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It started with a promise to my mother.
In 2010, both of my parents were diagnosed with cancer — my father with late-stage pancreatic cancer, my mother with breast cancer. I was already a Registered Holistic Nutritionist and Registered Dietitian, and I wanted to help them in the only way I knew how: through food.
The hardest thing to watch wasn't the diagnosis. It was the appetite loss. They couldn't eat. They couldn't keep food down. They were losing strength in a way no amount of nutrition counseling could fix from the outside.
In my research I kept landing on the same place — Indonesia, home to more than 21,000 documented medicinal plants and an unbroken twelve-hundred-year tradition of botanical formulation called Jamu. So I went. I ended up staying two years, studying Temulawak — Javanese turmeric — and the wider Jamu tradition with the women who carry it.
My mother, Edna, was the first person I brought a formulation home for. For the first time in months, she ate. Her strength came back enough that we got to spend real time together again. Before she passed, she asked one thing of me:
“Share this root with others — especially the people like me, going through treatment, who feel like giving up on food.”
— Edna
Temulawak LLC exists to keep that promise.
This honey is the next chapter of it. I came back to the United States, found 1,500 acres of land in the Columbia River Gorge, planted it to buckwheat, brought in my own bees, and built a closed-loop system fed only with worm castings and worm tea. Buckwheat honey carries the highest natural polyphenol load of any commercial varietal — the right base for a Jamu-style fermentation. The Jamu botanicals carry the tradition my mother helped me find.
I don't have a marketing team, a co-packer, or a contract beekeeper. The land, the bees, the formulation, the fermentation — all of it is mine. That's the only way I know how to do this honestly.
If you ever want to see the operation, you're welcome on the farm.
