Foodie in the Field

New Nordic Cuisine: The Poster Child for Sustainable Diets, Grassroots Nationalism and Unity?

In 2004, a group of highly industrious chefs from across the Nordic region, Aaland, Denmark, Faroe Islands, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden, with the support of several policy makers came together to create the Nordic Kitchen Manifesto. With representatives from each of these countries, a manifesto propagating the use of produce that is local and organic, whilst reviving old gastronomical techniques and expressing the purity, freshness, simplicity and ethics the region has to offer. This manifesto gave birth to the New Nordic Cuisine that has put this region, usually known for their minimalistic design concepts, LEGO and ABBA on the gastronomical map of the world, and this time not with IKEA’s Swedish meatballs.

From old to new: Porridge is one of the many traditional foods being reclaimed by this movement.

 Sustainability and the influence of the North

2030, the ultimate deadline for the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals is soon upon us. According to one of my interviewees, who has played an important role in the creation of the manifesto, sustainability is necessarily a Nordic concept because it was introduced at the Rio Convention of 1987, when the then Norwegian Prime Minister, Gro Harlem Brundtland, presented sustainability as a concept to the world. Ever since, the Nordic region is seen as an authority and even sometimes a poster child for sustainable lifestyles. But that is not when the Nordics started being a role model for the rest of the world. It started out around the Cold War, when they decided to maintain a neutral stance. Nordic Socialism even appeared to be a desirable middle ground between American capitalism and Russian Communism.

Like France’s Nouvelle Cuisine, New Nordic Cuisine has made the Nordic capitals into pilgrimage sights for social media foodies, and has also boosted eco-tourism to farms, where city people, can for a limited time engage in light farm work and begin to understand where their food comes from. But this planned focus on highlighting one’s cuisine has also become a source of pride for the people who identify with it.

Interestingly, this is a “bottom-up or grassroots nationalism” approach being used by other countries as well, using the Nordic Kitchen Manifesto as a successful model. During my fieldwork in Copenhagen, I attended several food related conferences, including the World Food Summit where I met a policy maker using a similar framework in Mexico, and an enthusiastic individual who has created a similar manifesto for India, and the Tasting India Symposium, which is meant to showcase the soft power of Indian gastronomic heritage, promote a sustainable and safe diet, and India’s forgotten indigenous foods. The Tasting India Symposium 2018 even invited Claus Meyer, an eminent figure in the Danish food industry, who was one of the spearheads of the Manifesto. Through my fieldwork with a food activism group, I also found a chef in Scotland trying to boost the image of Scottish food by following the Nordic model.

What’s in a Name?

Although New Nordic is a buzzword on the streets of Copenhagen, there is a little contention about the title itself. What originally piqued my interest in the topic was the idea that a region so topographically and culturally diverse could be grouped under one umbrella cuisine, to which I got varied reactions.

To several, they felt that because each country on its own have quite small populations, and so they might have a better shot at making a difference if they got together. A few others felt that the term “Nordic” needs to be used carefully and all inclusively, without selectively leaving out certain region, especially Greenland, the Faroe Island, Aaland and sometimes even Iceland. On the contrary, some also felt that it was more acceptable to identify as Nordic, rather than identifying as the country of one’s colonizers, like what usually happens to Greenland and the Faroe Islands, who are under the Danish Government, but are very different, culturally, topographically, and definitely in their cuisine.

However, there is another party of people who are not too keen on the term at all. According to these individuals, the manifesto came out around 15 years ago, so how “new” is the “New Nordic”? And anyway, the ideas of putting a focus on local, organic produce, is a tradition in Southern European countries, like France and Italy, not to mention in many other parts of the world. This group of people also believe that perhaps sticking to produce of a certain geographical region is limiting. However, they do not wish to commit any sort of patricide against the movement that put the Nordic region on the gastronomical map in the first place. So although they may try to be as organic, seasonal and fair, they try not to directly associate themselves with the New Nordic brand so that they do not find themselves caught in a web of technicalities, and form their own niche in the Nordic food industry.

By some, I was in fact corrected. I was told that rather than a cuisine, I need to think of the New Nordic Cuisine as a shared policy followed by the Nordic countries and as a way of life for its people.

Written by:
Tanya Pal,
Masters Student at the University of Copenhagen,
Ex-Xaverite, Class of 2017.