Hi. So, I've been cooking a long time, almost 30 years now, and every day I go into work
and I work really hard and I try and learn something new. And what I've learned at the
end of all of this time with all of this effort is something that I feel is kind of a universal
truth for cooks. And that's that I don't know a goddamn thing about anything. At the end
of the day, cooking in a restaurant, even though the passion, the desire for knowledge
is fundamental to what it means to be a cook, cooking for customers every day is a very
intuitive and a very emotional practice. And you learn what you can, but you can only
do so much to carefully study processes. And I was far on many years ago who realized
that if you physically separate a place where you can study and experiment a food lab, then
what happens is you can greatly accelerate the pace of discovery of new ideas. So a few
years ago, Renee and his team, they started a new kind of food lab, something that I think
is extraordinarily exciting. It's called the Nordic Food Lab. And it's specifically designed
to study Nordic food, true, but it's inspiring people all over the world, including myself,
because of the way they're approaching it. They don't create new dishes. What they are
doing is developing the building blocks of understanding that will allow all of us cooks
to make better food and more delicious food. So they're studying wild foods, they're cataloging
things, they're discovering the characteristics of a hundred different kinds of wild onions
and seaweed. They're fermenting native grains and fish. And they're building a platform
on which us, as cooks, we can stand and pull ourselves up and make better food and more
delicious food. And they're doing it in balance with the whole ecosystem. So basically, they're
using a lot of byproduct, a lot of waste product, a lot of things that people would
normally throw away. So there's a strong ecological and sustainability content to it as well.
So it is my great pleasure to introduce Lars, Williams, Mark, Emil, Hernandez. Can we,
Hermanson, can we please have a lot of wine? Thank you guys. It's an honor to be here.
I think almost everyone who's ever inspired me in the world is in this room today. So
it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you, Daniel, for the introduction. It's a little difficult
to talk about the Nordic Food Lab. A lot of my colleagues really often ask, what is it
do you guys actually do? Because it's a little hard to understand. And it doesn't make it
any easier for chefs to understand when they say, well, our anthropologist, Mark, who's
standing next to me, is really working on this big project that we just started. And
it becomes more and more complicated. I think to start off, you guys are getting bags. It's
not exactly a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. If you could take this vial out first. You
can just open it, taste it, please. We'll get back to what it actually is. And I think
it makes more sense to explain what we do, our approach to food, and our ideology, if
I led Mark to sort of tell about this in his roundabout way.
All right, good to see you all. Yeah, so title of our talk, delineating the edible and the
inedible, challenging concepts to shape the future. I mean, we always use these really
fancy titles for our work. We really enjoy putting that on top of the food. But basically
this is Lars and I and a few other people staffed on the boat, flavor scientist, a historian,
ethnobotanist that kind of go into this to develop new methods, new techniques, and really
new building blocks. So I'm going to start this by just telling my own story briefly.
It started one year ago at Oxford University as I was standing here, just finishing my
final paper, the title, an anthropological perspective on new Nordic cuisine as an expression
of Nordic identity, which is a very complicated title, again, to express a very simple idea,
which is we are what we eat or something by the likes of that. As I was standing here
about to open that bottle of champagne surrounded by two, almost three girls. This idea came
to my mind. Yeah, this idea came to my mind. Why don't I take this paper with this fancy
title and send it to Renovate Sabi at Noma and let kind of the new Nordic Oxford, you
know, all these fancy words work its magic and maybe he'll chip in a free dinner.
What happened next was I found myself on a fucking cold winter day with a sauce net
fishing for seaweed hobbers in the Copenhagen harbour because what René did was to post
me a challenge. He said, what does it mean that something is inedible? Why is it that
I can't just go out and take everything that I find on my way and put it on the plate in
my restaurant? And I said, that's a great question. I mean, humans being essentially omnivores,
we've heard this all day, can eat most things. This guy here made a whole career out of doing
just that. And they put everything they find on their way and put it in their mouth and
it's a way to explore the world. Which I think it's something that we need to get back to
as children, you know, babies, it's amazing to watch them. They're constantly interacting
and exploring the world and we really like to take inspiration from that and that's how
we try and approach things is by unlearning almost everything that we did know in the
beginning and for us to work creatively, it's all about finding this line, this boundary
that you have against your inspiration and stepping over it. So the most difficult thing
for us to do is figure out what we don't know in a sense.
Yeah, so exactly. But what we found was there's of course a border between the inedible and
inedible. And most times it's just edible. The inedible is just an edible with a consequence.
And of course, you know, consequences can be...
Like everyone knows that all mushrooms are edible, just some of them have consequences.
But there are also social and cultural consequences of eating some things.
I mean, earlier the guys from Mission Street talked about that and this sort of complexity
about what is the identity that food has.
Yeah, exactly. So yeah, just to sum up, we need to develop some of these kind of intellectual
tools for the kitchen that we could then work to apply in kind of innovating food, as we
say.
And okay, so to come back with it, so as I'm sure you're all aware here, 20 minutes before
lunch or 15 minutes now, eating is a biological act. It's something we need to do. But to
quote the great anthropologist Claude Fischler, eating is so much more than that. Food is a
substance that we allow to cross the boundary between the outside and the inside side of
our body.
And this principle of incorporation, as he calls it, touches a pin upon the very nature
of our person. It tells us something about who we are and where we are and about the
people that we surround us with. People eating similar food we trust. People eating dissimilar
foods we distrust. We might even be disgusted by them. And what we do through these regional
cuisines is establish a set of meanings around different foodstuffs. And it kind of allows
us to imagine who we are and where we are in the world. Sorry. So what you have is these
cultural concepts of what is and what is not delicious. And these concepts are like stamps
that sticks to you through your life. And through generations as well, like in Lars's
family where they still celebrate a traditional Christmas dinner every year in New York, three
generations after they left the continent.
Yeah, we don't really speak Norwegian. We still have a big Norwegian-style spread. And
you see that in New York is a great place to witness that, where you have Italian Americans
who are so proud of their culinary heritage and don't speak Italian.
Yeah, exactly. So it's kind of this rule of deliciousness or ability that's kind of delivered
between people and between generations. And those concepts can change too. We found this
great story of a riot in Boston in the 18th century where the prisoners were rioting that
they were being fed so much lobster. It was so disgusting to them. It's basically what
they were eating before they had rats.
So there was actually a mandate. So there was actually a lawgarden where they had a maximum
amount of lobster that could be served, which is not a problem that we generally have today.
But say, even seaweed or wild herbs, I mean, 10 years ago in this region was considered
an inedible substance or something that you just would not eat. It wasn't considered delicious
at all, at least in a general level. So it only would, when it becomes meaningful to
consume something, that it has the possibility of becoming delicious. Oh, I'm forgetting
my slides here. These are both testicles from Colorado that they fry up and sell them as
Rocky Mountain oysters.
Sardine.
Yeah. Just to say that these are really kind of really, really, really powerful concepts.
So last year, oh yeah, just to repeat what last said, that when we do this, it becomes
an introspective journey because we're really trying to challenge our own ideas and perceptions
of where this borderline is. So last year at Mad, Alex Otala presented, some of us and
some of you with these ants from the Amazon tasted just like lemongrass. Absolutely amazing.
And made us think, you know, these things are amazingly delicious, yet they are inedible.
They are, this is a really disgusting animal, but this is so delicious that this is something
I want more of. And it made us realize that what we kept on assuming was that itability
is a concept that is somehow perceived as prior to deliciousness. So for us, if we just
kind of reverse that and say, deliciousness is the driving force for itability, we kind
of get this great concept, this great tool where we can take this isolated concept of
deliciousness and then just apply it in the kitchen and try to, you know, innovate and
move forward with this regional cuisine. And I could go on debating this all night. I should
probably have stayed at university if I wanted to do that. We went to the kitchen instead
and with this hypothesis, the delusion between the edible and inedible is deliciousness itself.
And I know it says Lars and Mark on here. In fact, I came up with this. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So I guess we want to just, so, you know, I guess what we want to do, take this into
the kitchen, test it, see, is this true? And actually, we turn to insects as the first
stop and say, how do we consider these things? And we consider them like this from the film
Starship Troopers, one of Lars's favorites. These giant, you know, creatures taken over
the planet, sucking our brains out with a giant stick, you know, absolutely dangerous
and disgusting and everything. You know, yet 70% of people on the planet eat these things.
There's nothing innately wrong about insects. It's just, we don't happen to eat them. You
know, we find all these kind of small examples in Western culture, like this from the Bible
or, you know, stories of homeless guys telling you how you can eat earthworms, things like
that. But other than that, there's not a lot of things. Then you have, you know, all these
people coming up to us telling, you know, this is like the most sustainable food source
ever. You have the feed conversion ratio up to 10 times higher than traditional livestock.
You know, it tastes great. It's basically the way it's used in the Western world is
as a gimmick. It's as a culinary joke. When Lars made, oh, no, back, I'm missing a slide.
Okay. When Lars made a butter of grubs that we put on Twitter and people just freaked
out completely. We had the picture of the whole grubs and then the butter and it was
just, you know, worms slime next to each other. It tasted great, by the way. So we started
teaming up with some entomologists from the Copenhagen University and the University in
Wageningen where they're actually doing a lot of work on trying to make insects acceptable
in the West. And one of them, I mean, a lot of the stuff they're doing is to try to extract
protein from insects to kind of apply it and make it look like meat. Or as one suggested
even, you know, half jokingly, is that if we want to introduce entomophagy, the practice
of eating insects in the West, we should all be eating Cambodian food. And I think it really
highlights the point here is that why do we have to take all these cultural attributes
and then apply that when developing cuisine? Why can't we just make the whole thing up,
build a new culinary taxonomy in these creatures and really kind of map out the taste system
of these guys? And this is where the chefs come in here, symbolized by Lars, who insisted
I use this image of him. And the chefs can then go in and take all this talk and actually
apply this and develop this judiciousness because we know that the only thing that can
make these things taste bad is prejudice itself. And this is when I tell you that the first
sauce you had is a garum, sort of fish sauce, but the last made only it was from fermented
grasshoppers and waxmouth larvae. So you could also tell probably the people who have been
following us, they're a little more hesitant to taste things that we give you. Yeah, exactly.
So you can open up the second vial. It has the one, basically, the ones with these, which
are ants that Mark and Ula and one of our new interns has helped us. We sort of dug
these up. And the reason that we started playing with them is because we find them extremely
delicious. And that's one of the ideas we're working. And although I'm doing this just
quite a gimmick at the moment, we are fascinated by the flavors and how each one of the different
flavors, really, each one of the different ants taste quite different. So this is the
sauce that they're actually in. This is us making them. We just spun the grubs through
the centrifuge. And when we're eating these ants, it was amazing how different each one
tasted. Some are lemongrassi, some are coriander. Miles Irving called me up a couple weeks ago
and was so excited on the phone, almost couldn't, like, panicking exciting because he had found
coriander flavored ants and immediately put them into a box and shipped them to me. Unfortunately,
they escaped somewhere in customs. So we didn't actually get to taste those, but we did find
some similar ones in our forest in Copenhagen. But one of the things I think that we're talking
about and one of the reasons that we have people like Mark on our team is because it
allows us to attack these culinary problems and solve, answer questions that myself as
a cook and just not educated enough to do. So I sort of found a paper listing what the
pheromones that ants use to communicate are and trying to figure out why they taste like
they do. And Ariel Johnson, who's pictured, she's sitting right over there, pictured holding
up this whole list of compounds. And she walks by and goes, oh, that one's lemongrass. Oh,
that one's what the primary compounds of mint. That's there. They're sort of showing off.
And in ants, this one is lavender, fir, pine, melon, wintergreen nuts. These are all flavors
that the ants have. This is cabbage, roast beef, coconut, coriander, and leather. So
for us to be able to use insects as flavorings is amazing. And this is something we're trying
to approach food in a slightly different way. And we look at insects and we look at why
they have these flavors. It's mostly for defensive purposes. And in the same way, like the same
way that thyme tastes good or tarragon or rosemary is so flavorful and we love using
and cooking, it's because it's actually a defense mechanism. So we started looking into all
the different possibilities that we can possibly use these for. But an idea is to not have it
just be this terrible, terrible thing that we're all terribly afraid of. You can try this
small beaker with a couple of these guys in it. Give that a taste now. It's a small white.
This should be a third one. Give that a taste. Again, we're going to push everyone's comfort
zone a little bit. It's light. It's not. It's got a nice sort of fattiness into it. Slightly
sweet. These are B-Lar by the male drones. Sorry, guys. We actually get these from from
Copenhagen. We collect them from a beekeeper who has bee hives around the city on rooftops.
And they used to just throw them to the chicken to feed the chicken. But yeah, now we can.
So now we're finding a very interesting and, I think, possibly, we're taking what used
to be a waste product and finding a really positive kid. I think someone is actually
being attacked by ants. Oh, God. Are they fighting back? I think they're getting hyped
up by the movie. So I think the biggest thing that we like to talk about is just fighting
this border between the edible and edible is how we're trying to interact with our landscape.
And it's something that we find passionate. But there's also an idea that we find can
be taken anywhere. It's any part of the world. I think people are looking at different parts
of their cuisine and finding inspiration from it. And we, I guess, would like to just pose
a challenge to you guys if you can do the same. Thank you very much.
Before we get to the questions, I just wanted to say just a couple of words about people
like Lars and Mark because I know they've got a professional life working at Nome and
the Nordic Food Lab, but they've been running around the back organizing stuff for the last
few days. And if you didn't know they had another life, you'd think they were professional
event organizers. And they're doing an absolutely brilliant job. And it's not just Lars and
Mark. Maybe it's a good time for us to take a moment and to think about the kind of event
that René and his team have created here. Because I think you've all noticed that from
the moment we've got off the boat and we've been greeted by volunteers and to the amazing
kind of collaborative and collegiate effort that the effort that's been put in and the
joy with which people with their t-shirts from MAD are putting into this event. I just
think it's a real, you know, we've all been to events and they're quite interesting and
they're sometimes very stimulating. But I don't think any have that kind of feeling
of joy and togetherness. It's like a family gathering. So I think what we should do is
for all of the people from René down to the volunteers, all the MAD people, all the Nome
people, let's make a lot of noise for them.
I think it's really important to do that because I think the atmosphere you guys have created
and girls has been just absolutely memorable, as Paul Rosen would say. Right, have we got
any questions specifically? We do have a question from Paul. Can you just hang on until the
microphone gets here? I think one of actually, coming when we started thinking about this
presentation, one of the problems that we had was not quoting Paul 15 times.
Well, I thought that was wonderful. I loved your food. I work in disgust, as you know,
and one of the issues is that getting people to do something once is the big problem. That
is to say, people get used to things. For example, everyone in this room is breathing
the air that came out of the lungs of the person right next to them. Now, that's pretty
disgusting, but you get used to it. You get used to it. After a few insects, it's just
like some more food. A critical thing in this and one area I work in, which is getting people
to re-process sewer water, which is perfectly good water, is to just get them to do it a
few times. Because once you do it and it tastes good, you forget where it comes from, just
as we tend to forget where most of our food comes from. We don't think about it. We eat
it and enjoy it. That's one of the things that we personally
noticed is that, I think, within five days, we are sort of acceptance threshold that really
changed completely with regard to the insects. Now we have people coming in to visit us and
you're just sitting there snacking insects. First thing Renee did for me, even before I
came my first day at the food lab, was ordering 10 packets of live grasshoppers and saying,
oh, you can pick them up on Monday at 9 o'clock. I was like, what am I going to do? Are they
frozen? No, no, they're alive. Just come and pick them up. So I had these 10 packs of
live insects that I just had to come home and start cooking with them, going through
that whole process, inviting people over and all that.
Unfortunately, they're grown.
But not.
But what I was losing the point here, we have Mikael Bompfrost, who is our director at the
Nordic Food Lab, who talks a lot about that. One of the things we want to do in developing
this kind of culinary taxonomy is to actually test that as well. How much do we need to
disguise? I mean, the seaweed hovers. Hovers are actually a great example of that, which
is an amphipod, which is kind of in between of a crustacean and an insect. So we thought
we could maybe use that as kind of a gateway insect, because it's kind of living. I mean,
if you see, crustaceans are basically giant sea creatures. So like a lobster, it's a giant
sea creature. It's a scavenger. It eats garbage. If not garbage, then other lobsters. And it's
a really disgusting animal if it had been living on land. But because it's kind of across
that boundary, and probably because we don't see it, if I'm delicious, yes, you have these
giant insects that only eat leafy matter in the forest all day, and people are disgusted
by it. So I think it's a really good point that Mr. Rosen has in that regard. So I mean,
I'm just trying to say, this is part of the project we're trying to do is to map that
out. Michael always says, it's an interplay between neophobia and neophilia. How something
new can be both exciting and scary. And that's really where we, in our, I guess, design process
of these things is where we really want to hit that spot right now.
Yeah. And it's also for us, I mean, because I think the purpose of what the Nordic Food
Lab is to do is to give chefs building blocks that they can really then take their creativity
and expand on and form new dishes, new ideas about food. So with the INSIDE project, we're
trying to give them sort of like a head start, like a little jump kick.
Just to, yeah, just to, yeah, sorry, last, just to add to that. I mean, I think that's
why it's so interesting working with high-end cuisine is because people, once they're inside
the restaurant, they are much, they are much more open to that challenge. So you see it
no more, for instance, or other places where as soon as you go in there, you trust the
people around you, you are susceptible to this. We like to do the comparison with Formula
1 cars. I mean, people don't drive around in Formula 1 cars, except it's the, you know,
despite the fact that it's the kind of best and fastest car around. Yet some things from
the Formula 1 cars spill down into, you know, regular vehicles. And that's kind of that
trickle down effect in terms of developing this that we're also looking for on a kind
of a wider, ambitious scale.
Okay. Let's take a question up here. And then I think there's going to be one right here
in the middle after that.
I wanted to ask about the cultural impact of the things you eat, because there are cultures
where you eat dog, the French eat horse. And specifically, the one that probably interests
me most is because we see a very big debate about it is whale meat. What would your take
on that be? Because the Japanese argue that's a cultural thing. Australians are mightily
offended by it and spend a lot of time fighting in the International Whaling Commission. Are
there boundaries, cultural boundaries, you don't go across in what you eat?
Well, I mean, I personally don't feel that there's a cultural boundary. I think that
with you, when you're talking about whales, it's just not a sustainability problem. And
I think that we are in real danger of losing diversity in what we have in the world. And
so I think it's just, I don't support whaling myself, but I don't have a problem with it
per se as a food, like the idea of it as for food.
I can actually just to give an example of a big problem yet, because to me, when I tasted
this ant first, I was blown away. It was a eureka moment, because in the cold north,
I don't expect lemongrass flavors, you know, where this proud Protestant country that will
eat, you know, to survive. And suddenly you were having this flavor here, something that
I had in Thai food or in Latin flavors. I was blown away. It was a way of finding new
flavors to the food. So we started introducing it gently to some people. And of course, a
journalist picked up on it and wrote about it, and which resulted in a cascade of angry
emails proclaiming that now, you know, it is, it is declared that Noma is the emperor's
new clothes. And there were, you know, there was a, made a short sort of a story on how
they were envisioning the chefs putting an ant on some of the food. And then everybody
was sort of, you know, looking at the guests and when they put them in the mouth, you know,
they would say, oh my God, they eat them. So, so we have that. There is huge cultural
boundaries there, even though that it's a delicious flavor. It's a real strong, delicious
flavor. But even now, six months in it, people have heard about it and, you know, it's becoming
more and more sort of common to do it, even amongst Ostains. Right. But with the, the
answers that we have a sustainability problem with the ants is that we can't, I mean, with
that's a good example for the whaling, because if we consume all these ants, then they'll
be gone and not be around for people to enjoy. So we're quite careful about how we forge
for wild things. And that's something you're taking consideration with, you're just forging
wild herbs as well. Yeah. And in fact, in fact, that's one of the things that the entomologists
highlight all the time is that if we want to kind of roll this out on a wider scale,
it's very important to do it in a, in a, in a strategic manner where we are kind of have
those problems covered from the beginning, finding out what are the danger zones, not
only, you know, health-wise, but also in terms of, in terms of, like, yeah, the environment
and sustainable kind of cultures for the ants, things like that to not kind of go into it.
We've got a question here, right in the middle, right there, middle. I was just wondering
if you guys had ever thought about presenting the insects, perhaps, to children first. And
if you had, because they have less preconceived notes, I mean, I have a child that eats grasshoppers
coated in dusted cheddar. He's kind of weird. But I was just wondering if you see a difference
in the acceptance of insects from adults in comparison to children. Yes. I mean, kids,
if that's, you find it, it's completely different. Kids are very, very willing to accept novel
foods because they don't have the cultural sort of stigma against it. We were doing,
we were down in Amsterdam talking to entomologists about food and they'd made meatballs that
had, one had mealworms and one didn't have mealworms. And 90% of the people preferred
the ones with the mealworms in them. And then actually a small kid came up and was complaining
like, mommy, mommy, I don't have enough mealworms in my meatball. So there's a, I think with
children, it's fantastic, I think, in general to interact with kids and food. But for this
intake project, you definitely see much more of an acceptance level.
