Hi everyone, welcome to Pot Luck Food Talks.
Today we're here at KU, the Department of Food Science with Professor Michael Bonfrost.
And we're going to talk a little bit about how Copenhagen developed as a food destination.
So welcome, Professor, nice to have you here.
At this lovely library, we were checking a little bit of the books, a super nice selection.
So first of all, we wanted to know a little bit how this developed, what happened here in Copenhagen.
Is it true that 30 years ago, well, at least in my experience, the city or the country was not at all in the conversation of fine dining or food?
What happened there?
I think, we can say there was a lot of bamboo growth happening before the new Nordic food manifesto.
There were many things popping up, a few frontrunners were developing an advanced speed on what should we do.
And that was both in beer, in bakeries, flour, in restaurants.
So I think it happened sort of simultaneously in a number of different areas that there was an interest in having more delightful presences.
And I think what sparked it was different actors, among them Klaus Meyer coming with what was seen abroad.
That food could be a source of joy and food we could have a higher quality than we were used to having in our homes in a Danish setting.
I think one of the classical sayings is that we used to sell the good stuff and eat the bad stuff ourselves.
Traditionally, we've been an exporter of pork, particularly bacon and butter and other dairy products.
And we kept the leftovers and used that for our food.
So that's sort of a historical, ah, okay, that's what we did.
Of course, it's an exaggeration, but it's a very good framing of that.
It wasn't really the focus of that we should eat well in Denmark.
Of course, there were a few people doing it and the trailblazers were already there in the 70s with them.
In the chef's world, there was Erwin Lauterbach and Søren Geerike, who were championing this idea that we could have a much better food scene in Copenhagen than what we had.
You mentioned Klaus Meyer.
Well, he was making bakery business, but he was also an activist and he was also a catalyser of the New Nordic with the opening of Noma and the New Nordic Manifesto.
What can you comment on that?
I think he knows the stories much better than I do.
In the scene, there was also, you can say, the Danish Academy for Gastronomy, which is a private small organization.
They were advocating for that we should have a house of food or Madenshus in Copenhagen funded by the government.
Everything was in place, but then we had a shift of government in 2001.
It was derailed and put back into the drawer so that no one was advocating for that.
There were quite a number of people who were saying, okay, they had an interest in food.
They were people who enjoyed food, like the former EU commissioner and mayor of Copenhagen, Red Berger.
She was also part of this movement to say, let's get more emphasis on high quality foods in Denmark and in Copenhagen.
If I'm not wrong, Noma opened in 2004 and 2005, the Manifesto was written.
Noma opened in 2003, as far as I remember.
I remember very vividly that the Manifesto, they met and created the Manifesto in November 2004,
because I couldn't participate in the meeting.
I was traveling in Korea for months and they were having it exactly in November of 2020.
What challenges did it look to address, the Manifesto?
I think the inspiration came from the film world, the Danish Dogma movies.
They were reinventing filmmaking in Denmark, saying that we should focus on having a more raw presence.
They had dogmatic rules about how you could make films that included that you should only use natural light.
The actors should bring their own clothing and so on.
A number of films were created that way and some of them were nominated for prizes.
I can't remember how many of them won.
It was a spark to say, maybe we can do this with food also.
So they made a Dogma or a Manifesto.
With strict rules, only using local produce?
I wouldn't say that there were strict rules, but it was more like, this is what we would like to do.
The Nordic region is known for purity, for a nice, good climate, in terms of that we were environmentally concerned quite early.
So people would be seeing the food that came from our areas as something that could be more pristine.
If you take the Scandinavian peninsula and Finland and the North Atlantic parts of the Nordic region,
so the Faroe Islands, Iceland and Greenland, it's an enormous area.
The diversity there and the cultural connections were there to get food from one place to another.
If you read the first Nomad Cookbook, it's also said that to start Nomad Klaus and René,
they went to the Faroe Islands to get inspirations.
They saw something completely different than what they had expected when it came to produce.
I think that was part of the, that was built into the Manifesto,
that we really have to make a representation of the landscape that we have in the Nordics.
And then a few years later, it became kind of like a political tool of territorial development of the region,
like to get funding, for instance, to open the Nordic Food Lab and all these initiatives,
also Mads Impulsions and all of this. What happened there? What changed exactly at that point?
Let me see if I can remember everything correctly.
But the new Nordic Food Manifesto sparked the creation and writing of a report from the Nordic Council of Ministers,
which is a collaboration organization between all of the Nordic countries, all eight countries and independent territories.
The Åland, Faroe Islands, Greenland, and then Iceland, Norway, Finland, Sweden, and Denmark, right?
So they're eight member countries and independent territories.
One of the actors in there was Lisa Lise Løkke-Stefansson, who was politically appointed.
She was promoting, let's say, the Nordic region as a region of growth.
She picked up on that we could use food, or not her alone, but people inside the organization picked up that we could use food as a tool.
So she created with others inside the Nordic Council of Ministers, they wrote a report showing the perspective.
And then several of the ministers of food and agriculture around in the different countries saw the potential in that and said,
let's work more in this direction to create a new Nordic cuisine and a new effort to promote new Nordic food.
And also at that time, or more or less the same time, it was the article on Time magazine that was on the cover.
I don't know if you remember about that.
With Rene Rebsenbi?
Yeah, exactly.
I think it coincided with a rise in the celebrity chef that chefs became pinnacles of,
okay, they are actually very connected to the natural world.
And they had helped us form a bridge between a disconnected, alienated urban existence and the world as it is.
So it was not him alone, but it was like Ferdinand Drea and...
Had some romance out of it.
Yeah, Aleksa Thaler.
Oh, yeah.
There were the three that were on the cover.
Ah, yeah, exactly.
And that was sort of foraging and connecting nature and city, the raw materials with the guests.
And so I think there were several types of activities that can say created a co-emergence of the boom here, right?
And was it in this context that the Nordic Food Lab was created?
The creation of the Nordic Food Lab relates to that.
Some of the people behind the new Nordic Food Manifesto in Klaus Mayer's organization, Mayer Food,
they sat down to write a proposal for the new Nordic Councils because they had a program for promotion of industrial activities
with a particular Nordic angle.
And they applied for, I think it was 350,000 kroner or something to start Nordic Food Lab for.
And the first thing that they got when they had the 350,000 kroner was to get an extra grant from the Nuderia Foundation to get it running.
So they had a good starting pool of around 3.5 million, which is around a little less than 0.5 million euro to get it started,
to build the place, to work together and to create the organization.
And what was the goal of the Nordic Food Lab? To discover and novel Nordic foods?
You know, it was to rediscover and develop.
So if you have an ingredient, I mean, an ingredient in itself sometimes needs a lot of research before it becomes a central raw material in the cuisine.
So the discovery of what was in the Nordic landscapes, some of the early works that I remember, I was part of.
So you had the Nordic Food Lab, there were a few people hired, there was a board of directors, and then there was an innovation board.
And I was part of the innovation board.
So we heard about what was happening and we gave inputs and we would also help them in different ways, right?
No.
Support them in different ways.
Initially, there was like, what do we have in the gene bank, in the Nordic gene bank, which is just across Copenhagen on the Swedish side, just north of Malmö in Alenap.
That's where the gene bank is.
And not coincidentally, but it's actually led by Lisa Lykke-Stef, who was the main author of the first new Nordic food report in the Nordic Council of Ministers.
So they were getting materials old, underutilized or forgotten varieties of plants and using them to explore what could they do of different types.
I remember potatoes, I remember other types.
So they were working on this from a very exploratory point of view. What could they be used for?
How were they different from what was in the market?
The conformity of the industrial scale production.
And I was just talking with Phil, who is not today here, about I think one of the most tangible changes you can see in the culinary landscape worldwide that came out of the new Nordic movement
was that before the movement, fermentation was not such a big deal.
People would maybe one restaurant in a while would do some pickles or some sauerkraut and that was it.
And suddenly it became something that everybody's doing, fermenting all kinds of things because there was a lack of technical knowledge about it.
Was this something that was boosted by the Nordic Food Lab or was it Nome itself?
We did a lot of fermentation at Nordic Food Lab and some of the fermentations were unsuccessful and others became mainstays of what's happening in current gastronomy.
So if you look at Miso and the garden production, I mean that started in Nordic Food Lab, that we started producing them already in 2012.
And somewhere in a souvenir box, I have a few of them still.
But of course Nome, everyone was starting to do fermentation, to make vinegars and so on.
And I think what was special was that we displayed so much of how to do it.
We gave information via the blog so that everyone could take it up and create the same, not the same, but variants of the produce themselves.
Beautiful things were happening there in terms of saying also like very long-term projects where you can say this is just to show what goes on.
We had a head of culinary innovation at some time was Ben Reed.
And he came with a background.
He was doing a bachelor's degree at University of Gastronomic Sciences and came to Nordic Food Lab to intern and to do his bachelor thesis.
And he was incredibly productive and him and Lars Williams together came up with some of them all.
They were very good and with very little investment.
What can we make? They made fermentation boxes where you would use like floor, undercover floor heating and a thermostat to regulate temperature.
So you had an opportunity to be systematic about it and adjust, not just let it run wild, but let it go well.
And we published, Ben, he wrote a lot.
And we published all of that in the beginning of 2012 on Nordic Food Lab's website.
So it was like a whole body of a lot of fermentation that came out there.
And that was his bachelor degree thesis from University of Gastronomic Sciences that was transformed into a blog post as well.
So I don't think there were anyone else who had sort of systematically say let's do this and let's write it up and let's share it with others.
Yeah, I've heard that also Noma itself that many of the things that happened came out of chaos that at the beginning there was a lot of discussion, a lot of unplanned things, but everybody giving its best.
And that's kind of how it developed.
The first fermentation area that Noma had was an attic.
So it wasn't very controlled. Right.
And at Nordic Food Lab, we had the houseboat.
I think the temperatures were, I know that the temperatures were a bit lower because we had the sea.
So in the basement, it was pretty stable what the temperature was.
And then I think in late in 2013 or something like that, Noma invested in containers to create the first fermentation lab, right?
Where they would have people come and work systematically on optimizing their fermentations.
Ariel Johnson and then David Silva, they were I think the first two that were working and Lars Williams, they were the first that were working there.
First, Lars Williams and Ariel.
And then Lars moved on to a different position and Ariel, sorry, and David Silva I think moved more in the fermentation lab direction.
Okay.
And another profile that I think it's interesting, we wanted to interview him.
Unfortunately, it wasn't possible during this trip, is Mark Emil because he's like an anthropologist.
What's the role of an anthropologist in the Nordic Food Lab?
He was very instrumental in helping create the first ideas of how we should do research on insects.
On insects. Okay.
We worked on this and then started with an idea that at the first matching potion, Alexa Tala, he was presenting a story about how in the Amazon,
insects were really part of what was going on.
It was part of the larder, the part of the normal ingredients that you would use.
And he showed some examples of how he tried to introduce that into his cuisine.
And the chefs around and he said, why can't we serve insects in our restaurant?
So we took that up in Nordic Food Lab and initially worked with just a shoestring budget.
What could we do? And then eventually, together with Mark Emil, we wrote a grant application and we pitched it to a foundation.
And we got a grant where we could systematically explore the deliciousness of insects.
So what were the findings regarding insects?
At the time, FAO had published a report about it was actually a small committee in a program about
non-wood forest products.
What kind of crops and what kind of resources can you extract from forest that isn't wood?
And part of that was insects, to use insects as a food source.
And that report was quite published.
For some years, it was the most downloaded publications from FAO.
So it seemed like there was a need and there was a lot of people interested in this as a new protein source.
At that time, it wasn't widely known how large the environmental consequences of animal-based farming was.
So it was a way of... These were the first reports.
I think it was another report from FAO called The Long Shadow of Animal Farming or Husbandry.
I can't remember exactly the framing of the report.
There was a starting understanding of we need to do something about the amount where we get our protein from.
And it will be unsustainable to maintain a high level of animal production or animal-based food production.
So insects came up as one of the solutions that could be explored.
If you take a global perspective, insects are already eaten in many different countries.
And by Arnold Van Hooijs, he was a member of the advisory board for our project on insects.
And he said he remembered that it was put in the report that around 2 billion people eat insects.
But there was a generous estimate.
He would say that about 2 billion people had tried to eat insects and lived in cultures where eating insects was something that happened.
A fraction of those people would eat insects regularly or they would be a substantial part of their protein sources.
So what we did in Deliciousness of Insects project was to explore the understanding that these communities that used insects had.
So there was part of an anthropological field study going to the places.
Josh Evans and Ben Reed and later also Roberto Florida, they were traveling to different regions in the world exploring the insect astronomy there
and trying to understand it better to see how we could transform that into something to understand the principles of how does insects as ingredients,
how do they work in menus, in dishes and so on.
And we worked a lot on this, both students working on it and chefs working in the kitchen
and people researching the way that consumers or diners or normal people cooking with insects, how they interacted with it and so on.
And what you could do to promote this whole field.
And we took the perspective of saying let's not consider insects as just a protein source,
but actually what are the delicious elements that insects bring to the food.
So we focused a lot on that, which was a very different perspective than the majority of other researchers were more looking into.
How can we hide insects as much as possible?
Other researchers and other actors were, how can we produce as much insects as possible and hide it so that it becomes just an underswept protein source?
And I think my interpretation of it is also that at the time it would be an arms race between insects, artificial meat and plant-based alternatives.
And I think now, if you look at the...
It's what is happening right now, right?
Yeah, what has been going on for 10 years.
And I think the plant-based alternatives have won, if you want to say in terms of it, for the lab-grown meat producers, et cetera.
But if you look at the volume, then...
And the cost also, yeah.
The controversy around it, also both insects and lab-grown, there's a discussion about it while in plant-based it's not like everybody's okay with having that.
The advantage of the plant-based is that the sources are available readily in many places where it still takes a lot of research to scale up lab-grown meat.
Exactly, yeah.
And you can say based on earlier work in food science and technology on soil already dating back from the 80s, you had a lot of knowledge of what you could do with plant-based proteins.
I mean, as you see now, this is the area, but the challenge is then I think consumers, we've done some research on this.
Just last year, that consumers are...
There are some people that are more skeptical towards using.
They're concerned about the level of processing and they're concerned about the health of the foods that are the plant-based alternatives that are coming out.
And I think that we also have to build trust for this category of food as well.
But back to insects, we can say we were one of the...
We were in the vanguard of trying to promote insects as a food source.
And I think that was very... It was super interesting for me as a sensory scientist because it relates to how do we convey, how do we convince people that they should try foods that they haven't tried before.
And insects in particular was a real challenge because of association with disgust and diseases and filthiness and so on.
So we did our best to show the beauty of insects and the aesthetics of insects in that aspect.
Yeah, it can be really impressive. I've tried ants that taste like lemon or these different things.
And I know also that in the Nordic food labs, there were like ant gin or the...
Ants, yeah.
There's a little bottle left up here.
Joint collaboration with the Cambridgeson Distillery won an Innovation Award for best, most innovative spirit in 2015.
This book is also like a consequence of all the research you were just mentioning.
So besides insects, fermentation...
A lot of work on seaweed.
One of the board of directors was Ole Morgensen.
And he became, I would say, he had an interest in Japanese food long before anything existed.
He was living in Seattle and learned to appreciate sushi and Japanese food in general.
And he's been a big promoter of Japanese food for many years.
So he was appointed as one of the board of directors and he was also active in getting funding for projects that seaweed was part of,
were the ingredients that were worked on.
So we've done some very interesting work on that.
When it comes to research funding and when it comes to finding a way in the world for projects that you're doing,
it's an advance to be at the right time.
Sometimes you're too much ahead of the schedule and sometimes you're lacking behind others.
And with the algae research that we were trying to do,
we really spent a lot of time, already from 2008 and 2015,
trying to get funding for doing gastronomic research, doing food-related research on algae.
And then he gave up and said, OK, I'm not having it anymore.
Apparently, there's no interest in the Danish funding environment to support this.
Now there's a lot happening.
Around out there.
Yeah, OK.
We were a bit too early then, but there were some successful products and a few projects that were funded that created some interesting.
And from a gastronomic point of view, some of my favorite dishes were containing dahlsa.
That was William C. He made an ice cream based on dahlsa.
But the flavor was the seaweed dahlsa.
Amazing dish with algae and adnoma.
It was algae with truffles and mustard, like a super crazy combination.
It was incredible.
And now we have farmers, growers and harvesters.
There are a few companies that are living off producing algae for food consumption in Denmark.
I also wanted to know what is the legal status of insects right now in Denmark?
Is it legal to produce them and consume them?
I think as far as I remember, there are five insects that are approved to produce as food for humans.
But then there are some others that are also produced as feed.
My evaluation is that the northern European population, it's a lot easier to convince them to eat plant based alternatives than it is to convince them to eat insects.
And then I would say in the circular economy and biosolutions sphere, the advances of insects is that they can upcycle ingredients that are waste,
that would not be suitable for food and can be neither for feed and can themselves become feed.
So that you get a higher quality protein and you get a very good use of otherwise wasted resources.
So they become feed and you could use them for chicken, you could use them for pork or whatever.
One of the big issues, we have a very large animal, particularly pork production in Denmark.
And the import of soy is concerning to that.
So they're looking for alternative sources.
And particularly if you are in the organic sector, it's very difficult to get certified organic soy.
So we have to be as a producer or as a farmer who wants to buy a protein rich ingredient for feed, a protein rich feed.
Then you have to think about what other alternatives are there.
It's difficult to get organic plant based proteins or other types of protein.
So today the Nordic Food Lab doesn't exist anymore.
How was the ending of it? What is its legacy?
You can say Nordic Food Lab existed individually from 2008 to 2014.
And then we moved in to be part of the Department of Food Science.
I was part-time director of Nordic Food Lab and part-time associate professor here at the Department of Food Science.
And I advocated that we should move Nordic Food Lab in here.
And we thrived for a long time, say four years we were here.
And then it was quite a unique constellation of having the Nordic Food Lab advisory board.
And had a role in shaping the direction and that sort of, it was difficult to navigate in that space within the university.
I think we had one bad year of funding 2017.
So the management decided to say we should end this.
But I would say Department of Food Science was still having a lot of activities that relates to ideas that were founded at Nordic Food Lab.
So more sustainable food, upcycling waste and collaborating with chefs and creating food innovation.
Healthy and sustainable foods that are also delicious is part of what we do now.
So you can say it's been built into it. It didn't exist at the start.
But now the ideas have been absorbed and are being used by many of the different entities inside of the Department of Food Science.
And what would you say are today like the tangible consequences of the new Nordic movement?
But in the society or in normal restaurants, not only fine dining, what can be found around here in Copenhagen?
If you look at it from the perspective of what can we see in the broad population, I made a very interesting observation last year.
In June, we did a European survey of different fermented plant-based foods or plant-based alternatives.
And one of them is tempeh.
And you could just see that the knowledge of tempeh was higher.
The consumer knowledge of tempeh was higher in Denmark than any other place but the Netherlands,
which is a former colonial master of Indonesia that produced tempeh as a world product.
So you could say the early stages of creating fermented plant-based products,
I think that is part of a legacy that lives on, right?
That everyone, not everyone, but they're at a higher level when it comes to interest in plant-based fermented foods than many other places in Europe.
And then I think another legacy is that if you look at the around 80 people that over the years came through Nordic Food Lab,
many of them have gone on to create entities themselves or have learned something at Nordic Food Lab that becomes the foundation of,
or was a starting seed for their further careers, right?
So there are people working both with restaurants, there are people working with the food sector,
with innovation that are producers of various high-end products that came through Nordic Food Lab.
There was an open innovation network research carried out around Alice Waters Restaurant,
where they realized that over 40 years, there were about 270 companies that were founded by people who had been there.
Nordic Food Lab and Noma and all the others, I mean, it's probably not near that yet,
but it's the same kind of tendency.
People come, they get a certain mindset, they learn something, and they use those tools to build further on their career,
which is of course, like you know, some people say that Noma became the McKinsey of the restaurant sector.
You have to go there and work hard and earn your accolades, and then you move on and you create your own pathway based on this.
Like if you take the consultant world or the business world,
you need to work in one of the big consultancy firms for some time to get a big insight into many different areas of business.
And I think that's what Noma has created. And what we did at Nordic Food Lab, I think, was much more research oriented.
And what they're doing at MAD is to educate the public.
And from that perspective, we had different roles where the research role was with Nordic Food Lab.
Right? So if you take some of those products that needed a lot of research to exist,
I would say that they probably, in my opinion, emerged more from Nordic Food Lab than they did from the other places.