take root eat root (2024) is a book written and illustrated by semine long-callesen and published by obra press. it is a collection of fiction and research that tells the story of colonial botany through poems, recipes, and semine’s friendship with artist nancy valladares. take root eat root is riso printed and hand stitched and exists in a total of 53 copies. it is currently sold out. scroll down to read excepts and contact seminelong@gmail.com for enquiries.








While cooking with Nancy, I realized that some Malaysian dishes tasted very similar to some Honduran foods and vice versa - curiously, despite the geographical distance. Therefore, a recurring discussion between Nancy and me springs from the question: what is the difference between Honduran and Malaysian cuisine? Is it the Malaysian use of fresh and dried herbs? Perhaps, but in Honduras, mango and guava are eaten with ground cumin seeds

[ … ]

After some time, this surprising similarity in tastes started to make sense to us: Honduras and Malaysia were nodes in the same colonial network. Both places were part of a British imperial port infrastructure. Colonial officers and naturalists shipped seeds and plants across the world in their search for revenue and commercial exports and owned and used land in both Honduras and Malaysia to experiment with extractive agriculture

[ … ]

Over time, colonial seed transplantation resulted in a homogenous tropical belt of large-scale industrial agriculture where any crop in Honduras could also be grown in Malaysia.




In contrast to encyclopaedic atlases of foods, Take Root Eat Root will never be a complete or comprehensive overview of foods from Malaysia or Honduras. The recipes are not divided into either “Malaysian” or “Honduran” origins: it is a fruitless dead-end to search for national cuisines. The recipes are deliberately organized around a vague taxonomy with little desire for order. The recipes are divided into gardens that refer to relationships, places, and memories.





Julian Tenison-Woods, a land-surveyor and Catholic priest who worked in Malaya in 1884 said: “perhaps in no country in the world is exploration rendered so difficult from the extraordinary thickness of the jungle and the steepness of the mountain ridges which increasingly cross the traveler’s path”

[ … ]

This book is a map, not of the wilderness of a “borderland” of colonial imagination, but of the unwieldy emotional and sensory landscape of foods and the life I’ve shared with so many people: steep, sorrowful, and marvelous.