Welcome to New Nordic Food’s newsletter
June 2009
New Nordic Food’s newsletter will be published every other month with news from the projects, from the New Nordic Food ambassadors and the steering committee, and from partners and interested parties. The newsletter will also help to form networks in the growing group of people interested in promoting Nordic food and Nordic ingredients.
7 candidates for the diploma
New Nordic Food will award its diploma 2009, worth DKK 50,000, this autumn. This time the candidates will be found from the field of culture and design. Iceland and Åland have nominated designers; Icelandic Bordid and Eva-Jo, and Michael Hancock from Åland. Greenland has nominated the Hotel Arctic and Sweden’s candidate is the project ‘Smaka på Skåne’. Finland, Norway and Denmark have nominated national food celebrities Laura Kolbe, Ingrid Espelid Hovig and Rene Redzepi. Read more about the diploma here http://www.nynordiskmad.org
News from projects and ambassadors
What is happening on the projects?
New Nordic Food has supported a number of exciting projects involving farmers, the industry and the restaurant business in the last couple of years. A book about these projects will be published in the autumn, but New Nordic Food has already now begun to write short and more easily read articles on the people behind the projects, their ideas and results. You can read these under the heading TEMA on the New Nordic Food’s website. The first two are about ‘Nordost’, the ten steps for helping to simplify small scale cheese production in Sweden and Norway, and about Nordic malt research.
http://www.nynordiskmad.org/tema
Nordic News
Kitchen garden at the Nordic House in Reykjavik
A kitchen garden is beginning to sprout in the Nordic House in Reykjavik. Þuriður Helga Krístjánsdottir has planted herbs and potatoes in partnership with Iceland’s Gene Resource Centre, NordGen, a local organic kitchen garden, Engi, and the Nordic House’s new restaurant. The garden will display some of the kitchen herbs that were traditionally grown in Iceland such as angelica, wild thyme, lovage and chives. In addition, one can experience a number of other Nordic vegetables which can also be grown in Iceland, such as red cabbage, chard and turnips. In this way the garden will serve as an inspiration for visitors to the Nordic House. Iceland and the other Nordic countries are currently experiencing a strong, growing interest for growing vegetables at home.
‘Smaklust’ 2009 in Stockholm
’Smaklust’ – Sweden’s large exhibition of small scale food craft (‘småskaligt mathantverk’) will take place from 21 – 23 August at Hornstull’s Strand in the centre of Stockholm. Food producers will demonstrate and sell their wares here while meeting consumers and buyers under this year’s theme: taste and youth. The regions of Sweden will be represented by their food craftsmen and, with food as the focal point, will exhibit themselves as a tourist destination.
Read more on the organiser Eldrimner’s website: http://www.eldrimner.com
OPUS: We will eat wildly raw!
Copenhagen University has started up a 5-year research project OPUS. OPUS is an acronym for the Danish words for optimal well-being, development and health and will create what is being called the New Nordic Diet – a new Nordic meal which builds bridges between good taste, food habits, health and sustainability. At the conference on 16 June some of the speakers gave their suggestions of what that could include:
Local ingredients – from nature or grown with care
Less meat and more fruit and vegetables
Raw and simple – the food is processed as little as possible
The restaurants NOMA and Mallin & Schmidt served an inspirational lunch, which included hay-smoked salmon and lovage emulsion, new potato salad, malt and elder flowers and a cold soup of green strawberries and fresh pee shoots.
Dialogue about OPUS
Dialogue and participation are a couple of the headlines for the next five years’ work with the New Nordic Cuisine. It is important that ideas for a diet based on Nordic ingredients are not only for the selected few, but that everyone who is involved with food, from agriculture, fisheries, industry, trade, researchers, teachers, politicians, authorities to consumers will benefit from OPUS and the DKK 100 million that the project has received from the Nordea Foundation. Text messaging was used at the first New Nordic Diet Conference. In what area will Opus have made the greatest difference in five years was the question, and the participants texted their answers on greater professionalism, food quality and food policies. They could also register for the dialogue and as a participant in Opus by text message. Read about how you can take part: http://www.foodoflife.dk
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