Delineating the Edible and Inedible | Nordic Food Lab

hi so um I've been cooking uh a long time almost 30 years now and every day I go into work and I work really hard and I I try and learn something new and uh what I've learned at the end of all of this time with all of this effort is um something um uh that I feel is kind of a universal truth for cooks and um that's that I I don't know a goddamn thing about anything at the end at the end of the day cooking in a restaurant even though the the the passion the desire for knowledge is fundamental to what it means to be a cook cooking for for customers every day is a very intuitive and a very emotional practice and and you you learn what you can but you can only do so much to carefully study processes I was faran 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 and 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 they're they're discovering the characteristics of a hundred different kinds of wild onions and seaweed they're fermenting native grains and 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 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 and sustainability content to it as well so uh it is my my great pleasure to uh introduce uh Lars Williams Mark Emil Hernandez can we Hermanson can we please have a lot come on thank you guys it's uh an honor to be here I think almost everyone who's ever inspired me in in the world is in this room today um so it's a pleasure to be here uh thank you Daniel Daniel for the introduction um 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 I say well our Anthropologist Mark who's standing next to me uh is really working on this big project that we had just started um and it becomes more and more complicated I think to start off you guys are getting bags it's not exactly uh a peanut butter and jelly sandwich um if you can take this vial out first you can you just open it face 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 uh our ideology if I let Mark sort of tell about this in his Rond out way all right good to see you all um 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 tites for our work we really enjoy putting that on top of the food but um basically this is lass and I and a few other people staffed on the boote uh flavor scientist uh a historian uh ethnobotanist that's that kind of go into this to develop you know new methods new techniques and and really really new building blocks yeah um so I'm I'm going to start this by just telling my My Own Story briefly it started one year ago at Oxford University was I was standing here just finishing my final paper the title an anthropological perspective on new NAIC cuine 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 uh as I was standing here about to open that bottle of champagne surrounded by two almost three girls it uh this idea came to my mind yeah yeah this idea came to my mind why don't I take this paper with this fancy title and send it to reny Red sa at NoMa and let kind of the new Nordic Oxford you know all these fancy words work it's magic and maybe he'll chip in a free dinner what happened next was I found myself on a [ __ ] cold winter day with uh souret fishing for seaweed hobbers in the Copenhagen Harbor because what Renee did was to POS 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 that's a great question I mean humans being essentially omnivos we've heard this all day can eat most things this guy here made a whole career out of doing just that and and um and uh oh sorry um it's okay they put it they put everything they find in their way and put it in their mouth and it's a way to explore the world um which I think is a very like 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 it's we like really like to take inspiration from that and that's how we try and approach things is by unning 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 what we found was there there there's of course a border between the edible and inedible uh and and most times it's just edible the edible is just an an edible with a consequence uh and of course you know consequences can everyone knows that all mushrooms are edible just some of them have consequences um but but uh there are also social and cultural consequences of eating some things um I me and and yeah I mean earlier earlier with the guys from Mission Street talked about that and this sort of complexity about what is the identity that food has exact yeah exactly um so yeah just just to sum up we need to develop some of these kind of intellectual tools for the kitchen that we could can then work to apply in kind of innovating food as we say and um 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 uh eating is a biological act it's something we need to do um but to quote the great Anthropologist Claude Fishler um eating is so much more than that um 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 um 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 uh peing people eating similar food we trust people eating dissimilar Foods we distrust or we might even be disgusted by them um um and and and and and what we do through these Regional Cuisines is establish a set of meanings around different food stuffs and it it it kind of allows us to imagine who we are and where we are in the world um sorry so you you kind of to up so so what you have these these cultural Concepts at what is and what is not delicious and these these concepts are like stamps that sticks to you through your life um and and through generations as well like in lass's family where they still celebrate a traditional Christmas dinner every single year in New York three generations after they left the continent yeah we don't really speak Norwegian but ex we still have a a big sort of 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 yeah so so it's kind of this rule of deliciousness or or itability that's kind of delivered between people and between between Generations um um um and and and those those Concepts can change too we found this this great story of a riot in in Boston in the uh 18th century where the prisoners were writing that they were being fed so much Lobster it was so disgusting to them it's basically what they were eating before they had rant uh rats um so there was actually a mandate so they there was actually a law written where they had a maximum amount of lobster that could be served which is a not a problem that we gener have but say even even seaweed or wild herbs I mean 10 years ago in this region was considered you know an an inedible substance or something that you just would not eat it wasn't considered delicious at all at least in in a general level um so it only when it becomes meaningful to consume something uh that that it that it has a possibility of of becoming delicious um oh I'm forgetting my slides here these are B testicles uh from Colorado that they fry up and sell them as Rocky Mountain Oysters sure do yeah yeah um just to say that these are really kind of really really really powerful Concepts um so last year uh oh yeah just to 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 of of of where this where this borderline is um so last year at at Matt Alex atala presented uh some of us and some some of you with with these uh these amps from the Amazon tast just like lemongrass absolutely amazing um and made us think you know these things are amazingly delicious yet they are inedible they are they this is a really disgusting animal but this is so delicious that is this is something I want more of and and it made us realize that what we kept on assuming was that edibility is a concept that is somehow uh 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 that or this great tool where we can take this isolated concept of deliciousness and then just apply it in the kitchen um and try to you know innovate and move forward this Regional Cuisine and and I could go on debating this all night I should probably have stay at University if I wanted to do that we went to the kitchen instead uh and uh with this hypothesis uh the delation between the edible and inedible is deliciousness itself and I know it says L and Mark under here in fact I came up with this um yeah yeah yeah yeah so I guess we has Bigg we wanted to so you know guess what we want to do take this into the kitchen test it see is this true true and naturally we uh we turn to insects as the first stop and say how how do we consider these things and and we consider them like this from the film Starship Troopers one of L's favorites these giant you know creatures taking over the planet sucking our brains out with a giant stick you know absolutely dangerous and disgusting and everything um you know yet 70% of people on the planet eat these things uh there's nothing innately wrong about insects it's just we don't happen to eat them you know you we we find all these kind of small examp examples in Western culture like this from the Bible uh or you know stories of homeless guys telling you how you can eat earthworms things like that um 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 know you have the feed conversion ratio up to 10 times higher than traditional livestock you know it's uh it tastes great it's you know it basically the way it's used in the western world is as a gimmick it's as a it's as a culinary joke uh when L made oh go back I'm missing a slide okay um when um L made a a butter of grubs that we put on Twitter and people just freaked out completely uh we had the picture of the 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 um so um so um sorry sorry um um so we started teaming up with some entomologists from the Copenhagen univ University and the university in vening where they're actually doing a lot of work on trying to make insects acceptable in the west and 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 um or as one suggested even you know have jokingly is that if we want to introduce entomophagy the practice of eating insects in the west uh we should all be eating Cambodian food and I think it really highlights uh the point here is that why do we have to take all these cultural attributes and then apply that When developing cucine why can't we just make the whole thing up build a new culinary taxonomy in these creatures and uh and really kind of map out the taste system of these guys and and this is where last this is where the chefs come in here symbolized by lass who insisted I use this image of him and and and the chefs can then go in and take all this talk and actually 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 garam a sort of fish sauce that last made only it was from fermented Grasshoppers and wax mouth La so you can also tell probably the people who have been following us they're a little more hesitant to taste things that we give youly you yeah so you can open up the second VI it has the one basically the ones with these which are ants that are uh Mark and AA and one of our uh 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 is quite a gimmick at the moment we are fascinated by the flavors um and how each one of the different flavors really each one of the different ants tastes quite different so this is uh the sauce that they're actually in this is uh us making them we've just spun the grubs through the centerfuse and when we're eating these ants was amazing how different each one tasted some are lemong grassy Su are coriander miles Irving called me up uh a couple weeks ago and was so excited on the phone almost couldn't like panicking exciting and because he had found coriander flavored ants and immediately put them into a box and shipped them to me um Unfortunately they escaped somewhere in customs so we didn't actually get to taste those but we did find some similar ones in uh 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 honor team is because it allows us to attack these culinary problems and solve answer questions that myself as a cook is just not educated enough to do so I sort of found a paper listenting 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 uh pictured she's sitting right over there pictured holding uh up I was this whole list of uh compounds she walks by and goes oh that one's lemongrass oh that one's what the primary compounds of uh mint that's there there's her showing off um in in amps this one is lavender fur Pine melon winter green 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 we look at why they have these flavors it's mostly for defensive purposes and in the same way got that guy um like the same way that time tapes good or tagon or Rosemary is so flavorful and we love using in 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 and the idea is to not have it as again Nick to not have it just be this terrible terrible thing that we're all terribly afraid of you can try there's a small Beaker with a couple of these guys in it you can 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 bear uh the male drones sorry guys we actually get these from uh from Copenhagen we collect them from uh a beekeeper who has be beehives around the city on rooftops and they used to just throw them to the chicken to feed the chicken but yeah so now we're finding a a very interesting and I think possibly we're taking what used to be a waste product and finding a a really positive bit I think someone is actually being attacked by an oh God are they fighting back I think they're getting uh hyped up by the movie but um 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 can look start looking at different parts of their Cuisine and finding inspiration from it and we I guess would like to just POS a challenge to you guys um if you can do the same thank you very much um before before we get to the uh questions I just wanted to say just a couple of words about people like Lars and Mark because uh I know they've got a professional life working at gnome and the Nordic Food Lab but they've been running around the back organizing stuff for the last few days and if if you didn't know they had another life you'd think they were Professional Event organizers uh 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 uh and to think about the kind of event that Renee 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 uh and to the amazing kind of collaborative and Collegiate effort that the effort that's been put in and the the Jo with which people with their t-shirts from Mad are are putting into this event I I just think it's a really you know we've all been to events and they're quite interesting and they're 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 Renee down to the the the the volunteers all the Mad people all the Noma people let's make a lot of noise for them let's let's stand up stand up stand up no I I think it's really important to do that because I think the atmosphere you guys have created and girls has been just absolutely uh memorable as Paul uh Rosen would say right have we got any questions specifically we do have a question from Paul can you just hang on to the microphone gets here I think uh one of actually Com when we started thinking about this presentation one of the problems that we had was not quoting Paul 15 times copying the whole thing well um I thought that was wonderful I loved your food um we we uh I work and discuss as you know and one of the issues is that uh 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 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 so a critical thing in this and and one area I work in which is getting people to drink or reprocess 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 t if it tastes good you sort of 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 yeah I mean that's one of the things that we personally noticed is that I think within 5 days we are sort of acceptance threshold that really changed completely with regard to the insects and you know now we have people coming in to Ian visit us and you're just sitting there like snacking insects first thing Rene did for me even before I 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 9:00 and I was like what am I going to do are they frozen are they no oh 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 and that going through that whole process you know inviting people over and all that I mean unfortunately for your girlfriend yeah exactly uh but um what I was losing the point here uh we have Mikel buom Frost who is our director at the natic food lab who talks a lot about that and and one of the things we we want to do in in in develop developing this kind of culinary taxonomy is to actually test that as well how can we do we need to how much do we need to disguise do we have I mean the seaweed the seaweed hovers hovers are actually a great uh 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 right on I mean if you see you know Crustaceans are basically giant sea creatures right so like a like a lobster it's it's a giant sea creature it's a it's a scavenger it eats garbage if not garbage then other lobsters and it's a it's a really disgusting animal if it had been living on land but because it's kind of across that boundary uh and probably because we don't see it um if I'm delicious yes you have these giant insects that only eat leafy matter in the forest all day and people are disgusting dis disgusted by it so I think it's a really good point that Mr Rosen has in that regard so I mean I'm I'm just trying to say this is this is part of the project we're trying to do is to map that out Michael always says it's the it's an interplay between neophobia and neilia um how something new uh can be both exciting and scary and that's really where we in our I guess design process of these things is really we really want to hit that spot right now yeah and and it's yeah and 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 um so with the inside project we're trying to give them sort of like a head start like a little jump kick and just yeah just to yeah sorry it lasts to just to just to add to that I mean I think I think that's 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 at NoMa for instance or or other places where you as soon as you go in there you trust the people around you you are susceptible to those we like to do the 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 One carard 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 a wider ambitious scale R okay let's take a question up here and then I think this this 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 uh and specifically the one that probably interests me most is because we see a very big debate about it is whale meat um what would your take on on that be because the Japanese argue that's a cultural thing a Australians are mightly offended by it and spend a lot of time fighting in the international whing commission are there boundaries cultural boundaries you don't go across in what you eat um well I mean I personally don't feel that there's a cultural boundary I think that with 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 whing myself but uh I don't have a problem with it per se as a food like the idea of it as for food I I I I can actually just give an example of a big problem we had because when 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 uh lemongrass flavors you know we're this proud Protestant country that uh will eat you know to survive and suddenly you were having this this flavor here something that I 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 on how they were envisioning the chefs putting a an ant on on some of the food and then every everybody was sort of uh looking at the guest and when they put them in the mouth you know they were say oh my God they eat them um so um so we have that there 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 and you know it's becoming more more um sort of U common uh to do it even amongst us Dan right but with the the ants is the we have a sustainability problem with the ants is that we can't I mean 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 take in consideration with you're foraging wild herbs as well so yeah in fact in fact that's one of the things that the enologists uh 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 U finding out what are the danger zones not only you know healthwise but also in terms of um in terms of like yeah the environment and sustainable kind of cultures for the ants things like that to not and we've got a question here right in the middle right there middle um I I was just wondering if you guys had ever uh thought about presenting the insects perhaps to Children First and if you had because they have less preconceived no I mean I have a child that eats uh 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 I mean kids you that's you find it it's completely different kids are very very willing to accept novel Foods uh because they don't have the cultural sort of stigma against it uh we were do we were down in Amsterdam talking to ologist about food and uh they' made uh meatballs that had one had meal worms and one didn't have meal worms and 90% of the people preferred the ones with the meal worms in them and then actually a small kid came up and was complaining like Mommy Mommy I don't have enough meal worms in my meatball so there's uh I think with children is fantastic I think in general to interact with kids and food but for this inake project you definitely see much more of an except level w