Taste shaping natures: a multiplied ethnography of translated fermentation in the New/er Nordic Cuisine

Thesis

Culinary innovators in Copenhagen are combining far-flung fermentation techniques with Nordic ingredients to yield products and flavours that have not existed before. This flavour-oriented ‘translated’ fermentation is also having broader cultural and material consequences, for these culinary practitioners as well as for their microbial partners’ biogeography, ecology, and likely their evolution. To account for these novelties, I bring together critical scholarship on nature, more-than-human geographies and multispecies studies, theories of taste, and STS, to develop the concept of a ‘taste shaping nature’: a nature shaping and shaped by taste. Employing a novel combination of multispecies multisensory ethnography, collaborative microbiological experiments, and DNA sequencing—an approach I shorthand as ‘multiplied ethnography’—I conducted fieldwork around two sites in Copenhagen, Restaurant Noma and Empirical Spirits, leaders in the culinary movement sometimes known as the ‘New Nordic Cuisine’ (NNC). Linking my fieldwork and the literature, I develop each part of ‘taste shaping natures’ across four analytic chapters: on ‘Nature’, ‘Consipience’, ‘Experiment’, and ‘Interest’. ‘Nature’ investigates how the NNC has mixed ‘wild’ and ‘postpastoral’ natures, how these ‘multinatures’ have shifted over time, and how they have shaped and been shaped by different approaches to fermentation. ‘Consipience’ articulates how humans and microbes—or any creatures—come to know each other through taste and smell, within and across species, as a contribution to STS, multispecies studies, and sensory ethnography. ‘Experiment’ examines the role of technoscience in how humans and microbes know and shape each other in translated fermentation, and proposes a model of experiment as a contribution to STS. ‘Interest’ brings together the aesthetics, ethics, politics, and biological consequences of translated fermentation’s taste shaping natures, and suggests the supporting concept of ‘micro-governmentality’ as a complement to ‘microbiopolitics’. In conclusion I reflect on fermentation politics, and consider how fermentation contributes to ongoing debates around domestication.

Authors: Evans, JD

• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: innovation; New Nordic Cuisine; microbes; fermentation; multispecies; domestication; taste
• Subjects: Food; Microorganisms; Geography; Taste; Cooking; Fermentation