About Up There The Last
Welcome!
I am Max Jones, traditional food conservationist and founder of Up There The Last.
A writer, photographer, food producer, speaker and educator I work internationally as an active archivist of traditional food preservation.
My life is split between coastal West Cork in Ireland and the mountains of the Biellese in Italy, with lifelong connection to London and West Wales in the UK.
I want to reconnect people to our inherent ability to harmoniously convert the landscape into food, inspired by the intuitive and resourceful methods I have gleaned from working alongside artisans from across Europe and to provide an archive of these methods so they do not go lost. I love to help re-awaken these abilities that are intrinsic to us all, in the hope that we can carve out a better future for our food by honouring techniques of the past.
Perhaps the best way to explain why and what I do is by telling the story behind the name I have given this beautiful project.
As a boy I spent much time in the mountains of a forgotten pre-alpine town in Italy called Biella. This was my mother’s home, and I remember that as long as I had a piece of bread, a hunk of cheese, a salame and a knife, I was able to have small adventures out on the mountainside for days on end. I never questioned the moulds on the rind, the fact I had no fridge, nor did I think twice to drink the water that came from natural springs. In later years I returned to this memory with the informed understanding that those foods were made from the animals that grazed beautiful and wild alpine pasture, and for as long as I was out there with the herdsmen eating like they did, I too was becoming the mountain through its eating.
As an adult in London I honed my understanding of natural milk processing as a cheesemonger and affineur of the more traditional cheeses from France and Switzerland. I found myself being drawn to the lives of the makers themselves, as what they were creating was a pure connection to their landscape that they transformed into food.
I began staying with the producers, following deeper into the mountains and remote places, to document their unique methods of production for some of the rarest cheeses and learn from their inspirational ability to survive in their given geographical context, bringing to London this new knowledge and eventually leaving the capital, to help support the last smoker of exclusively wild Salmon in Ireland, where even though the tradition remains strong in a few Irish smokeries, farmed fish dominates the market.
This became a four year project to turn the smokery of the Sally Ferns Barnes into a learning centre, to keep alive the tradition by celebrating the fish, the Blackwater Irish fishers, the smoking technique, and the ethics behind actual artisanal existence.
Although hard to find, I observed that the more fringe the communities in which artisans operate, from alpine mountainsides to the fishing villages of the Atlantic, the more reliant on these traditional techniques they still remain. I wanted to tell their stories to bring this knowledge to the fore, witnessing this added value when you are able to explain the true provenance of food, as it established an invaluable connection and growing within myself were the skills with which we work the food of our given landscape, using everything, wasting nothing. Observing the seasons. Being in harmony with nature. Doing so just by virtue of being and without today’s projected hyperbolic romance.
I absorbed this information to take with me and pass on, through speaking, workshops and tastings, as well as helping new food producers harness old methods which I adore doing. Re-connection to long-established ways of staying alive that are reliant on the natural world, is healing indeed. This is why, along the courses we run, I have been working towards sharing with you the two most powerful experiences I have had in this regard. The cheesemaking bound with the alpine pastoral tradition of transhumance in the Biellese mountains, and smoking wild Atlantic salmon in West Cork. They shake up your soul and should be experienced at least once in a lifetime, which is the reason I have built spaces in both Italy and Ireland in which to welcome you.
A couple of years into my research, I came across a book. Made in the early seventies, a photographer from my mother’s hometown of Biella named Gianfranco Bini had gone into those pastures I knew as a child and was now revisiting, to document the fading traditions of the mountain. And within, beautiful images of herdsmen and women, butter and cheesemakers, clog carvers, charcutiers, and no sight nor sign of a single piece of plastic, hairnet, blue glove or chemical. He had foreseen the beautiful ways he had grown up with becoming obsolete, threatened by the advent of fast food and mass production, and just like myself, sought to preserve them somehow and to inspire others with the incredibly important ways of living established way up there, in a world that only the stones know.
It is called Lassù gli Ultimi or, for you and I, Up There The Last.
