About Channelin' Granny
Our mission at Channelin’ Granny is to preserve culinary cultural traditions for new generations.
In today’s fast-paced world, things are changing more quickly than ever before. It seems that everyone is searching for the next new thing. But as they say, there is no reason to reinvent the wheel. At Channelin’ Granny, we take that advice to heart. Instead of constantly looking ahead, what if we took the time to understand what has come before?
Our cultural memory is short-term by nature. A social tradition, such as a family recipe, will evaporate into the ether as soon as people stop practicing it. All sorts of incorporeal cultural artifacts – things that don’t mummify or fossilize – like music, dance, and food traditions – have thus been swept away beneath the sands of time. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
Human discovery should never be forgotten. Channelin’ Granny believes in the power of preservation and it’s a responsibility that we take seriously. Digitization is a major asset to this process but the best way to protect accumulated knowledge is to practice – to live it.
And what better way to preserve ancients wisdom than through food? It’s something we all do every day, but a shared meal can be so much more than just eating. It is a way to strengthen family connections, both here in the present and in deep threads of our ancestral pasts.
This culinary knowledge is delicious on many levels but its collection is not an end to itself. The shared global relationship with food, stretching all the way back through time to every human who has ever lived, is a reflection of our one interconnected human family. It is this realization that Channelin’ Granny works to advance.
Channelin’ Granny advocates for rediscovering the lessons that we as a species have already learned, passing on acquired knowledge, and understanding how our ancestors lived and ate.
The Vision
At Channelin’ Granny, we metaphorically invoke the matriarchal archetype of our societal experience to strengthen the bonds with our collective past. But we don’t stop at metaphors. The greatest success in ancient recipe preservation comes through contact with the other side.
Channelin’ Granny began with a vision – quite literally. It all started in October 2019 when Louise Proctor, statistician and Yahtzee celebrity, was contacted by an entity from the great beyond - the ghostly visage of an elderly grandmother. It took hours of trial and error to establish a means of effective communication but the spirit was eventually able to transit its message: the recipe for an early 18th century mincemeat pie.
Proctor had been drawn to Yahtzee, a dice game built on weaving strategic technique and random number generation, from a young age. As she moved up the sport’s ranks, she began experimenting with numerological and astrological elements in her training regimen. The calming meditative techniques sometimes rendered her into a harmless dissociative state, allowing the mind to delve deeper into the game’s secrets. She credits this prior experience with mystic arts to her otherworldly breakthrough with “Granny” and her mincemeat pie.
