Professor Gerard Bodeker

The communities of Sarawak have known for generations which leaves heal, which roots sustain, which fermentations mark a ceremony and which mark a grievance. Their knowledge is rigorous. It has simply never been studied with the rigour it deserves. Professor Gerard Bodeker has spent his career working in that gap, and he has chosen to give some of that rigour to our conservation work.

His academic ground

Professor Bodeker took his doctorate at Harvard and spent two decades teaching and researching at the University of Oxford. He is Adjunct Professor at Columbia University. We do not recite these titles for show. What matters is the care he brings to every conversation about indigenous medicine and the food that grows out of it.

His field is public health sciences, and he has worked on traditional and indigenous medicine throughout his career. He has written, taught, advised governments and helped shape the WHO’s thinking on traditional medicine for longer than Serumpun has existed.

We do not take it lightly that a scholar of his standing advises our work.

What he does for Serumpun

His role as scientific adviser is a working one. He is part of three strands of what we do.

The medicinal plant research. The Indigenous Ingredient Codex (midin, empurau, litsea, engkabang, terung asam, bunga kantan and the rest) includes the medicinal uses that communities have shared with us. Professor Bodeker makes sure those entries stand on clear scientific ground, as knowledge that other scientists can test and build on.

The Expo 2025 Osaka narration. At our debut at Seaside Studio CASO in August 2025, Professor Bodeker narrated each course on stage. We planned it as culinary anthropology. Where a community’s knowledge lay behind a dish, that knowledge was named. Where an ingredient had a medicinal use, the evidence for it was set out in terms the room could follow. The debut was taken seriously abroad partly because he held it to that standard.

The long conversation. Our research on medicinal plants goes on beyond any single event, and so does his conversation with us. It moves at the pace his scholarship needs, and on the ground he has earned.

Why it matters that he is here

The food on its own proves nothing scientifically. A chef holding a leaf over a plate and saying it heals does not make the leaf medicine. What makes a medicinal use real is the long, careful work of a scholar who has spent his life studying how indigenous knowledge systems keep their evidence, and who can check each entry against what science requires.

Without Professor Bodeker, our medicinal claims would rest on my word alone. With him, they rest on his.

The communities whose knowledge goes into the Codex deserve his standard of proof, and mine is not enough.

How we work together

We never use Professor Bodeker as a marketing voice, and we never use his name to borrow authority we have not earned. When he has read a claim and accepted it, the claim stands. When he has not, it waits.

That is our rule, and it is his.

Our thanks

To Professor Gerard Bodeker: thank you for your years of scholarship, for the patience of your reading, and for choosing to give your rigour to a small team working to conserve one forest’s knowledge. We want our gratitude on the public record for good. Part of the science our food speaks is your science. The communities who have trusted us with their medicinal knowledge know that it has reached a scholar of your standing, because they have seen you stand with us.

The forest feeds our future. Your scholarship gives that science a public language the future can keep.