Women as Custodians of Culture: The Role of Food Preservation in Sustaining Traditional Knowledge

Abstract

Food preservation is both a material practice and a cultural pedagogy through which communities curate taste, health, and identity across generations. In many agrarian and Indigenous settings, women occupy the social position of primary processors, storers, and educators of household food knowledge, converting seasonal abundance into year-round security through drying, salting, smoking, pickling, candying, fermenting, and the management of seed and starter cultures. This paper conceptualizes women as custodians of culture by examining how preservation routines function as informal institutions of traditional knowledge: they encode ecological calendars, locally adapted risk management, sensory evaluation, and ethics of care, while organizing intergenerational learning through apprenticeship, ritual, and everyday repetition. Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship across ethnobiology, food studies, anthropology, and sustainable food systems, the review synthesizes evidence on three linked roles. First, preservation sustains biocultural diversity by maintaining relationships with landraces, wild edible plants, and place-based ingredients, and by stabilizing culinary repertoires under climate variability and market pressures. Second, preservation practices transmit embodied competencies—microbial stewardship, tool and fuel selection, hygienic heuristics, and flavor norms—that are rarely captured by formal documentation yet are central to food safety and sensory authenticity. Third, women’s preservation work supports community resilience and social reproduction through reciprocity networks, festive collective labor, and the circulation of preserved foods as gifts, dowry items, and emergency stores. The paper also identifies contemporary threats to knowledge continuity, including migration, commodification, changing gender norms, and regulatory regimes that devalue vernacular processing. Finally, it proposes a research agenda that combines participatory documentation, rights-based heritage governance, and gender-responsive innovation to safeguard living food knowledge without freezing it into museumized tradition. By positioning food preservation as a knowledge system rather than a mere technique, the study clarifies how women’s everyday labor underpins cultural sustainability and adaptive capacity. Such recognition can inform inclusive policies, education, and equitable markets.