Edible North: Metabolizing the Scandinavian Issuescape Through Turnips and Terroirs

With the publication of the Manifesto for a New Nordic Cuisine in 2004, the gastronomic potentials of the Scandinavian flora and fauna became the basis for a social innovation project with ambitions far beyond fine dining and select produce. Since then New Nordic Food has become a key platform for articulating concerns about (and discuss solutions for) more divisive or contentious topics like the lack of development in peripheral Scandinavia, the relationship between diet and disease, or the sustainability of our food production system. From an STS perspective it is interesting to contemplate how the ‘bodily registers’ (Latour 2004, Despret 2004) of these issues change as they become, quite literally, digestible and ‘metabolized’
(Whatmore & Stassart 2004) through their partial mergers with the New Nordic Food agenda. Like so many other contemporary concerns, New Nordic Food brings to the fore our relationship with both the natural and the bodily, except here as a promising
and comforting rather than a threatening and uncertain liaison. When the Nordic landscapes and their flora and fauna become in this way ‘the stuff of politics’ (Braun & Whatmore 2010), it warrants an exploration of both their co-constitutive role in the
formation of publics (Marres 2007) and the ways in which they are themselves reconfigured as ‘matters of concern’ (Latour 2003) in this process. I draw on digital cartographies and fieldwork carried out under the Carlsberg funded project Edible North: Mapping the ’New Nordic Food’ phenomenon, its diffusion, development and socio-technical variation.