would turn us into Claudia Schiffer, we pounced on it. “It’s from the East,” her mother said.

Back then, swamis and Alphaville’s Big In Japan were a thing. So we pounced some more. And for months we dutifully downed a glass of the stuff every morning, and gave the scoby a name: Gertrude the Great. We tended to her, making sure her tea remained clear and not cloudy. At one point we thought she was dying, and I was secretly happy, as my spots were still there and I’d gained three kilos. Eventually, a new fad came along, thankfully involving Black Label quarts and vegetable rotis from the university pub, and Gertrude was left to rot in the fridge along with the cabbage and opened tins of two-week-old tuna. And I thought those days of vile tea were over.

But, evidently, Gertrude’s life force was strong. And now every eatery with enough delicious monsters in the window to prove its relevance is serving kombucha. Except, instead of being some alien mothership of mysterious cosmic wonder, it now comes packaged in bottles with pretty labels, and is flavoured with begonias and buchu, hand-plucked at dawn. Granted, the flavouring helps. It disguises the tart, fermented-underpants taste. And, yes, I am aware of its purported health benefits: probiotics, vitamins and its anti-inflammatory properties, but I can’t help feeling – and hoping – it’s just another trend that will soon be replaced by something equally vile, like pickled restio leaves or flaked Drakensberg termites.

Another fad that has reached our shores is seitan, one of the growing number of meat substitutes beloved of vegans and overpriced burger joints. Made by washing wheat until it’s reduced to insoluble gluten, it’s become an alternative to tofu and is often sold as vegan “ribs” or some form of bacon. And every time I eat it, I am reminded of those gnawed bits of animal hide puppies leave lying around lounges. True, my teeth are from the 1600s, but even fresh sets of choppers would struggle with the stuff. And because it’s essentially just congealed wheat sweat, and is therefore flavourless and bland, overpriced burger joints often cunningly coat it in a sticky marinade that transforms it into a mustardy toffee apple. But I never learn. There is surely a word for food amnesia – foodgetfulness? – that sees us ordering the same meal over and over again, despite the fact that the last time we ate it, and the time before that, we shoved the plate aside and proclaimed that it was “sis”. With seitan, I think it’s the name that keeps luring me in: a demonic thing that promises to satiate. Like Beelzebub at a flaming Sambuca bar, I keep going back.

With veganism hogging the limelight this year, bringing with it a slew of new foods and ingredients, kale has, thankfully, retreated into the shadows. Sorry, Woolworths, you were a tad late to the party. My father, a man of farming stock who has a taste for roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, once told me that in the olden days, kale was used as fodder for sheep. And when it burst onto the foodie scene, it seemed not much had changed – flocks of hungry-looking yogis snapped the stuff up as though it were an elixir that, when juiced and rolled around in coconut oil, would bring eternal life.

Because I have a tacit relationship with the sun salutation and sometimes get tangled up with the occasional chakra, I have tried with kale. Like, really tried. The only time I didn’t pull a face was during a breakfast at Tasty Table in Simon’s Town, where they flash-fry the kale so it’s crisp and curled and bears little resemblance to the bitter, heinous leaf that it is. Good riddance, kale. May you go on to nourish a thousand sheep in northern Cumbria.

As a new year cracks open, it will bring new food trends and eating experiences. Food & Wine magazine, that American bastion of nourishment, predicts that 2020 will be the year of open-hearth cooking, sustainable ingredients, “hyper-regional” meals, communal dining and bread. With South Africa grappling with all the terminal stages of load shedding and riding the sine waves of soaring food prices, this bodes well for us – we’ll be veritable trendsetters. When the power goes out and we’re plunged into darkness, we’ll light the braai, throw a few foraged geraniums onto the coals and settle back into the gloom with a wodge of bread, laughing quietly and wondering what will come next.

And in a swampy hollow near a freeway bridge, a dark shape will huddle next to the embers of a burning log, picking feathers out of his teeth and swatting away the glare of headlights. DM

Helen Walne is an aspirant vegan who detests food snobs, kale fascists, tartare sauce and misplaced apostrophes on menus, but is very fond of broccoli.