Conservation

This page is about the conservation work my cooking grew out of, and the long view I try to keep on it. It is in the present tense because the work is still going on. I speak in the first person where the words are mine. Where the page speaks for the movement, it uses the voice the movement has chosen for itself.

Conservation comes first

Cuisine is heritage, diplomacy and soul. The conservation work lives in the third of those, soul. My cooking rests on it. I did not add it on to a career in kitchens. The cooking grew out of it, and if the cooking stops honouring it, the cooking loses its point.

The French technique I trained in is demanding. So is the Japanese attention to season and to silence. But the oldest texts I have read, and the ones I keep going back to, are in roots and resin, and in what many generations of indigenous communities in Sarawak’s rainforests know without writing it down.

What I am protecting here is a body of knowledge that is older than every kitchen I have ever worked in.

The thirty-four communities

Thirty-four indigenous communities are recognised in Sarawak’s indigenous classification. Serumpun Sarawak works in conversation with their elders, seed-keepers, foragers and cooks, and only in the voices each community has chosen to share.

They know which leaves heal and which roots feed. They know which fermentations belong to ceremony and which belong to grief. This is working knowledge, kept with great care and passed on through apprenticeship instead of print. It has seldom been studied with the care it deserves.

What I have been able to add, through Serumpun Sarawak, through my kitchens and through public conversation, is a footnote in their ledger. A grateful one.

A temporary custodian

My role in this programme is temporary, and it was set up that way on purpose. I am a guide, an interim custodian. The people of Borneo and their leaders trusted me to light a fire that others will keep, people with far more right to it and far deeper knowledge, who will stay with it much longer than I could.

I am not being modest. This is how the work was built, from the very first conversation. The communities are the makers and scholars of a system older than any institution that has endorsed them, and they keep it. My part is to listen first, cook later, and at some point step aside.

The Serumpun In Motion mentee programme was designed with that in mind. Young Sarawakian chefs are mentored inside the movement, so the cuisine and its conservation work carry on without depending on one chef’s career or profile.

UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy, Kuching

In March 2026, UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy Kuching endorsed Serumpun Sarawak for its conservation of Sarawak’s indigenous gastronomy, food culture and edible medicinal plants. I do not treat the endorsement as marketing. It confirms that the conservation work meets a standard the world’s cultural heritage body recognises.

It adds to a partnership that already includes the Sarawak State Government, the Sarawak Tourism Board and the state’s cultural institutions. Each of those partners brings a standing I could never bring alone. The work belongs to them as much as to me.

Part of the oldest living institution

Serumpun Sarawak is now embedded in the oldest living institution of Sarawakian culture. It will not fade into an archive. People will cook it, taste it, share it and pass it on, every day, and they are the people it was always meant for.

That is how I judge whether conservation has worked: the work has to outlive the people who started it. The cooking of Sarawak’s indigenous communities has done that for many generations. My part will be judged by whether it adds one small stone to that long wall, or breaks it by taking credit it has not earned.

Serumpun Sarawak is not my movement

Serumpun Sarawak is not James Won’s movement, and it never was. It belongs to the forest, and to the elders who taught us the forest’s language. It belongs to the communities who shared their most personal knowledge with patience and grace, and to the young chefs who will one day teach the next generation what they have learned.

My name is on the masthead because, at the time, someone’s name had to go there. That is a matter of paperwork. The work itself is what counts.

What this page is not

This is not a credentials page. The honours belong on the Recognition page, where the detail behind each one is set out.

Nor is it a manifesto. The communities have manifestos far older than anything I could write. This page sets out my relationship to a body of knowledge that I did not create and do not own.

What it is: a public account of the conservation work my cooking stands on, for anyone who wants to know what I keep to and why. It is one page among many. Serumpun Sarawak and its own pages carry the detail.

The long view

The work judges itself by what carries on without it. Sarawak’s thirty-four communities have gone on for many generations without naming any single founder. I am a footnote in that story, and the cooking I am lucky enough to do is one of many things the forest has given.

The knowledge lasts. So does the practice, and so does the discipline of listening before speaking and cooking only after listening.

The plate is at the centre of one half of this work, and the forest at the centre of the other. They will sit side by side on this site for as long as I cook, and in the record of the work long after I have stepped aside.