The Kitchen Is a Library: archiving Kenya’s living foodways

We’ve been crossing Kenya to learn - archiving techniques, swapping seeds, and cooking shoulder to shoulder with stewards of land and culinary practices.

This is what our chef trainings and culinary collaborations look like in real life: co-creating and letting menus carry memory, rooted in the depth of ancient wisdom and ingredients hidden across the country.

Eating to extinction or endurance - the choice is ours

Across the world, we’re losing the very diversity that makes food nourishing and resilient. Since the 1900s, about 75% of agricultural plant genetic diversity has been lost as local varieties gave way to uniform crops; today, roughly 75% of what we eat comes from just 12 plants and 5 animal species. Three crops - rice, wheat, maize - supply the majority of our plant-based calories. We can do better than a world of blank pages where a library should stand.

If this sounds abstract, Dan Saladino’s Eating to Extinction makes it visceral - story by story, seed by seed - showing how foods vanish and how people fight to keep them alive. It’s a field guide to courage and culture, and a reminder that saving a flavour can mean saving a way of life. This is what guides our brand - we spend time with our growers and celebrate the seeds and traditions that they steward by integrating them in our recipe development. If we can create a market and educate eaters in the majesty of these ingredients, will it help preserve what ought to be preserved?

Part of this work is collecting seeds. Not to hoard, but to keep them moving between hands, seasons, soils. Every seed we carry is a page from a longer book. If you’ve ever walked the herbarium stacks at Kew, like we did earlier in the summer, you know the feeling: millions of plant specimens, centuries of human curiosity and care. Our role is to help that wisdom breathe again - in gardens, kitchens, and conversations.

Circles of Generosity

In Molo we spent days with Kalenjin women who coil baskets as steadily as they thresh grain - hands moving with a rhythm that feels older than language. In return we shared what we know about composting and soil life; they opened their larders and taught us their unique fermentation methods. An everyday alchemy that keeps culture as alive as the microbes themselves.

The exchange felt true to how we work with chefs: not a lecture, but a loop. We document the “how” and the “why,” then fold these methods into our living archive so that the products we make and the bulk ingredients we sell can taste, unmistakably, of place.

With Kikuyu elders we cooked njahi - the black lablab bean that anchors postpartum meals and feast days, a food laced with memory. We noted soaking times, pot choices, leaf pairings, and the stories that travel with the bean. Keeping such knowledge intact matters: foods like njahi carry resilience in their genes and in their rituals.

Next we'll travel East, to roads where sand and salt air infuse. Among our Giriama growers in Kilifi we'll crack cashews and rub moringa leaves between our fingers until they stain green. Here, as everywhere, we buy directly from the farmers we’re supporting to transition toward regenerative practices - and many of these ingredients will make their quiet way into our kitchens later on.

Imagine lodges as third spaces

Imagine lodges as third spaces - places where guests can sense into new ways of being. When designing our chef training modules the menus hold place-based memories rather than a generic "fusion". We bring systemic thinking to everything that we do so that the circle of knowledge exchange stays unbroken. We're always asking: how can we keep more value with growers - supporting them to transition to regenerative agriculture that heals soils? Time and again, our growers remind us: our health begins in the soil.

We've been coming home to Tigoni with notebooks full of timings and stories - and with something harder to measure: trust. Trust that sharing knowledge across fires and sufuria pots can keep flavours - and species - alive. Trust that chefs can be archivists and that guests are citizens, not consumers. Trust that if we cook with gratitude and serve with context, a plate can become a small act of preservation.

Soil. Seeds. Stories. Shared Meals. That’s the work we're committed to as Grove and Meadow.

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