The People Behind Food Craft: Knowledge, Work And Transmission

Three Cooks From Oaxaca, Puebla And Tlaxcala

UNESCO’s article of 18 June 2025 introduces Celia Florián from Oaxaca, Guillermina Ordoñez from Puebla and Yara Muñoz Castillo from Tlaxcala as traditional cooks. A photograph caption also identifies Florián as the owner of the Quince Letras restaurant in Oaxaca.

Maize, chilli and beans appear in these portraits with a kitchen learned in childhood. UNESCO describes the three cooks encountering cuisine early as a living heritage. Guillermina Ordoñez says that traditional cuisine will endure while there is a home and a family to feed. In this view, transmission takes place in the everyday meal made again: knowledge continues through another preparation.

The article also describes the cooks’ advocacy for fair payment to rural producers and their efforts to restore recognition of organic maize production. Preserving culinary knowledge here includes asking who grows the ingredients and how their work is rewarded.

Person, Place And Profession

Many hands stand between the traits of a pepper in the field and its use in a kitchen. García’s breeding work and the cooks’ knowledge of preparation are not repetitions of one task. Developing an ingredient and cooking with it carry different responsibilities along the route to a meal.

Fabián García: Field, Institution And Publication

New Mexico State University (NMSU) describes Fabián García’s development of new pepper varieties and his appointment as director of the Agricultural Experiment Station in 1913, a role he held for thirty years. While serving as an administrator, García continued plant breeding and published his findings in Spanish and English. Fieldwork, institutional responsibility and sharing research in writing developed together in his professional life.

The NMSU Library’s historical list records García’s Improved variety no. 9 of native chile as Bulletin 124. Work on a pepper variety becomes a text another person can read beyond the field and institution where it arose. His publication in Spanish and English gives that sharing a linguistic dimension too.

This sharing of knowledge also had an educational dimension. NMSU’s portrait describes García helping young Hispanic students pay tuition and living expenses and find housing. He also left a substantial part of his estate to support the construction of a dormitory for students in need. In his life, sharing knowledge extended to making education possible for those who would learn it.

Routes Of Knowledge Transmission

The cooks’ demand for fair payment and García’s support for students make it difficult to treat transmission as the survival of technique alone. The person growing an ingredient needs to be paid, and someone wishing to learn needs a place to do so. These portraits also ask who sustains the conditions in which knowledge can continue.

Behind our knowledge of a pepper may lie a repeated kitchen gesture, a published bulletin or a student able to continue an education. Often invisible in the finished food, these acts change the possibilities of another meal and another growing season. Remembering people’s names keeps their contributions from disappearing into an undifferentiated idea of tradition.

• Follow handwriting and memory in recipe documents
• Tools in contact with ingredients: metate and molcajete