i. A popular misconception; a scholarly paradox

It is a truism that food cultures change over time. This dynamism, however, isn’t universally acknowledged, let alone celebrated. The Slow Food movement, for example, its beneficial work notwithstanding, can have a tendency to consider traditional foods as static and unchanging, romanticising them for their authenticity and purity², aiming to preserve them as museum pieces, lest they be forever lost: a kind of salvage anthropology³. This sentiment is common in popular food writing too, as above where Michael Pollan implores us to ‘regard non-traditional foods with scepticism’.

Many prominent organisations like Slow Food and individuals like Pollan are doing important work to preserve agrobiodiversity, food culture and traditional foodways.⁴ We share many of their values, and our interest here is not to critique them specifically. Our interest is rather to consider what is lost or precluded for flourishing, flavourful, ecological food futures by so categorically rejecting innovation, and in doing so accepting that the relation between tradition and innovation is a binary, zero-sum game.⁵

In food studies and related fields, it is now well-established that food cultures are dynamic, and have always been innovating to adapt to new circumstances, persist and thrive.⁶ Scholars recognise that the alternative is ahistorical. Indeed, much of what many think of as traditional—food and otherwise—is often more recently invented than is supposed.⁷ Today it's difficult to imagine, for example, Italian cuisine without tomatoes, Northern European cuisine without potatoes, or various Asian cuisines without chillies. Yet before the 16th century, these foods were unheard of in these food cultures, until, circulating from the Americas, they were assimilated and made traditional, indispensable favourites.⁸ In this dynamic view of food cultures, past innovators are celebrated for their resourcefulness, and their innovations for having helped bring us to where we are now.

Given this view, we’ve noticed a puzzling lack of attention given to innovation in food culture research. Based on a review of back catalogues of Food & Foodways and Food, Culture & Society, we note a few studies that exist, for example on the relationship between innovation and tradition in contemporary craft brewing⁹ and artisan cheesemaking¹⁰, or consumer acceptance of novel foods¹¹. Yet overall there seems to be surprisingly little research that explores how food cultures past and present engage with innovation, and even less exploring how they might mutually enrich one another.

We’re curious about why this might be. It feels strange to us that understanding food cultures as dynamic hasn’t led to more research on how exactly they innovate and evolve. It’s also not obvious to us why innovation done by our ancestors would be inherently more worth celebrating or even studying than some of that which occurs today, or how innovation could change at some arbitrary point in history from being something worth celebrating and studying to something to be sceptical of. We also haven’t found any literature that articulates why this might be true.

Whatever the cause of this apparent ambivalence in the literature, we ourselves have experienced a far more clear and categorical scepticism when presenting our culinary innovation work to social scientific audiences. We’re often struck by a feeling of starting on the back foot and needing to win over (at least some of) the crowd, who seem to assume we are advocating for technological ‘solutions’ to be imposed on food cultures, whether they want it or not, simply because we dared mention the ‘i’ word. These same scholars openly celebrate traditional foodways, seeming to ignore the fact that these are the accumulation of past innovations. Given the prevalence of this experience, we suspect this attitude might be quite common among food studies scholars.

ii. Amodern innovation

We propose that one of the primary reasons for the categorical scepticism of innovation we have evidenced and sensed, explicitly in much popular discourse and implicitly in some scholarly ones, is because it is typically only understood in its dominant, ideologically modernist form: advancing universal, technocratic ‘solutions’, consolidating power into a handful of corporations, and aiming to decouple people from land, leave tradition in the past, and homogenise cultural difference.¹² Traditional foodways movements, meanwhile, reacting to this agenda, are often explicitly anti-modernist, favouring the preservation of traditional diversity and food culture as a resistance to modernism. From this perspective they then see innovation as an existential threat, which they therefore categorically reject .¹³ So it is understandable that tradition and innovation are then often framed as zero-sum in food-cultural movements and scholarship, as in wider society.

Yet this dichotomy is false. Innovation is much more than this dominant form. We see tradition and innovation as co-constituting forces, and propose that the latter can, if performed discerningly, enrich food culture. This form of innovation is more about gradual, careful tinkering than total rupture with the past, and is motivated by reasons other than profit and control. ¹⁴ It is not for or against modernism, but is instead agnostic to it. Nor is it even a response to modernism, since it is ‘what happens, and ha[s] been happening the whole time, before, during, beyond, and in spite of modernism’. ¹⁵ As such, we might call this ‘amodern’ innovation, after Latour’s assertion that ‘we have never been modern’. ¹⁶ The richness of food cultures, then, we can understand as the selective accretion of these innovations into traditions. ¹⁷ How does a food, like the tomatoes, potatoes, and chilies above, go from being unknown to being fiercely loved? By being tinkered with, experimented with, as taste by taste, their place in a food culture is gradually discovered, negotiated, and cemented. In short, through a process of innovation.

For but one example: the myriad forms of traditional dairy cheese, rightly celebrated for their diversity and gastronomic heritage, only exist in the first place because people have always innovated to adapt to their environments to nourish themselves and their communities. With roots in millennia-old practices of dairying across Eurasia and North Africa that have since spread around the world¹⁸, the cheeses we love today are the products of thousands of years of tinkering innovations that have accreted into traditions. If our ancestors had refused to innovate, as cheesemaking spread to new locales across different bioregions and was adapted to new challenges, ingredients, techniques and preferences, then cheese, if it continued to exist at all, would be impoverished compared to what it is today.

Such tinkering continues; indeed, it is inevitable. Novel misos, one of many products we make and research in our R&D kitchen and lab where we seek to make flavourful, old-new foods to support green transitions, are another example of taking traditional techniques and ‘translating’ them to use regionally and culturally appropriate ingredients while honouring their origins.¹⁹ In this case, traditional Japanese techniques have been adapted to use Danish ingredients like yellow peas, fava beans and rye bread, often made with barley kōji, to provide umami and other flavours not previously found in Danish cuisine.²⁰ These novel misos are just the latest iterations in a long line of tinkering that originated in China over 2,500 years ago with jiangs—mixed fermented condiments of meats, fish, vegetables and grains. These jiangs then spread across Asia, including being brought to Japan, where they evolved into miso, tamari, and shōyu, before much more recently being embraced, and evolving further, elsewhere in the world.²¹ This story is just one illustration of why embracing traditions (i.e. past innovations) but rejecting contemporary innovation makes little sense.

In our R&D kitchen we seek to join this millennia-old flow of tinkering innovation, developing miso and shōyu-like products as novel sources of umami and other flavours, by upcycling food by-products like brewer’s spent grain, spent coffee grounds and cereal bran (Figure 1). These products point to how much untapped potential exists in our food system, waiting to be unlocked through fermentation, innovative use of enzymes, and other forms of discerningly engaged old-new technology.

Another important feature of tinkering innovation is its serendipity. Our R&D chef Kim was exploring coffee substitutes by upcycling Belgian endive roots, building on another existing tradition of chicory coffee. By chance, he discovered that the bitter roots, when wild-fermented, developed a refreshing citrussiness, so he pivoted towards developing a tonic water-style beverage instead (Figure 2).²² There may be countless other examples of delicious flavours that would remain undiscovered if we didn’t continue to innovate, and in doing so keep ourselves open to being surprised.

iii. Rejecting innovation limits the future

We are concerned that the categorical rejection of innovation—even if understandable and well-intentioned—is counterproductive and self-limiting, potentially depriving us diversity-inclined scholars and eaters of countless other new flavours and foods that could enrich food culture and support sustainability, like those described above. By writing off all innovation—both its practice and its study—because its currently dominant form is associated with capital and power, anti-modernism refuses the use of a potentially powerful tool because it is seen as morally impure. This refusal does not serve food culture movements or research, especially as even many 'traditional' food industries have also been to some extent captured by capitalism. Capitalism is, for now, inescapable, and we are all shaped by it whether we like it or not; purity is not possible²³. At the same time, amodern innovation has existed long before capitalism, which would suggest that it can also exist without it, and may even help resist it, if practiced in a discerning, community-oriented, culture-enriching way. By rejecting innovation, we might be denying future food cultures something as potentially impactful and delicious as dairy cheese, or all the rich traditions that sprang from the crops exchanged among the Americas, Africa, and Eurasia. What do we lose, we wonder, when we relinquish innovation to industry?

A blanket rejection of all forms of innovation limits the potential for desirable futures that many otherwise claim to want. This is the case for what is typically seen as food innovation, namely food product R&D, but can be seen throughout the food system—for example with agroecology. Like others, we believe that agroecology, a form of agriculture based on ecological and social principles with roots in Indigenous and traditional agricultural practices²⁴, is a critical component of any future food system.We also believe the mode of agroecology that will help us best face contemporary challenges is not anti-modernist, eschewing potentially valuable knowledges or technologies, or trying to ossify an idealised past that might never have existed. Rather, we find the most promise in an amodernist mode, recognising that agroecological practices, knowledge and heritage crop varieties are all the product of past innovations, and which must continue to be innovated to remain usable in an ever-changing present and future-in-formation. Most agroecologists—who are nothing if not innovative, despite rarely using that word—would no doubt agree.

For example, rather than fetishising heritage or heirloom varieties of crops and trying to preserve them in some unchanging state, we need to be breeding them ever further. The world is changing, and heritage seeds need to be continually adapted to a changing climate to stay viable. These existing crops can be bred alongside new varieties—like population varieties or landraces—that are better suited to agroecology, better adapted to specific bioregions, more resilient and adaptable to changing environmental conditions, and that possess qualities better suited for their intended use, for example prioritising flavour and nutrient density over uniformity in size and shape.²⁵ It is through precisely these practices that our ancestors made all the diverse seeds we now inherit. Keeping traditions alive is about keeping them living²⁶, allowing them to continue to respond and adapt to their environment as it too changes. And since agency, autonomy and sovereignty are core tenets of agroecology²⁷, it should be up to food cultures to determine for themselves which foods they eat and how they produce them—including which traditions to innovate to keep them living—rather than having a rigid preservation mindset imposed on them or being judged because others don't like them changing.²⁸

iv. Reclaiming innovation can help us cultivate the futures we want

We now come to the question of ‘whether or not to change eating habits’.²⁹ One way amodern innovation can contribute to answering this question is by providing tools, experiments, and ideas that support eaters determining for themselves how their food cultures should continue to evolve and adapt, driven by their everyday choices and daily eating habits. Earlier we gave a glimpse of some innovations that could help do so, offering eaters more diverse, flavourful, ecological, and culturally appropriate food choices. Another, perhaps more radical example is plant cheese.

Most plant cheese available to buy today fits squarely in the modernist innovation paradigm: ultra-processed foods, with mediocre flavour, texture and other sensory properties, which proponents argue should replace all dairy cheese in the name of (reductionist) sustainability. An anti-modernist perspective thus typically rejects all plant cheese as an unnecessary and even threatening techno-capitalist innovation that disregards food culture and tradition, in favour of preserving traditional varieties of dairy cheese.³⁰ Here we are again: back in the same binary, zero-sum, either–or proposition.

Yet this is not the only form that plant cheese could take, or the only possible terms of the debate. Traditional dairy cheesemaking techniques and traditional techniques for fermenting plant substrates (e.g. for tofu) could be—and indeed are being—translated for cheesemaking with whole and upcycled plant ingredients.³¹ Coupled with the discerning use of technology to develop enzymatic coagulants best-suited to plant substrates, this approach points to an alternative future for plant cheese that is eminently amodern (Figure 3). We imagine a future in which countless bioregionally diverse varieties of plant cheese, made from different agroecologically-grown plant ingredients, enrich food culture with new traditions (Figure 4). This kind of amodern, agroecological plant cheese could not only co-exist with, but could even support, the preservation and resurrection of traditional dairy cheese varieties, by reducing industrial animal agriculture and facilitating a focus on quality, ecology, and diversity over yield-at-all-costs. We don’t believe we need argue about ‘either/or’ when we can have ‘both–and’.

Of course, modernism remains the dominant form of innovation, so we’re well aware that what we propose here isn’t the most likely trajectory for plant cheese innovation if things continue as they are. But to preclude this possibility simply because it is new impoverishes our shared future by reducing the available options, including ones that could help cultivate the kind of flourishing, diverse food systems and cultures many people and institutions desire.

As researchers, we do not believe it is up to us to dictate how people should eat. So we do not think it is possible for us to answer the question whether or not eating habits ‘should’ change. Instead, we understand part of our job as being to empower people to become as involved as possible in deciding how their own food cultures adapt and evolve. We are not, for example, arguing that everyone should eat plant cheese instead of dairy cheese. We are arguing that if we want to realise, for example, an agroecological future, then perhaps not all the foods and techniques we will need to realise that future exist yet, or have even been thought up. Plant cheese is just one such tool that food cultures could use and tinker with, to realise that future in a more delicious, diverse and enriching way. By rejecting all forms of innovation, we deny them, and ourselves, the ability to do so. In contrast, by embracing amodern innovation in a discerning way and acknowledging it as always already part of living food cultures, we empower people to participate in co-creating the futures they want.

If one reason we cannot answer the ‘change or not’ question is about sovereignty—who has a right to decide how one eats—another reason, perhaps more fundamental, is about food cultures’ well-established dynamism, where we began. If food cultures are dynamic, then they will inevitably change, and eating habits along with them. So the question may be less about whether food cultures should change, and more about how. Sovereignty is about empowering people to guide this process for themselves—its direction, its pace, its goal.

v. Toward an amodern food culture research

An amodern approach does not just offer potential enrichment to the practice and cultivation of food cultures; it also offers just as much potential enrichment to their study. An amodern food culture research would recognise how food culture is and has always been dynamic, and how tradition and innovation are mutually co-constituting. It would neither categorically and uncritically reject innovation, nor categorically and uncritically embrace it, but rather critically and discerningly engage with innovations that serve the futures that food cultures wish to bring to fruition. It would acknowledge and affirm communities’ agency to shape their own foodways, including through present-day amodernist innovations that can become traditions in the future, rather than imposing on them external ideas of preservation. It would examine the conditions required to enable innovation to be performed in service of diversity, flavour, sustainability and land stewardship rather than in service of capital, homogeneity and control, and how it can support these goals. It might seek to celebrate agrobiodiversity, traditional foods and agroecology without over-romanticising the past at the expense of present and future cultural developments, recognising how food cultures persist and evolve. It might explore how innovation can support and enrich, and be supported and enriched by, these areas—for example how agroecosystem design, plant breeding and other forms of technological innovation could be directed with amodern innovation in mind.

Perhaps Michael Pollan was right after all. Maybe we should ‘view non-traditional foods with scepticism’. Not a categorical scepticism stuck in reactionary, modern vs anti-modern zero-sum games, but a supple scepticism, a discerning scepticism, a scepticism that is also sceptical of itself. A scepticism that, if satisfied that a certain food or technique could be valuable for cultivating a certain food future, can blossom into curiosity. It is through this curiosity, this openness to being surprised, that all delights emerge. And it is through a tinkering, amodern form of innovation that, through the accretion of these serendipitous delights, new traditions and food cultures are formed.

Contributions & acknowledgements

Eliot and Josh conceived this essay together. Eliot wrote the first draft, Josh provided editorial input, and they developed it further together. It was originally written as a submission to a special issue of the Food & Foodways journal and is pending publication. Thanks to the other contributors to the Special Issue for their feedback on drafts of the article.

The header image is from ‘Plantae selectae quarum imagines ad exemplaria naturalia Londini, in hortis curiosorum nutrita’, 1750-1773.

Eliot photographed the bran amino and endive root tonic in our food lab, whilst Caroline photographed the plant cheese in our food lab. Eliot generated the future cheesemonger image using AI tool Midjourney.

Endnotes

[1] Michael Pollan (2009), Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual, Penguin: London, UK.

[2] Kelly Donati (2005), ‘The Pleasure of Diversity in Slow Food’s Ethics of Taste’, Food, Culture & Society; Luca Simonetti (2012), ‘The Ideology of Slow Food’, Journal of European Studies.

[3] Samuel Redman (2021), Prophets and Ghosts: The Story of Salvage Anthropology, Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.

[4] Carlo Petrini (2003), Slow Food: The Case for Taste, Columbia University Press: New York, USA.

[5] ‘Innovation’ can mean different things. Here we understand it as a process of ‘making new’, per the work of the late sociologist Benoit Godin, an authority on the study of innovation. For further discussion refer to Benoît Godin (2015), Innovation Contested: The Idea of Innovation Over the Centuries, Routledge: Abingdon, UK; Benoît Godin (2017), Models of Innovation: The History of an Idea, MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA; Benoît Godin (2020), The Invention of Technological Innovation: Languages, Discourses and Ideology in Historical Perspective, Edward Elgar: Cheltenham, UK; Benoît Godin, Gérald Gaglio, and Dominique Vinck (eds) (2021), Handbook on Alternative Theories of Innovation, Edward Elgar: Cheltenham, UK; Benoît Godin and Dominique Vinck (eds) (2017), Critical Studies of Innovation: Alternative Approaches to the Pro-Innovation Bias, Edward Elgar: Cheltenham, UK.

[6] Paul Freedman (ed.) (2007), Food: The History of Taste, University of California Press: Oakland, California, USA; Amy Bentley and Peter Scholliers (eds) (2019), Food in Modern History: Traditions and Innovation, Bloomsbury Publishing: London, UK; Amy Bentley, Fabio Parasecoli, and Krishnendu Ray (eds) (2024), Practicing Food Studies, NYU Press: New York, USA.

[7] Heather Paxson (2013), ‘The Life of Cheese: Crafting Food and Value in America’, Oakland, California, USA: University of California Press.; Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds. (2012), ‘The Invention of Tradition’, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

[8] Jack Hawkes and Javier Francisco-Ortega (1993), ‘The Early History of the Potato in Europe’, Euphytica.; David Gentilcore (2010), ‘Pomodoro!: A History of the Tomato in Italy’, New York, USA: Columbia University Press..

[9] Carlton Larsen (1997), ‘Relax and Have a Homebrew: Beer, the Public Sphere, and (Re)Invented Traditions’, Food and Foodways.

[10] Harry West (2020), ‘Crafting Innovation: Continuity and Change in the “Living Traditions” of Contemporary Artisan Cheesemakers’, Food and Foodways.

[11] Deborah Lupton and Bethaney Turner (2018), ‘Food of the Future? Consumer Responses to the Idea of 3D-Printed Meat and Insect-Based Foods’, Food and Foodways.

[12] James Scott (1999), Seeing Like a State, Yale University Press: New Haven, Connecticut, USA; James Scott (2017), Against the Grain, Yale University Press: New Haven, Connecticut, USA; Josh Evans (2023), ‘Innovation Is Multiple: Ideologies of Innovation’, Social Science Research Network.

[13] Josh Evans (2023), ‘Innovation Is Multiple: Ideologies of Innovation’, Social Science Research Network.

[14] María Puig de La Bellacasa (2011), ‘Matters of Care in Technoscience: Assembling Neglected Things’, Social Studies of Science; María Puig de La Bellacasa (2017), ‘Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds’, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA: University of Minnesota press.; Josh Evans (2023), ‘Innovation Is Multiple: Ideologies of Innovation’, Social Science Research Network.

[15] Josh Evans (2023), ‘Innovation Is Multiple: Ideologies of Innovation’, Social Science Research Network.

[16] Bruno Latour (1994) ‘We have never been modern’, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA: Harvard University Press.; See here for further discussion on the relation of amodernism to modernism and anti-modernism: Josh Evans (2023), ‘Innovation Is Multiple: Ideologies of Innovation’, Social Science Research Network.

[17] Josh Evans (2023), ‘Innovation Is Multiple: Ideologies of Innovation’, Social Science Research Network.

[18] Mélanie Salque, Peter Bogucki, Joanna Pyzel, Iwona Sobkowiak-Tabaka, Ryszard Grygiel, Marzena Szmyt, and Richard Evershed (2013), ‘Earliest Evidence for Cheese Making in the Sixth Millennium Bc in Northern Europe’, Nature..; Sarah McClure, Clayton Magill, Emil Podrug, Andrew M. T. Moore, Thomas K. Harper, Brendan Culleton, Douglas Kennett, and Katherine Freeman (2018), ‘Fatty Acid Specific δ13C Values Reveal Earliest Mediterranean Cheese Production 7,200 Years Ago’, PLOS ONE.

[19] Josh Evans and Jamie Lorimer (2021), ‘Taste-Shaping-Natures: Making Novel Miso with Charismatic Microbes and New Nordic Fermenters in Copenhagen’, Current Anthropology. Credit goes to our colleague Kim for the ‘old-new’ epithet.

[20] René Redzepi and David Zilber (2018), ‘The Noma Guide to Fermentation: Including Koji, Kombuchas, Shoyus, Misos, Vinegars, Garums, Lacto-Ferments, and Black Fruits and Vegetables’, New York, USA: Artisan.

[21] William Shurtleff and Akiko Aoyagi (1976), ‘The Book of Miso’, Berkley, California, USA: Autumn Press.; René Redzepi, and David Zilber (2018), ‘The Noma Guide to Fermentation: Including Koji, Kombuchas, Shoyus, Misos, Vinegars, Garums, Lacto-Ferments, and Black Fruits and Vegetables’, New York, USA: Artisan.

[22] Kim Wejendorp, Josh Evans and Caroline Kothe (2023) ‘Creating a Spontaneously Fermented “Tonic Water” Using Belgian Endive Root’, International Journal of Gastronomy and Food Science.

[23] Alexis Shotwell (2016), Against Purity, University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA.

[24] FAO (2018), The 10 Elements of Agroecology: Guiding the Transition to Sustainable Food and Agricultural Systems.

[25] Francesc Casañas, Joan Simó, Joan Casals, and Jaime Prohens (2017), ‘Toward an Evolved Concept of Landrace’, Frontiers in Plant Science.; Stephen Jones and Bethany Econopouly (2018), ‘Breeding Away from All Purpose’, Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems.

[26] Douglas Deur and Nancy Turner, eds. (2005), ‘Keeping It Living’, Seattle, Washington, USA: University of Washington Press.

[27] FAO (2018), The 10 Elements of Agroecology: Guiding the Transition to Sustainable Food and Agricultural Systems.

[28] Colin Anderson, Janneke Bruil, Michael Jahi Chappell, Csilla Kiss, and Michel Patrick Pimbert (2019), ‘From Transition to Domains of Transformation: Getting to Sustainable and Just Food Systems through Agroecology’, Sustainability.

[29] This was the central question of the Special Issue of the Food & Foodways journal that this article was originally written as a submission for, pending publication.

[30] Slow Food (2023), ‘Plant The Future’.

[31] Lutz Grossmann and David Julian McClements (2021), ‘The Science of Plant-Based Foods: Approaches to Create Nutritious and Sustainable Plant-Based Cheese Analogs’, Trends in Food Science & Technology; Jin Xie, and Michael Gänzle (2023), ‘Microbiology of Fermented Soy Foods in Asia: Can We Learn Lessons for Production of Plant Cheese Analogues?’, International Journal of Food Microbiology.