Jennifer Marsiglia Pastrana - an ode to the matronas

Sometimes the work is simply about recognising the importance of someone. And in our society, we don’t do it nearly enough.

Thank goodness there’s Jennifer and her organisation SABORES Y SABERES, from the Atlántico Department in Colombia. In this soulful conversation, we elevate our grandmothers, and discuss the role of time and what is the best (and only) way to preserve tradition - ahem nope, not in books.

A lot of the work that you do is about preserving memory. I’d love to know why is memory important to you…

Here we have a saying when people think they invented something, we say “They think they discovered hot water”. Basically, when we don’t know anything, everything looks like an innovation. This is important because in food nothing is an innovation, even the thing that we think is innovation. Somewhere, someone is doing the same thing without flashlights or social media reports.

So for me, memory is important because the knowledge that we need to cook is the heritage of many generations. What gets to us today is the refinement of that knowledge through each generation. That is important.

Let me give you an example, I made a soup and when I learned to make that soup it’s thanks to many women who have refined the recipe of the soup before it got to me. If it wasn’t for the memory of those women, I’d have to start from the beginning the refinement of that soup. This applies to everything. What we can enjoy today is the result of years of refinement, of perfecting. 

When did you start Sabores y Saberes?

Sabores y Saberes as an organisation started officially last year (2022) but I think it started before… I grew up in a family with many aunts: 10 aunts from my mother's side only. And growing up I was surrounded by strong women who were my role models. And they weren’t strong models because of the studies or the leadership, but rather for an indescribable feeling of ‘everything is possible’. By observing our aunts, our grandma and our mom, my sister and I were infused with a sense that anything can be overcome and everything can be made possible. 

Perhaps Sabores y Saberes started during my childhood.

In 2008 I began working with old people in communities that needed help, and memory was a big part of that because a lot of those I worked with were suffering from Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. 

You went from gathering the knowledge of the women in your family to collecting the memories of your community…

More than collecting, my work consists in making people understand that this is important. It’s just a matter of recognition, and already with that it’s a lot of work. When you know that what you do is important, you feel different in your community with your equals. It’s very different from feeling that what you do doesn’t matter. 

The first step is recognising. And then someone might say that it’s not enough to just recognise, we have to preserve. So that’s the second step, preservation. After perhaps we need to stop and think about what knowledge we want to refine in time. Therefore, the third step is about wisely choosing what we pass down to the next generation.

I work for the first step. 

Can we speak more about this third step? About this responsibility of choosing what to pass down as heritage to those who come after us, because I assume that as time changes also traditions change… But I don’t think it was ever a truly conscious choice.

This is so important because we choose that every time in every moment, we aren’t conscious of that. Whether we buy from a farm or we buy from the supermarket, we are choosing this knowledge, we are choosing this practice, we are choosing a model of being. This isn’t only happening with food, think of clothes. Today’s fashion makes clothing disposable season after season, but our grandma preserved her clothes and even passed them down until they couldn’t be worn any longer - and even then they would turn it into a washing cloth. This is a practice that we either learn and repeat or not.

So every day we choose something that is either good or is not for the generation to come. However, we aren’t conscious of the knowledge we are preserving. 

In food, this is even more important because we need to take into consideration the health of the planet. If we eat a lot of meat, we might not have fresh air anymore. If we only grow monocultures, we homogenise the planet and kill biodiversity - which is mandatory for life to thrive. Food is important also because it has a direct connection with consumer behaviour and consumer behaviour makes all the difference for the next generation.

In the end, it’s all about choices.

You know, I’m Italian and I’ve been observing the attachment Italians have for all their culinary traditions and all those products that they consider to be part of their identity. It’s not all very positive, take for example cured meats - the prosciuttos - they come from a passed down tradition but today those cured meats are not made in the same way the grandparents did … they are made in huge implants, and 100,000s of female pigs are raised in tiny cages and fed with genetically modified corn.

How is this beneficial for the land, the animals and for the next generations? It’s not sustainable yet if Italy decided that that is what makes the Italian culinary heritage Italian, we shall keep it as is. So what you’re doing is very precious, it’s “change made conscious”. Also, you are giving yourself permission to adjust a recipe from your grandma to your own taste and to the times you live in… symbolising the fact that you come from her yes but you are also your own woman, with different tastes and preferences living in a different time.

This is another important aspect to clarify. Tradition, in food, is what you get used to eating from the day you are born… it’s all the habits picked up growing up. This makes your tradition different from that of your mother, which is different from that of your grandmother and so on. But we have this idea that we are just replicating the same tradition of our grandparents when in reality we are not. 

If I ask a child here, what is tradition? It’s fast food nowadays. This child has a tradition that we as adults don’t have, and won’t learn. I have a lot of products from the supermarket that are not found in my grandma’s house.

Anyway, today we know nothing about tradition because today we don’t have time to make that tradition possible. Tradition takes time. Maybe what makes you Italian is not the kind of food you eat, but rather the time, energy and knowledge that nonnas have preserved in families. And the symbol of that is food but it’s not the food that makes you Italian. It’s about making that food in the family where values are shared. 

When we talk of heritage we talk about knowledge. Not something physical. In food what makes it a heritage it’s the cooking knowledge, but people say it’s the pizza or lasagna or pasta or whatever else. If all the old people who make all those things die, what is traditional? Where is the tradition? We need to change our perspective on tradition and realise that knowledge is important not just what you’re eating or trying to preserve as a physical symbol.

Maybe we need to start to preserve the knowledge of people. When a grandma dies, it’s a living library being lost, that’s 90 years of refinement of knowledge. 

In your projects you bring together old and young, tell me more about that…

We create activities for grandmas and grandchildren on seed planting, plant identification, the chain that goes from seed to dish and what produce we can use to replace other products in different recipes. Moreover, we teach them that every recipe has a history: family history, national history, and perhaps Earth history too. 

We don’t function like a school. We believe one needs to learn to eat and that learning comprises a certain knowledge such as the seeds you’re used to knowing as your country’s actually come from another country and another culture. At one point in our history, maybe that seed came into this country tangled in the hair of someone from Africa… who knows, it’s a hypothesis but also not so distant from the truth. Take yam, today we enjoy it but at one point in history that was considered food for the poor only. It’s important to know because food is also a social distinction.

There’s a cuisine of chefs, and then there’s a cuisine of grandmas, nonna and matronas.

See, matronas are preserving the well-being of everyone. Chefs are selling well-being for a part of the population that can pay for this well-being.
In that sense, grandmas are more important for society than Michelin-star chefs. 

So your way of “preservation” of knowledge is not by writing it down in books but really through oral tradition, through the direct passing down of the know-how.

This is because books, the internet and social media are a power that not everyone has in my country. Not everyone has access to the internet in my country, nor do our grandmas have a smartphone. Moreover, why would I write books and encapsulate that knowledge in books when most of the grandmas I work with don’t know how to read? I’d rather create connections in my community that will make possible the preservation of knowledge in time. 

I could write a book, record a video to post on YouTube or create some content for social media… but that would be only for a like. Alternatively, if we connect the people so that when they come together they share the history and the practice and recognise the importance of it, we may be doing more good to that tradition because that tradition begins to move between people. 

In fact, tradition is like a living force… when only relegated to books it perishes, it can only live inside of the people. 

Yes, when you post a photo you have captured a moment of that tradition, but tradition keeps on changing. Tradition changes every day, whether we want to or not. When people come to me and show me a book and claim that the real tradition of said country is in this book… I say no, it’s not in the book, it’s in people!

The real tradition is in the homes of the people. Going back to the Italian tradition, it is not found in manuals, it lives in the hands of the Italian nonnas. 

Have you seen any change in the young people who come to learn from their grandmas?

I love to watch this young generation interact with the matronas because even though they know the produce that grows in our department - like corn, yucca, bananas, and plantains - they have no clue how land makes it possible. So when they first saw a yucca go from seed to soup… they were filled with wonder. 

Young people are so used to seeing the fruits, that they have no idea of the transformation. And I think when they experience the fruit born from the seed they planted, they are amazed. 

Another thing that creates a sense of wonder and amazement in their hearts is learning to transform that produce into a dish. This is how they understand the importance of preservation, land management and sustainability. 

Moreover, they realize we have a living library in the homes in the experience of our grandmas. Our society doesn’t value old people because they are not productive, however their value is not in their ability to do but in the ability to teach. For that matter, I am working on making space for the Matronas to teach a course at the university where I am getting my Ph.D. 

Like“Hey Mama, you have never been to school yet you are teaching at the university”... That is so powerful! And I am actually dreaming of a university of Matronas… 
See they haven’t got the opportunity to teach in a food school because they don’t have any title or diploma that validates their knowledge. So we are going to have a university of Matronas where validation does not come from a paper but from experience.