Conservation

This page describes the conservation work the cuisine has grown out of — and the long view that holds it. It is written in the present tense because the work is alive, and in the first person where I speak directly. Where it speaks for the movement, it speaks in the voice the movement itself has set.

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The conservation pillar is non-negotiable

Cuisine is heritage, diplomacy, and soul. The third of those — soul — is where the conservation work lives. It is not a programme appended to a culinary career. It is the ground the cuisine grew out of, and the ground the cuisine must continue to honour or it will lose its meaning.

The contemporary French technique I trained in is rigorous. The Japanese discipline of seasonality and silence is rigorous. But the oldest manuscripts I have read — and the ones I will keep returning to — were written not in ink but in roots, resin, and the quiet knowledge of many generations of indigenous communities in the rainforests of Sarawak.

Conservation, in this work, is not the protection of an idea. It is the protection of a knowledge system that predates every kitchen I have ever stood in.

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The thirty-four communities

There are thirty-four indigenous communities recognised within the Sarawak indigenous taxonomy. The work of Serumpun Sarawak is in conversation with their elders, their seed-keepers, their foragers, their cooks — in the voices each community has chosen to grant.

They know which leaves heal. Which roots sustain. Which fermentations mark ceremony, and which mark grievance. None of this is folklore. It is applied knowledge, rigorously held, transmitted through apprenticeship rather than print, and rarely studied with the rigour it has always deserved.

The work I have been able to add — through Serumpun Sarawak, through the kitchens I have led, through the public conversation — is a footnote in their ledger. A grateful one.

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The temporary custodian

My role in this programme is, by design, temporary and transitional. I am a guide. An interim custodian, entrusted by the people of Borneo and their leadership to kindle a fire that others will tend with far greater right, far deeper knowledge, and far longer tenure than I ever could.

This is not modesty. It is the operating ethic of the work, written into its structure from the first conversation. The communities are not subjects of conservation. They are makers, scholars, custodians of a system older than every institution that has ever endorsed them. My role is to listen first, and to cook later — and at some point, to step aside.

The Serumpun In Motion mentee programme was designed with this end in mind. Young Sarawakian chefs are mentored within the movement so that the cuisine and its conservation logic continue without dependence on any single chef’s career or visibility.

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UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy — Kuching

In March 2026, UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy — Kuching endorsed Serumpun Sarawak for the conservation of Sarawak’s indigenous gastronomy, food culture, and edible medicinal flora. The endorsement is not a marketing instrument. It is an institutional confirmation that the conservation work meets a standard the world’s cultural-heritage body recognises.

The endorsement extends a partnership that already includes the Sarawak State Government, the Sarawak Tourism Board, and the cultural institutions of Sarawak. Each partner carries weight I alone could not carry. The work is the partners’ as much as it is mine.

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Embedded in the oldest living institution

Serumpun Sarawak is now embedded in the oldest living institution of Sarawakian culture. It will not fade. It will not be archived. It will be cooked, tasted, shared, and passed forward — every day, by the people it was always meant to serve.

This is the measure of conservation’s success: that the work survives the passing of its founders. The cuisine of the indigenous communities of Sarawak has done so for many generations. The work I have been part of will be measured by whether it adds the smallest stone to that long wall — or whether it interrupts the wall by claiming credit it does not deserve.

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Serumpun Sarawak is not James Won’s movement

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

My name appears on the masthead of the public record because somebody had to put a name there at the time. Names are administrative conveniences. The work is the work.

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What this page is not

It is not a credentials page. The honours and recognitions belong on the Recognition page, where they sit on substance.

It is not a manifesto. The communities have manifestos older than any I could write. This page describes my relationship to a knowledge system I did not author and do not own.

What this page is: a public statement of the conservation discipline that grounds the cuisine, written for readers who want to know what I hold to and why. It is one page among many. Serumpun Sarawak and its sub-pages carry the substance.

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The long view

The work measures itself by what continues without it. The thirty-four communities of Sarawak have continued without naming any single founder for many generations; I am one footnote in that continuity, and the cuisine I am privileged to cook is one expression among many that the forest has produced.

What endures is the knowledge. What endures is the practice. What endures is the discipline of listening before speaking, and of cooking only after listening.

The plate is the heart of one part of this work. The forest is the heart of the other. They sit together on this site for as long as I serve the table — and they will continue to sit together on the public record long after I have stepped aside.