Rambling on about sustainability or Eating my way towards interweaving research and practice
BY MAU LINDOW TARBENSEN
A slight hazy distance settles like a cloud over her gaze. Over mine too, I suspect. The air briefly changes. Three times in the past few sentences have I unintentionally uttered the word – the centre of our conversation, though I initially assumed it would go without saying. The word?
Sustainability.
My guess is most people are familiar with the dullness that can permeate certain words and phrases, when they no longer spur thought, but exhaust us by their mere mention. At some point we are bound to ask: What are we even talking about? I asked myself that after a conference on green transitions in the food sector a few years back, where the s-word had been in frequent use. Although I had jotted down several succinctly put, thought-provoking points during the talks, I also had this nagging sense of sitting in a hot-air bubble of convenient agreement in beliefs, nice and warm and about to burst. On exiting this stately building full of good intentions and walking out onto the street, I saw a father and son gobbling kebabs made from spinning piles of stacked meat – and just then I remembered a recent study about how most people don’t want to make any changes, not even the slightest, in their eating habits for the sake of the climate.
I enter the field of literary food studies with a certain degree of suspicion about the purpose of my scholarly endeavours. And my suspicions are, admittedly, often confirmed. Even when trying to tread carefully, I am prone to burst out into airy statements about reimagining our current food systems by changing the narratives surrounding them to create more environmentally sustainable futures for all.
What am I even talking about?
Well, I guess “[w]herever jargon shows its shiny face,” as Helen Sword writes, “the demon of academic hubris inevitably lurks in the shadows nearby.”1
∞
After my slight faux pas during our conversation, we get back on track. “We” being the head chef at Nögen, Nicoline Ørbæk Hviid, and myself.
While several climate-friendly practices are inscribed in this restaurant’s DNA, the chefs here don’t speculate too much on carbon emissions. The fact that the restaurant’s emissions are nonetheless on the low side is, however, one result of the way they cook. These chefs create an ever-changing weekly menu using excess produce that would otherwise have gone to waste, as well as using ingredients that are not commonly in demand. The liver of some fish, for instance, makes a wonderful pâté, but in the chain of production it is typically discarded before the fish reaches the fishmonger. Although edible and delicious, it is considered a waste product.
I am sitting across from Nicoline at the restaurant in Aarhus, Denmark, on a regular Monday afternoon. The restaurant is not yet open, and aside from us the dining hall is empty. The kitchen on the other hand is buzzing with activity, developing this week’s menu through experimentation and know-how, cross-fertilising ideas and twisting classics. I recognise some of this, I tell her, having recently worked in a kitchen, helping to develop dishes, working with food on the practical side of the table rather than doing research on it.
I believe a great deal of knowledge can be generated by weaving together the academic and the practical approach to food. And that’s why I am here, bombarding Nicoline, who kindly agreed to meet with me, with questions. I am gathering inspiration for a format I am planning, combining a talk on my research into food culture as described in historical Danish cookbooks with a dinner inspired by the practices I investigate in the talk. It could be called eating research, or maybe edible research? The framing still eludes me. And while cooking for large crowds and doing talks are both familiar territory, merging these experiences meaningfully – carving out a space for learning and encouraging reflection on how traditional cooking methods and historical food cultures can inspire less earth damaging eating today – poses more of a challenge.
∞
The following evening, I am thoughtfully seated near a window in a nook, not exactly cut off from the other diners but in a place where I will not draw too much attention with my notepad on the side. ‘Nögen’ translates to ‘Naked’, which is a fitting description of the restaurant’s concept, showcasing the taste and texture of each ingredient without masking the flavours or combining them in ways that cancel each other out. Three snacks arrive shortly after my waiter for the evening has briefly described the way Nögen works. She uses the s-word as well, but in her mouth it does not sound like a cliché, maybe because it is soon followed by physical proof. A tomato gazpacho with semi-dried tomatoes and drops of olive oil has an honest mono-flavour profile, sweet, light, with the oil’s fattiness igniting the umami flavour and letting it linger. The restaurant gets plenty of tomatoes in, Nicoline told me the day before. Currently, they are experimenting with a tomato focaccia, using excess tomato juice to replace water in the recipe, making for a bread with no physical traces of tomato other than the slightly different colour of the crumb. As it doesn't appear on any of my plates, I'm guessing it still needs some tweaking before entering the menu. Next, the waiter serves me a steamed gyoza filled with shredded beets, carrots and parsnips, generously spiced with fresh ginger, and served with a kimchi mayonnaise. The restaurant often receives varieties of shredded root vegetables from their supplier, and while the chefs keep experimenting, they have a basic repertoire that the recurring ingredients are most suitable for.
With the arrival of the first courses in the set menu, I notice that the party behind me is getting something different than me. One of their dishes is a tagliatelle pasta in a creamed puttanesca sauce with grated North Sea Cheese on top – whereas mine is presented as string beans in an oat cream puttanesca with sprinkles of nutritional yeast flakes. I am getting the plant-based version of the menu, the party behind me is not. The restaurant does not call attention to these differences, however, which is such an important non-stated statement (two exclamation points on my notepad). It mirrors research on the area as well, suggesting that calling attention to something being plant-based or vegetarian does not appeal to diners. Instead, precise and sensuous descriptions of a dish diminish these dietary differences, making one choice as normal as the next. In addition, although the plant-based option will most likely have a smaller carbon dioxide footprint, emphasizing that fact can feel like a guilt-trip to diners, putting unnecessary pressure on them to go plant-based and diminishing their enjoyment of the experience. With the aim of awakening appetite as well as inspiring people to think differently about food waste and nature’s resources, Nögen is enacting sustainability by putting different versions of it on the plate, broadening its appeal.
After I write vigorously about this for a few minutes, the meal continues. With porcini and oyster mushrooms in generous amounts of creamy, earthy sauce, liberally salted, and another almost single flavour dish – reminiscent of the tomato gazpacho – in the form of a delicately cooked yellow beet on a canvas of sauce with depth but no distinctive flavour, evoking the beet’s earthiness and soft texture, contrasted by fried panko. The last plate is smeared with a light, sweet carrot and chilli puree underneath an ever so slightly cooked carrot split in half, poured over with chive oil and decorated with house-made potato crisps.
A common denominator for the dishes is that they give the guests a sense of the chefs’ minds. While some dishes are refined, having been through several iterations, most of them are at a rawer stage. Being unpolished, they are also accessible, inviting the guest to imagine how they themselves could create dishes based on what is available, approaching cooking from the point of the ingredients at hand and their inherent potential instead of ideas coming before them. Nicoline had told me that customers often ask for the recipes. And while I was surprised by that yesterday, today I am not.
As the night comes to an end, I think about interweaving practice and research, how these two approaches to food culture can meet and inform each other without one being subordinated, building non-hierarchical collaboration, creating insight through mutual engagement: Between talking, listening and eating, between me and the audience. Combining the practical and the academic in this sort of space allows new ideas to emerge through the sensuous interaction of ingredients, the way the chefs at Nögen build and conceptualize their weekly menu,, while creating an opportunity to anchor these new ideas on islands of knowledge.
On second thought, I guess it would be impossible to leave wishful thinking behind completely and still work towards tangible changes. So if I am guilty of undermining my own argument, at least next time I will serve it up differently: On a plate, glistening and sumptuous. And who can argue with that?
Endnotes
1. Sword, Helen, Stylish Academic Writing, Cambridge: Harvard University Press 2012, p. 120.
Mau Lindow Tarbensen (1995) is a PhD fellow at Aarhus University, Denmark. Her research examines the ways in which 19th-century Danish cookbooks written by women intertwine household economy and the ecology of plant life. As part of her project, she is tentatively exploring whether forms of “everyday ecology” in 19th-century cookbooks can inspire shifts in present-day food cultures, encouraging more sustainable food production and consumption in response to the climate crisis. Tarbensen is the author of the novel Salat (2025) and the poetry collection Dæmpet (2022). She has previously worked as a chef.
