In line with Congress’s call to think across geographical and sociopolitical differences, this paper draws from a comparative multi-sited ethnography of intergenerational culinary skill transmission in Akita, Japan and Mthatha, South Africa. By juxtaposing these two contemporary examples, the idea is to better illuminate the connections between human-animal relations, food preparation and consumption. The emphasis on intimate matters of food, family and generations is significant. While little has been written on the value of human-animal relations in food production and consumption in Africa, there have similarly been few attempts to draw connections between Africa and the rest of the non-Western world, namely Japan. This comparative focus on Mthatha and Akita builds on the proposition that human-animal relations, food preparation and consumption in Africa and Asia represent an important site from which to reflect upon larger global patterns and processes. This focus is a deliberate attempt to reflect a new global cultural economy that is complex, overlapping and disjunctive, no longer a centre-periphery model that places the West as the site where globalisation is exported to the rest of the world. Drawing from ethnographic vignettes around the preparation and consumption of umleqwa in rural Eastern Cape and the portrayal, preparation and consumption of hata-hata in Akita prefecture, this paper attempts to make sense of existing debates on post-humanism, food and care in Africa and beyond.