MICROBES & FERMENTATION
I am setting up a new research group at the Danish Technical University's Center for Biosustainability, called Sustainable Food Innovation. Our goal is to create food products, particularly through fermentation, to address some of our food systems challenges and use them to conduct interdisciplinary research on human–microbial ecology and evolution.
In my PhD I investigated whether novel fermentation practices at some leading restaurants and flavour innovators in Copenhagen are creating new microbial ecologies and evolutionary histories through their pursuit of new flavours.
With colleagues at MIT Media Lab Space Exploration Initiative, I extended these experiments to the International Space Station to see if this highly specific environment gives rise to new microbial ecologies and evolution.
AGRICULTURE & LANDSCAPE POLITICS
Studying how human societies past and present shape their landscapes for food production, who gets to decide where cultivation and domestication are at work, and why it matters, is an ongoing project.
I investigated these ideas in my Master's thesis, on indigenous cultivation and conservation politics in the Canadian Pacific Northwest (publication forthcoming).
Together with a colleague I have explored domesticatory practices around the tradition of rearing edible wasps as a delicacy in central mountainous Japan.
In my PhD thesis I outline some multispecies revisions to domestication theory appropriate for life in the Anthropocene—to be developed further.
CULINARY R&D
While working with Nordic Food Lab, I guided research projects involving a range of neglected and underutilised products of the Nordic region, including wild plants, insects, sea creatures, and fermentations.
More recently I have shifted into studying and conducting collaborative experiments with gastronomic innovators.
I have also offered culinary research and development consultation from Denmark to New Zealand. If consultation is of interest to you, you are welcome to get in touch.
INSECT GASTRONOMY
With a past project for Nordic Food Lab, I explored the gastronomic diversity and potential of insects around the world, and their implications for sustainability.
The results were shared in a book, a documentary film, a tv series, and articles and recipes gathered in an online folio.