Keya van As: Anti-Inflammatory Food That Never Forgets to Comfort

Keya's relationship with food started young, in what she affectionately calls "girl science," tinkering with recipes to make them healthier just for the fun of it. But that early love did not run in a straight line. As a teenager, she drifted away from cooking almost entirely, as diet culture reshaped how she saw food.

"I lost that love for cooking through diet culture," she says.

For a stretch of her teenage years, food felt like something to keep at arm's length rather than something to enjoy.

The turn came in 2022, when Keya joined the yachting world, working at the time as a stewardess. On her off days she kept gravitating toward the galley, cooking and helping wherever she could, and something clicked into place. "I'd rather be doing this on the boats than what I was doing at the time," she says. When her captain offered her the chance to cook on board, she took it. That single yes set the course for everything that followed.

After roughly two years cooking on yachts, Keya decided to formalize what she had been teaching herself, enrolling in culinary school and earning her diploma. She returned to yachting as a sous chef and took on land-based private chef work as well, moving in and out of professional kitchens. She has since stepped back from that world to focus on recipe content creation full time, but the training gave shape and vocabulary to instincts she had already spent years building.

The heart of Keya's cooking is anti-inflammatory food that never feels like a punishment. She takes dishes people assume are off-limits, curries, stews, and street treats among them, and shows they can be nourishing without giving up their warmth. Her point is that eating well should not mean surviving on steamed broccoli and plain chicken breast. Much of her cooking is also shaped by her own experience with PMOS (Polyendocrine Metabolic Ovarian Syndrome). A good share of what she creates is PMOS-friendly, built around hormone support for women as much as around comfort.

"Comfort is such a huge part of healing," she says.

It is a quietly radical stance in a wellness world that often frames progress as something waiting on the far side of discomfort. For Keya, a warm bowl of food shared with someone you love is not a detour from healing. It is part of it. Her own go-to, a lemony chicken and leek stew, is exactly the kind of dish she means: humble, restorative, and easy to return to again and again.

Ask Keya what sets her apart and she will tell you it is not novelty. She is not chasing recipes that look impressive or exotic on a feed.

"I want to create food that is realistic, that you can eat realistically every day," she says.

That means dishes that do not demand a long shopping list, a stack of unfamiliar techniques, or an hour you do not have. The goal is everyday food that happens to be good for you, cooked without the guilt or the fuss.

Keya's palate is rooted in South Africa, a country she describes as deeply multicultural, shaped by Dutch and English colonial history and by a strong Cape Malay influence that pulls flavors eastward. Half Afrikaans and half English herself, she grew up around the braai and the potjie, the stew slow-cooked over a fire in a heavy cast iron pot. South African food carries a strong Indian influence too. Rusks, the hard, dippable biscuits she recently featured in a video, are another South African staple. Spices were always present, coriander, cumin, paprika, and turmeric among the constants on the shelf.

When asked for a childhood food memory, Keya lands not on anything fancy but on french toast. On weekend mornings her dad would take ordinary pre-sliced bread and make it on repeat, and she and her older brother would compete over who could eat the most slices.

She remembers being a six-year-old putting away five slices with tomato sauce, served on old-school metal plates printed with flowers. Nothing about it was elaborate. That is exactly why it stayed with her.

These days Keya cooks intuitively, having made enough recipes to know what works before she starts. She can look at a photo of a dish and know how she would build it, then layer in her own approach. Underneath that instinct sits a foundation from culinary school and commercial kitchens: start the onions, bring in the garlic and ginger, then the spices, then the meat, then the vegetables. The methodology is there, she says, but by now it mostly runs in the background.

The hardest part of the work has been a surprise. After years of hands-on, practical jobs, Keya found that spending most of her day behind a laptop left her feeling dysregulated. She moved to the countryside earlier this year to escape the noise of city life, but she is quick to point out that nature does not regulate you on its own. You have to engage with it on purpose. Being her own boss has meant learning to set limits with herself, to stop and rest rather than let content creation bleed into every hour.

She is also careful about where she stands. Keya is not a dietitian or a nutritionist, and she does not pretend to be. She describes herself instead as a nerdy chef, someone genuinely absorbed in health, nervous system work, plants, and food, who wants to pass along the things she wishes someone had told her, without overstepping what she is qualified to say.

Two threads run through everything Keya does: a pull toward healing and a pull toward building something of her own. Her father is an entrepreneur, and she sees her current work as a rare chance to use all of her interests at once, from design and videography to cooking and health, without setting any of them aside. She is in the process of launching a recipe ebook and building out a website, and she has a longer view that reaches beyond recipes toward an anti-inflammatory lifestyle brand.

Much of that vision centers on women.

"I want to empower women to not feel shame about what they're eating," she says.

She wants to create a space where hunger and cravings are treated as normal rather than as problems to fix, where the goal is balance instead of restriction. That focus is personal as much as professional. Living with PMOS herself, she knows firsthand how much confusion and judgment can surround women, food, and their own bodies, which is exactly what she is trying to ease.

Asked if she had a message for readers, Keya reached, fittingly, for food. Almost anything can work together, she suggests, the way watermelon, feta, and mint do, as long as it is held in proportion.

"You can combine anything, as long as you're doing it in a balanced way," she says.

It is a cooking principle and a life philosophy folded into one, and it sits at the core of how she thinks about eating, working, and living well.

Keya's page is the work of a chef who learned to cook twice, once as a girl experimenting in the kitchen, and again in a yacht galley far from home. What she makes now is food that refuses to choose between healthy and comforting, filmed from a quiet farm where she is slowly building something larger than a recipe feed.

Follow Keya on Instagram at @thefarmersdaughter_za, where she shares anti-inflammatory, comfort-first recipes rooted in her South African upbringing and her belief that healthy eating should never feel like restriction. Chefadora is proud to spotlight creators like Keya who are reshaping how we think about nourishment and making space for women to enjoy food without shame.

Updated on 25 Aug 2026