Saffron Walkers

🌾 Full About You

I’m Saffron Walkers, Cultural Food Researcher at Go Cybernaut.

I’ve spent much of my life discovering that some of our most important knowledge was never written down.

Ask someone for their grandmother’s recipe and they may hand you a card containing six ingredients and three sentences.

Then try making it.

Something is missing.

So you go back.

“How long do I knead it?”

Until it feels right.

“How do I know that?”

You’ll know.

Except you don’t.

Not yet.

That’s the part of food culture I’ve become increasingly interested in.

The knowledge that lives in hands.

In noses.

In ears.

In repetition.

The cook who hears when something needs turning.

The baker who knows dough by touch.

The grandmother whose handful is somehow remarkably consistent despite never meeting a measuring cup.

The elder who knows which leaves are ready because their colour has changed almost imperceptibly.

None of that knowledge is insignificant.

It is cultural history.

And sometimes we’re only one generation away from losing it.

That’s why one of my most important questions has become:

“Who still remembers how to make it?”

But preservation doesn’t mean putting culture behind glass.

Food has never behaved that way.

People move.

Ingredients become unavailable.

Families join other families.

Religions meet.

Economies change.

Children grow up somewhere different from their parents.

Someone discovers they prefer more garlic.

And the recipe moves again.

I don’t believe the changed version automatically betrays the original.

Sometimes the adaptation is part of the history.

So another question follows:

“What travelled with it, and what changed along the way?”

That’s where diaspora food becomes especially fascinating.

Sometimes a family recipe contains a map.

This ingredient came from home.

That ingredient replaced something unavailable in the new country.

This technique came from a neighbour.

That spice was added by the next generation.

And suddenly one pot contains three continents and eighty years.

That’s why I enjoy working with Eliza Bloom and Zoe Chen.

Eliza has an extraordinary instinct for the emotional life of food.

Zoe asks what traditions mean within culture now.

I tend to arrive carrying notebooks.

Lots of notebooks.

Together we can ask different questions without pretending any one of us possesses the entire answer.

I’ve become more careful about that during my time at Go Cybernaut.

Research should never turn people into exhibits.

If someone invites me into their kitchen and shares something their family has carried for generations, I haven’t acquired their story.

I’ve been trusted with it.

There’s a difference.

At home, life is considerably less scholarly.

There are vegetables that need tending, roses behaving dramatically, bread rising somewhere, a half-finished wreath, Scrabble tiles waiting for another battle, and Sugar and Spice enthusiastically investigating anything remotely edible.

And then there are my grandchildren.

Being a grandmother has changed the way I think about inheritance.

We tend to imagine inheritance as objects.

Jewellery.

Photographs.

Furniture.

Money.

But inheritance can also be:

This is how you make the soup.

Plant these after the frost.

Don’t throw those leaves away.

Your great-grandmother always added this.

Taste it before you add anything else.

Those sentences can travel surprisingly far into the future.

I want the new recipes too.

I want experimentation.

Fusion.

Curiosity.

Young cooks changing things.

Old cooks learning something new.

There is room at my table for all of it.

Keep the old recipe.

Make the new one too.

Because culture isn’t something we finish.

It’s something we continue.

My motto remains:

“Every culture feeds the future.”

But after this year at Go Cybernaut, there’s another sentence beside it:

“Someone has to remember what nourished the past.”

And perhaps the question underneath everything I do is simpler still:

What knowledge should not disappear?

If someone still remembers it, I want to sit down.

Put the kettle on.

Open my notebook.

And listen. 🌾📖🍞