Culinary Heritage and Arts Society Sarawak
Community trust and introductions, and the method behind the fieldwork the cuisine grows out of. Without CHASS, the door to Sarawak's indigenous communities stays shut, and there is no Serumpun.
The cuisine begins with trust. In Sarawak's communities, the elders, seed-keepers, foragers and household cooks whose knowledge sits under every plate do not open their kitchens to a chef who turns up unannounced. They open them to someone who has earned the right to be brought in. CHASS made that introduction for us.
The Culinary Heritage and Arts Society Sarawak is the cultural research society that gives Serumpun its standing with the State’s indigenous communities. Their work is the long, patient labour of community engagement: conversations in the field, heritage research, and the careful method of recording living knowledge so that it stays alive and does not harden into folklore.
CHASS brings three things the platform could not have managed without them.
Community trust. The introductions that brought Serumpun into the kitchens, longhouses and forest fields of the indigenous communities. The communities know CHASS, and their word opens doors no marketing budget could buy.
Methodological backbone. Field procedures, consent protocols and the rigour of heritage research, so that every entry in the Indigenous Ingredient Codex stands on ground other practitioners can check and build on.
Cultural validation. The recipes, the narrations and the menu language are measured against what the communities themselves recognise as faithful. CHASS reads the work before the public does.
CHASS at Osaka, and the Master Dossier credit
CHASS’s part in the Osaka chapter at Expo 2025 is recorded explicitly in the Master Dossier: CHASS led the fieldwork and heritage research, and read the recipes, the narrations and the menu language against a standard the communities themselves recognise as faithful. The six courses and the overture went to the international stage only after CHASS had read them and checked them against that standard. That covered which people each landscape was credited to, the indigenous ingredient names spelled correctly in their own languages, and the way kesak and ulat tinduh were presented, as traditional foods and never as a spectacle.
That role is not on the menu card or in the press. It is in the Master Dossier, which is where it belongs: the formal record of the work, alongside the other partners who made it.
Datin’ Sri Dona Drury-Wee
Datin’ Sri Dona Drury-Wee leads the CHASS work that touches Serumpun. She has been part of every selection round of the Mentee Programme: the technical and cultural interviews, the shortlist that took thirty-odd applicants down to twelve, and the careful decisions about which young Sarawakian cooks had both the discipline and the heritage to earn a place.
CHASS was looking after Sarawakian heritage long before Serumpun. Its work across cultural arts, language and indigenous practice goes back decades. Serumpun is one of the platforms CHASS chose to support, and I am honoured that it did.
Chef Laura Sim Bara, a CHASS practitioner on the programme
Chef Laura Sim Bara is on Serumpun’s current Mentee Programme. She is also a CHASS practitioner, so she works on both sides. Her cultural checks on the menu, her discipline on the pass at Mulu and her foraging with the Baram communities are part of her CHASS standing. They are CHASS at work.
The Mentee Programme owes what it is to the CHASS practitioners who pass through it, and the cuisine owes what it is to that exchange.
What this acknowledgement asks of us
Thanking CHASS by name is the easy part. The harder part is keeping to the discipline they trusted Serumpun with, and it goes like this.
The communities are the cuisine’s senior teachers. The Free, Prior and Informed Consent of every community whose knowledge enters the platform has to be secured before the entry is made. We never assume it, and we never add it afterwards. The Codex is a record of trust given and trust kept, and I do not treat it as a chef’s pantry.
The long thanks
To Datin’ Sri Dona Drury-Wee and the CHASS team, and to every elder, seed-keeper, forager and household cook who has chosen, quietly and on their own terms, to share what they know with this platform: the cuisine owes you a debt it will always carry.
The forest feeds our future. CHASS opened the way into the forest in the first place.
Trust comes less from an introduction than from what the introduction holds itself to afterwards.
James Won
The forest opens to people it already knows. CHASS made the introduction, and it is up to Serumpun to keep the discipline that goes with it.