Sustainable Cuisines and Taste Across Space and Time: Lessons from the Past and Promises for the Future

Abstract

A certain level of culinary sustainability was automatically built into many ancient cuisines due to scarcity in food supplies and, hence, optimal use of the available resources with minimal waste. The concept of sustainability in the global food systems today is much more complex, where the planetary limits to population growth and availability of food resources are leading to tremendous stresses on the overall conditions of the planet including the climate. Still, lessons from world cuisines across space and time may serve as a guide towards a more sustainable plant-forward cuisine in the future. In this essay, we highlight how a focus on gastronomy, especially gastronomic heritage, can provide a framework for a more sustainable cuisine. We see gastronomy as much more than related to cooking and fine dining but also referring to a complex understanding of the word, involving taste, lifestyle, meal culture, commensality, traditional knowledge, craftmanship, and food making. The Mediterranean Diet, traditional Japanese cuisine, and ancient Roman practices are discussed as examples.

1. Introduction

Sustainability and sustainable development are usually defined as means to meet the needs of the present whilst ensuring that future generations can meet their own needs. Sustainability is traditionally supposed to cover three areas: economic, environmental, and social, to which we would add socio-cultural sustainability. To achieve a sustainable development, activities and policies in all these areas must work together and support each other [1].

There is an increasing body of research and literature that calls for dramatic changes in the global food systems all the way from production, processing, consumption, and eating practices to food waste. Such changes imply dietary changes under the constraint of providing healthy and nutritious food for a growing global population, leading to a diet that also fulfils the conditions of sustainability with respect for climate impact, human equity, and cultural values. In the big picture, this transition implies for members of the wealthy part of the world’s population that they should cut down on animal-based foods, in particular red meat, and increase the plant-based part of the diet, i.e., eat from the lowest trophic levels of the global food web which should not only include plants but also algae and fungi [1,2].

However, although being acute, a green transition is not easy to implement on a global scale because the inertia to change works on many different time scales, ranging from the daily rather fast food and meal choice of the individual consumer dictated by impulse, price, convenience, etc., over the less fast dynamics in the production, manufacturing, retail, and public procurement systems to the slow changes in food preferences and food culture. Whatever measures are taken to influence these different dynamics on the political and governmental levels, it should be kept in mind that people do not eat diets, calories, or nutrients; they eat food, which is a human activity taking place within a specific cultural context, and food has qualities characterised by flavour and texture and associated (hopefully) with deliciousness and pleasure.

When asked about the biggest challenge for changing towards a more plant-forward diet, people most often mention flavour and taste. Plant-based foods are simply not tasty and palatable enough for a majority of consumers [3]. This is where gastronomy, culinary arts, and craftmanship must enter along with interdisciplinary science-based knowledge to furnish robust and realistic solutions for a sustainable planetary diet. Chefs along with academics, innovators, and entrepreneurs will assume key roles in this endeavour. With the current discussions of how to reframe and develop the concept of gastronomy in the direction of sustainability, it is important to not only talk about cooking techniques but also include broader aspects, such as lifestyles, culture, traditions, and knowledge.

It is not an entirely new condition of human behaviour to act sustainably, and traditional food cultures around the world have often exercised a kind of ‘economic’ behaviour in their households and cooking practices, i.e., in the true sense of the origin of the word ‘economy’, from oikos, meaning ‘household’, and nemein that can be translated as ‘management and dispensation’ [4]. Also, a key driving force in human evolution has been a search for delicious foods that satisfy both nutritional needs and sensory pleasures [5]. We propose in the present essay to look for solutions for sustainable foods and sustainable culinary practices by learning from different food cultures across space and time. Specifically, it is not a new challenge to cook with vegetables; many cultures across the world have practiced and still practice vegetarian and vegan eating behaviour, and knowledge about how to find delicious tastes and textures can be gained from ancient cultures that have been driven by the same evolutionary driving forces as modern human beings.

As an example, an intangible cultural heritage of humanity, the Mediterranean food culture, exercised for centuries by communities throughout the Mediterranean basin, is not only of interest in terms of the actual diet but also for its associated lifestyle, cultural identity, and continuity from ancient times to today where we globally face several crises in terms public health, climate, and sustainability of the global food systems. We present here a viewpoint on the Mediterranean food culture ranging from the anthropology of the lifestyle and the history of the concept of the Mediterranean Diet [6] to the universal deliciousness of certain food items dating back from Antiquity, which, combined, provide lessons for changes towards a more sustainable eating behaviour. Similar lessons can be learned from the Atlantic Diet [7] and to some extent from the New Nordic Diet [8] and the traditional Japanese food culture. A common element of these cuisines is a substantial component of marine foods and, in relation hereto, a stable element of the fifth basic taste: umami. These lessons may hold a key to a green transition in our eating behaviour by fulfilling a human innate and evolutionary determined craving for deliciousness. Insights from both contemporary and old Asian cuisines as well as from ancient European and Greek cooking practices can thereby function as a guide towards future cuisines that downsize meat and incorporate more plants in the diet.

In the present essay, we advocate an interdisciplinary approach to the concept of sustainable cuisines, bringing together the authors’ different competences, respectively, in social sciences and anthropology (SH) and in natural sciences and gastrophysics (OGM). Through a number of examples and case studies, we demonstrate both the need and the strength of working in a truly cross-disciplinary mode when combining insights from different academic disciplines to showcase how a focus on gastronomy, especially gastronomic heritage, can provide a framework for a more sustainable, contemporary cuisine. By considering the concept of taste with different meanings and from different perspectives in humanistic academic disciplines and in natural sciences, we arrive at a multifaceted viewpoint on gastronomy which holds a promise for agency in the context of sustainable cuisines across space and time.

2. What Is a Sustainable Cuisine? The Mediterranean Diet as an Example

Whether a certain cuisine can be seen as sustainable or not is a rather difficult question to answer. At a symposium held by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in Rome in 2010, the following general definition was agreed upon:

“Sustainable diets are those diets with low environmental impacts which contribute to food and nutrition security and to healthy life for present and future generations. Sustainable diets are protective and respectful of biodiversity and ecosystems, culturally acceptable, accessible, economically fair and affordable; nutritionally adequate, safe and healthy; while optimising natural and human resources”

[9].

A more concrete formulation can be found in the EAT-Lancet Commission Report on healthy diets from sustainable food systems (1) which, in 2019, stated that to keep both the planet and people healthy, we need to eat more plant-based foods and significantly less meat, a strategy that since then has been developed into specific advices regarding which foods to eat and which to avoid in order to sustain both the planet as well as humans.

Aviaja Hauptmann reminds us, though, that sustainability of cuisines must be assessed in a local context [10]. “It isn’t about plants versus meat, but rather about nature versus industry” she argues in an interview about her research in Arctic food and lifestyle, where she also points to the Western dominance regarding food and sustainability definitions (see also [11]). To eat plants in the Arctics where tomatoes or cucumbers are not easy to grow is a demand that is unrealistic to follow. So, when discussing the meanings of sustainability in relation to food, it is worthwhile to stress that there is not such a thing as a global cuisine [12] but a variety of cuisines across the globe—tightly related to local traditions, habits, culture, environment, history, etc. There is no global ‘we’ and no generalised diet that can evolve or be eaten regardless of geography, history, and locality. Thus, different local premises shape the foundations for how to establish and maintain a cuisine for the future. Not only place, though, but also time changes the meaning of food and cuisine.

An example of such a local cuisine, that has changed meaning over time, is the Mediterranean Diet (MD). The MD was not coined as sustainable from the beginning but rather was framed as beneficial for health, especially for its proposed potential for preventing heart and coronary diseases [13]. The very famous and critically discussed work by the American doctor Ancel Keys (and his wife Elizabeth Keys) during the 1950s (see, e.g., [14]) laid the ground for naming and categorising the Mediterranean cuisine as something special—especially Italian—although, this categorisation has been criticised for being too ‘white’ and lacking both evidence and scientific precision [15]. Later (in 2010), the Mediterranean Diet was acknowledged by UNESCO as an intangible and unique cultural heritage, pointing to its connection to a broader concept of lifestyle related to the Mediterranean region’s ways of living, eating, and producing food, caring for the environment, prioritising sociality around meals, and acknowledging history and tradition, rather than a narrow focus on human health and specific food crops [16]. A few years later, the MD was redefined again as a sustainable cuisine—this time guided by the above-mentioned definition by FAO. The Mediterranean Diet has been, from then on, officially approved as a case study for sustainable diets with four general indicators:

(1)

Nutritionally adequate, safe, and healthy;

(2)

Low environmental impact—protective and respectful of biodiversity and the ecosystem;

(3)

Culturally acceptable;

(4)

Accessible, economically fair, and affordable [13].

Thus, what we know as ‘The Mediterranean Diet’ has changed content and meaning through history, from being known as a diet to prevent disease to a diet being declared as an important cultural heritage and to now also being acknowledged as an example of sustainability [17].

A Portuguese research group has argued, though, that there is no clear definition of what makes the MD a sustainable diet. In a review of 220 papers (published in 2022), and in-depth analyses of 32 of these [18], the authors identified 33 indicators used to argue for the MD as being sustainable. These were grouped into four categories: Health, Economy, Environment, and Society/Culture. They concluded that assessing the sustainability of a cuisine is complex but, nevertheless, that there is a need for harmonised ways of assessment, making it possible to communicate across borders about its content and meaning. They also noted, that of the four categories, there was one factor that was only assessed in a single paper, namely the socio-cultural criterion. One can wonder why this is, as the MD is often praised for exactly this element.

One component that can be seen as part of the socio-cultural dimension is the practice of people, e.g., how they eat and why they make the food choices they do. Which habits and traditions do they maintain, and which do they renew, and which consequences do such actions have for the assessment of sustainability? These kinds of questions can reveal, as Medina points to, that the MD is perhaps primarily a cultural construction, an idea and an ideology, not necessarily followed by everyone in the Mediterranean area [13]. In fact, there is a concern among researchers that the MD concept is in risk of losing its stability and support in the region, especially among young people. Dernini et al. states the following: “Despite the fact that the Mediterranean diet is well documented and acknowledged as a healthy diet, paradoxically, it is being abandoned, mainly by the young generations in most Mediterranean countries. Southern and Eastern Mediterranean countries are passing through a ‘nutritional transition’ in which problems of undernutrition coexist with overweight, obesity, and diet-related chronic diseases.” (ibid:1323). The MD is a well-accepted cultural concept but is seemingly not mirrored in the practice of todays (especially younger) Italian eaters. Storytelling and pedagogical interventions for the younger generations about the history of the MD are some of the solutions mentioned to heal this paradox [17]. The socio-cultural dimensions of the MD and the gap between concepts and practice are, though, important to further explore.

We argue here that there is another related dimension, which has been overlooked in many studies and approaches through the years, for transforming the viewpoint on the MD from healthy to sustainable: the taste of food. As we explain later, we here mean taste in a broad sense, both related to the eating experience, the human attraction to deliciousness, and the social organisation of the meal. To maintain a cuisine, we need to understand what makes a diet, such as the MD, attractive to people and how to place this dimension in a sustainability context: and here, tradition can play an important role. If we have a closer look at the concept of taste, including looking back in time as in the following section, e.g., at the Mediterranean cuisine a long time before it was praised as healthy, culturally significant, and sustainable, we may find a clue as to how to connect taste and sustainability in a future cuisine where maintaining tradition and innovating sustainable menus go hand in hand.

3. Taste, Taste Archaeology, Flavour Principles, and Sustainability

3.1. What Is Taste?

A key concept of ‘taste’ refers to a complex set of phenomena pertaining to human interaction with that part of the world we as omnivores may consider as food and may eventually ingest. Taste can refer to the sensory and physiologically based perception of food, to the judgement of a taste experience, and to an assessment of individual preferences, acceptance, liking, or disgust [19]. Moreover, some researchers talk about taste agency as an ability to act and communicate in relation to taste, i.e., related to a range of human activities in a distinct or varying foodscape [20].

A taste experience can be defined as a multimodal perception [21] of a food or drink item that is perceived via the five basic senses: sight (visual perception), olfactory sensation (smell, both orthonasally and retronasally), taste proper (in the oral cavity), tactile sensation (e.g., mouthfeel), and hearing (auditive perception directly via the outer ears or indirectly transmitted through vibrations in the jaws and cranium) [22,23]. These physiological sensory cues are folded together in the brain with memories, emotions, and expectations and, therefore, involve sociocultural, psychological, and psychosocial factors [24,25] and are subsequently interpreted within a given cultural context, tradition, and situational framework as a ‘taste experience’. The so-called Proust effect referring to a kind of involuntary memory is an example of the strong coupling between the senses of taste and smell to primeval or lost memories [26].

The physiological components (particularly taste, smell, and mouthfeel) of the taste experience are sometimes in English called ‘flavour’, but not all languages have a similar compounded description and may employ the word ‘taste’ synonymously with flavour, often leading to some confusion. Taste proper, i.e., the chemical sensation of food in the oral cavity, is composed of five basic tastes, sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and umami. Taste sensation then corresponds to a chain of mechanisms stimulated by the binding of certain taste molecules from the food to the taste receptors in the taste buds on the tongue and a subsequent neural signalling to the taste centre in the brain where the signal is processed and interpreted [22].

3.2. Taste in Evolution and Across Millennia

As mentioned in Section 3.1, a distinction must be made between the objective (physiological taste) and subjective taste preferences (hedonic taste and taste and food preferences). Concerning the five basic tastes, sour, salty, bitter, sweet, and umami, there is something special about sweet, bitter, and umami, and an understanding of why is important for facing and tackling the challenges involved in changing eating behaviour from meat towards a more plant-rich diet [27]. Humans have evolved as omnivores, and umami taste receptors have coevolved to steer us towards nutritious, energy-dense, and calorie-rich foods like meat, particularly after our ancestors started using fire for food preparation 1.9 million years ago [28]. Hence, the quest for umami is a universal and evolutionary trait imprinted in our genes and independent of culture. Similarly, the desire for sweetness is also universal and stems back from our early ancestors’ eating behaviour harvesting ripe fruits whose attractive aromas [5] and delicious sweetness led our early ancestors to sugars and hence calorie-rich food. At the same time, we developed an arsenal of bitter receptors to help us to stay away from bitter tasting and potentially poisonous foods. Hence, it is in our genes to search out foods that are rich in umami and sweetness and not too bitter. Liking for bitterness is something we learn [19].

As we shall return to below, the human innate attraction to umami and sweetness and the repulsion to bitter tastes is key to understanding why many people have difficulties eating a plant-rich diet. This is not to say, as already mentioned, that we cannot develop over time a liking for bitterness. In fact, most people do, e.g., for bitter-tasting foods like coffee, walnuts, olive oil, certain vegetables, and beverages with tannins. Also, over shorter time spans than evolutionary time scales, food cultures have developed to seek bitterness and may live on a vegetarian or vegan diet with little umami.

3.3. Taste Across Time and Space

Whereas one may possibly appreciate and accept statements about liking and accepting certain foods and dishes in the written, even ancient, literature within cooking and gastronomy—despite individual variations in taste and food preferences—it is much more troublesome to understand which taste perceptions people would earlier have had from specific ingredients and specific food preparations.

There are several reasons for this. First, it may well be that the ingredients, e.g., vegetables and fruits, if they still can be found today, are not from the same species or varieties as earlier, and second, the assessment of the taste may have changed over time. An interesting example to this effect was recently discussed by Spence [29] in the case of the pineapple that was first tasted by a non-native American, possibly Colombo, on 4 November 1493, and only thereafter brought to the Old World. First, the common pineapple varieties nowadays may be completely different from then and may have different chemical taste and aroma compounds. Second, whereas this extremely rare fruit in the 17th century Old World was described as the world’s most delicious fruit, the assessment, appraisal, and description of its taste may now be quite different due to the fruit’s common availability.

When it comes to the taste of composite ancient dishes and preparations, the situation becomes further complicated since the way recipes were written earlier can be quite different from today, where a proper recipe is more like a scientific protocol with an accurate list of well-defined ingredients, each denoted with rather precise measures in terms of numbers, weight, and volume. In addition, a modern recipe prescribes a set of preparation procedures such that the dish can be assumed to come out in a (hopefully) similar way each time it is prepared. Many ancient recipes contain neither measures nor detailed descriptions of procedures. A classic case is the famous cookbook known as De Re Coquinaria, attributed to the Roman gourmet Marcus Gavius Apicius [30] who lived in the first century CE. As an example, a simple Roman salad dish in De Re Coquinaria was simply described as “For cucumbers take pepper, pennyroyal, honey or sweet wine, liquamen, and vinegar”. We shall later refer to this recipe and describe the taste of the ingredient liquamen that is a name for a version of the fermented Roman fish sauce garum.

Despite the great uncertainties in assessing and describing the taste of certain ingredients and dishes across extended time spans, there is the possibility of finding help in uncovering some general principles and maybe aspects of taste invariants over time from the linguistic studies by Jurafsky [31] who in his book The Language of Taste describes how one can trace the development of a dish or recipe over time by studying the evolution of its name as the dish has been traveling with seafarers across the world over continents and over centuries. Two of Jurafsky’s examples are particularly enlightening for the discussions of the present paper.

The first example pertains to the British national dish, fish’n’chips, that turns out to have roots millennia back in Persia as a sweet and vinegared stewed meat dish, sikbāj, with onions. According to Jurafsky, this expression transforms into French aspic, Peruvian ceviche, and Spanish escabeche, still with a sour taste but where meat is replaced by fish. It is likely that seafarers who have become accustomed to the sour Persian meat dish have substituted the meat with the more easily accessible and cheaper fish when they brought the dish to Europe in the beginning of the 16th century. Possibly, a fish dish would also fit better to the long periods of lent in catholic Europe. Later, seafarers brought the dish to South America, where lemon juice took the place of vinegar, and the dish became the marinated fish dish ceviche. Later, Portuguese Jesuits took the sour fish dish, a kind of pecado frito, to Japan where it eventually turned into tempura with a sour–sweet dip. Jurafsky suggests that emigrating Jews brought the dish from Portugal via The Netherlands to England in the late 18th century where it morphed into fish’n’chips, now fried and battered cod fish but still with an acidic taste from vinegar. The potatoes came in only from the mid-19th century via Ireland or Northern England. It is interesting to note that, whereas the basic contents in this traveling dish change and adopt local ingredients and traditions, the key taste attributes remain invariant during this global transformation: sour (from vinegar or lemon juice) and umami (from meat, fish, or potatoes); these attributes are invariant and remain dominant during the different transformations in space and time.

The second example is ketchup, which is one of the most widespread taste condiments in today’s western cuisines. Although modern ketchup, which is based on tomatoes, most often is associated with American fast-food culture, it actually has a root in Southeast Asia millennia back as a kind of salted and fermented fish sauce. In the language Hokkien spoken in the Chinese province Fujian and parts of Taiwan, the name of this fish sauce was, according to Jurafsky [31], ke-tchup (or catsup, catchup, and koe-chiap), where ke means salted/conserved fisk and tchup means sauce. Seafarers are thought to have brought ke-tchup from China to Malaysia, the Philippines, and Indonesia, where the name over time turned into kecap which basically just means a sweet sauce without salt. Jurafsky points out that the lingual distortion of the word is similar to the one known from Latin where the contemporary word sauce derives from Latin salsus, meaning something that is salted. British seafarers probably brought the Chinese fermented fish sauces on board their ships to pep up the tedious salty meat provisions and the dry sea biscuits. Around 1700, the fish sauce found its way to England where it was sold as a sought-after and expensive commodity, leading to the invention of local replacements involving new ingredients like mushrooms and walnuts in addition to vinegar and a range of spices. In the period 1750–1850, ketchup became a common name for thick brown sauces with mushrooms. Only in the beginning of the 19th century were tomatoes added to ketchup which gradually gained in popularity. A certain amount of fish in the form of anchovies remained as the only fish component, but the fermentation was gone. Around 1850, the content of anchovies was reduced and the costumers in the USA gained preference for a sweeter and more sour and viscous ketchup. Until the 1980s, one could still hear the work catsup for ketchup in the USA, reflecting the well-known phenomenon that American English retains expressions which had fallen out of fashion in British English [31]. The most famous ketchup recipe of all is probably that of Heinz’ from 1876, which includes mushrooms, anchovies, tomatoes, vinegar, walnuts, pickles, spices, and sugar. It is here interesting to observe that despite the many changes in the ingredients in ketchup, going from ke-tchup to modern ketchup over many centuries, traveling from Southeast Asia to the Old and New World, the invariant basic taste is umami. Where it originally was umami from fermented fish, it is nowadays umami in the form of anchovies, mushrooms, tomatoes, and walnuts. Most noteworthy is that the umami taste derived originally from the fermentation of fish is now mainly derived from ripe tomatoes that exhibit a very potent umami synergy [32]. As we shall see later, the tomato is a unique ingredient to provide for umami taste invariance in a transition from a meat-rich cuisine to one that is more plant-rich [2].

The interdisciplinary study of taste and cooking in ancient times may be considered as a kind of food and taste archaeology [33] which is a specialty that requires the application of many different disciplines, such a linguistics, anthropology, social sciences, history, and natural sciences. This field of study involves the discovery of ingredients, cooking tools, and culinary techniques, and it may reveal social, political, religious, and economic practices of the past [33]. The study of the senses and taste in Antiquity is described in the book edited by Rudolph [34]. Sally Grainger, a British Latinist and chef, is a prominent figure in this field and renowned from her experimental studies of Roman cooking, e.g., by the use of garum [35,36] and exploring Roman cuisine and recreating ancient recipes in her own reconstructed Roman kitchen.

3.4. Rozin’s Flavour Principles

The examples mentioned above of a possible principle of taste/flavour invariance when certain dishes and food preparations travel across the world over centuries may be viewed in the context of the so-called ‘flavour principles’ proposed by Rozin and Rozin [37,38]. According to these principles, as also stressed by Belasco [12], a given cuisine and culinary practices distinguish themselves by characteristic flavourings, in particular for cuisines that are predominantly vegetarian. Such flavourings could be one specific and dominant flavoured ingredient like dashi in Japanese cuisine, certain spice mixtures in North African, Indian, and Mexican cuisines, mixtures of olive oil, tomatoes, and garlic in Southern Italian cuisine, and combinations of ginger, sesame oil, soy sauce, and garlic in some parts of China. These characteristic seasonings constitute a kind of ‘gustatory theme’ [37] that also can be related to ethnic identity.

As pointed out by Rozin and Rozin [37], this identity can be so strong that immigrants seek to preserve it when settling into foreign countries with other food cultures by either bringing condiments and seasonings along or seeking similar flavours in local ingredients. An example is the self-sustained Japanese Yuba community in Brazil who procures their ethnic flavourings by processing local produce, e.g., in the form of soy sauce and certain tsukemono-type pickles [39], thereby preserving umami taste and the distinct Japanese subtle harmony in taste and mouthfeel.

It should be remarked that Rozin’s flavour principles must not be confused with the hypothesised principles or so-called theory of food and beverage flavour pairing [40], which assumes that food items with the same volatile aroma compounds provide for a good pairing. It was shown by Ahn et al. [41], using an extensive big-data network analysis of 56,000 recipes from cookbooks from around the world, that this theory is scientifically flawed, and good pairing is judged differently in different food cultures. A related study based on metadata pertaining to local Chinese cuisines found that geographical distance rather than climate similarity implied resemblance in the favoured local recipes [42]. In contrast, the principle of umami synergy, to be described later as a basis for food pairing, is scientifically well-established down to the receptor level [43]. Whereas the extensive analysis by Ahn et al. could not support the flavour-pairing theory, it delivered strong empirical evidence for the Rozin flavour principles by finding in the extensive data material that each cuisine was dominated by a small number of common key ingredients that enter in many recipes of the cuisine in question [41].

3.5. Taste Travels Across Food Cultures in a Plant-Forward Cuisine

Whereas the taste and flavour preferences vary among individuals and between different food cultures, the innate human craving for sweetness and umami are universal traits as described in Section 3.2 above. Rozin and Rozin [37] have pointed out that compared to predominantly vegetarian food cultures, those food cultures, e.g., in temperate and polar regions, which have a high portion of meat and dairy in their diet have less tendency to use specific flavourings in their recipes. The Rozin flavour principles, therefore, mostly apply to food cultures that are predominantly vegetarian.

It is noteworthy that many of these flavourings according to the flavour principles are typically rich in umami [32] or associated with koku attributes, e.g., from garlic, seafood, and fermented products [44], which are known to enhance the sensation of umami and sweet and in addition to reducing the perceived bitterness. This makes sense because plant-rich foods, excepting ripe fruits, generally lack in sweetness and umami and on top of that they carry or produce bitter-tasting compounds to scare eaters away. The reason why plants (roots, stems, foliage, and unripe fruits) lack sweetness is that the sweet sugars are bound in tasteless large carbohydrate molecules, and the reason why plants lack umami is that the tasty amino acids (particularly glutamate) are bound in large tasteless protein molecules. In addition, plants, due to their lack of muscular tissues, do not contain a large amount of those compounds (free nucleotides) that can stimulate umami synergy [45]. Confronting this fundamental aspect of plant biology with the human innate and evolutionarily determined taste preferences described in Section 3.2 clearly exposes the key challenge in cutting down on meat towards a more plant-forward diet [2].

Once the taste issues of changing eating behaviour have been identified, solutions can be much more easily and readily envisioned. There are basically two approaches. One is to impart the ‘missing’ umami and sweetness to plant dishes using seasonings and condiments that are rich in umami and sweetness. The other one is to transform the plants’, e.g., vegetables’, potential to taste sweet and umami by denaturing the tasteless large carbohydrate and protein molecules into smaller tasty entities, such as sugars, free amino acids, and small peptides. This is most conveniently accomplished by fermentation using microorganisms like bacteria, yeasts, and moulds or specific enzymes. Both approaches are well known from vegetarian and vegan food cultures.

As an example, many Southeast Asian cultures use fermented condiments produced by fermenting fish, molluscs, and crustaceans, which are all rich in umami taste from glutamate and small peptides. Umami-rich vegan condiments like soy sauce and miso can be produced by fermenting beans. Due to umami synergy, only small amounts of these condiments are needed to make delicious vegetarian dishes without compromising taste [2]. During centuries, such condiments and the associated culinary practices have made their way from the East to the West, and we have already mentioned in Section 3.3 how this cultural transfer applied to the ancient Chinese fish sauce that was transformed into ketchup. Furthermore, the specific oriental fermentation techniques used to produce soy sauce and miso have, in recent years, also been implemented in the West [46], first in avant-garde restaurants and now gradually also in small innovation companies that produce fermented condiments based on local beans, peas, and lentils using the mould culture koji [47]. The acceptance in Western food cultures of such products produced by koji fermentation, which only creates rather mild aromas, are more eminent than other much more pungent fermented products like fish sauce and fermented shrimp paste.

Another powerful principle by which to promote a plant-forward diet by culinary culture transfer from East to West is the one imbedded in dashi [48]. Dashi is the soup stock omnipresent in Japanese cuisine [49] and, in fact, is the motherlode of umami. Dashi is made as a liquid extract of the seaweed species konbu (Saccharina japonica) combined with an extract of a special fish product katsuobushi, or shiitake in case of a vegan version [49], cf. Figure 1. Dashi exhibits by this combination of ingredients a perfect umami synergy and is, therefore, not only used as a soup stock and simmering liquid but also enters a wide range of Japanese condiments that are used to flavour vegetable ingredients. Dashi and derived condiments have now found their way into western cuisine not only in classical Japanese restaurants and sushi bars but also as flavourings in many western households and restaurants, not least within the noodle and ramen kitchen. A particular application is the use of both dashi and koji (in the form of the condiment shio-koji) to pickled and marinated vegetables, so-called tsukemono [50]. Tsukemono produced from a great variety of vegetables and fruits can also become umamified using soy sauce, miso, and sake lees [51].

Dashi is the culinary principle around which the whole traditional Japanese cuisine revolves. It is in this context interesting to note the traditional Japanese food culture, washoku, in 2013, similarly to the MD, was promoted to a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage, in particular with reference to washoku’s component of respect towards nature.

As mentioned, the brown seaweed konbu is used in dashi where it supplies umami-tasting free glutamate in large amounts [52]. The traditional culinary uses of seaweeds are rather scarce outside Southeast Asia and Polynesia [53,54], and although seaweeds have been used and still are in use as food in some coastal areas in Europe, it appears that the use has been ‘forgotten’. However, recently, it was found in archaeological studies that seaweeds and other aquatic plants have extensively been consumed in many European coastal communities through the Neolithic transition to farming and into the Early Middle Ages [55]. Particularly, the red seaweed species dulse (Palmaria palmata) appears to have been a popular food. With the globalisation of Japanese cuisine, not least the sushi culture [56], seaweeds have gradually gained acceptance as edible foods, and a quest has begun to search for local seaweeds with an umami potential similar to that of konbu. Considering the now-documented ancient uses of dulse in Europe, it is interesting to note that dulse is the only European seaweed species studied so far that has an umami potential similar to konbu [57]. Dulse is, via an interest in seaweed stimulated by Asian food cultures, finding its way into contemporary western cuisine [58], not least in the context of a sustainable plant-forward cuisine. Also, in this case, the invariance of umami taste seems to be the crucial link, in much the same way as described in Section 3.3 for the cases of fish sauce and ketchup.

The examples of taste invariance across time and space described above open up a broader view of how lessons from the past can lead to promises for the future of more sustainable cuisines as unfolded in more detail in the following section.

4. The Past in the Future

4.1. French Sauces, Taste, and the Osmazome

Traditional French cuisine has had an enormous impact on global culinary culture and gastronomy. In the context of the very essence of taste, mention should be made of the concept of sauces and stocks as they were described systematically by the two French master chefs Marie-Antoine Carême (1783–1833), the greatest exponent of haute cuisine, and Auguste Escoffier (1846–1935), who updated and simplified the techniques and recipes of traditional French culinary culture, e.g., laying the foundation for the taxonomy of sauces [59].

Even if classical French sauces are not featuring prominently in contemporary writings about sustainable cuisine, there is still something to learn from their preparation with respect to taste and sustainability. What this lesson may be transpires from the classical book The Physiology of Taste [60] written by the French lawyer and politician Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755–1826) who has been conferred the status of the ‘father of gastronomy’. Although Brillat-Savarin had no knowledge of the concept of umami, in his book, he reveals an intuitive understanding about something like it and from which all good stocks, soups, and sauces derive their value. When he describes extracts from meat and bones, he refers to a mysterious substance he calls the osmazome that lends a delicious, strong taste to soup. The osmazome can be imagined as a taste quality with the same capacity as umami to impart deliciousness to foods. The concept of the osmazome bears some resemblance with the Japanese soup stock dashi described in Section 3.5, with the same basic strong umami taste, although with very different aromas. Both can be used in soups, sauces, and condiments to umamify a green and vegetable-based cuisine.

There are several aspects of sustainability in using sauces and soups in a plant-forward cuisine. First, if properly prepared, such sauces and soups can help to umamify, e.g., vegetable dishes. Second, the stock for the sauces and soups are often made by extracts from raw ingredients that are little used or even discarded, such as skin, shells, and bones from land animals, fish, shellfish, and crustaceans and certain entrails, as well as less-valued cut-off parts of vegetables.

In passing, it is interesting to note that the principle of a powerful umami-rich and nutritious stock is embodied in the invention of mass-produced soup cubes and powders launched on the European market first by Knorr in 1870, and most iconically represented by the famous Maggi cube. These products facilitated cheap and convenient ways for poor households to produce delicious and nutritious food. A similar product appeared in Japan around 1910 in the form of a dashi soup powder (hon-dashi).

4.2. From Ancient Greek and Roman Knowledge

We have several times above highlighted the basic taste umami as a route to a more sustainable and delicious plant-forward cuisine, and that many Southeast Asian cuisines have solved the problem of making vegetable dishes delectable by using umami-rich condiments like fish sauce, soy sauce, and dashi. The Ancient Greek and Roman cuisines used a similar approach, as alluded to above in Section 3.3. There is an almost forgotten tradition in the Mediterranean coastlines of producing fermented fish sauces called liquamen or garum [36,61,62,63] in Latin or garos in Greek, cf. Figure 2. Garos was produced on the Aegean islands at least as early as the fifth century BCE. The Romans produced several types of refined garum, and the basic form of fermented whole fish sauce, called liquamen, was used as a universal condiment. Garum and liquamen are, therefore, likely to be the oldest condiment or additive used in Europe to impart umami to foods. Classical Roman writings on the culinary arts [30] suggest that garum was incorporated into almost any kind of dish, even souffles and desserts.

The Romans often produced condiments as mixtures of garum with, e.g., wine, olive oil, vinegar, and honey [36]. It was recently pointed out [64] that one of the derived condiments from Roman garum, so-called meligarum, being a mixture of garum and honey (mel is honey in Latin), is a perfect condiment to combine umami and sweetness (in addition to salty) and, hence, can be seen as a medium to umamify and sweeten vegetables and other green dishes. In fact, the second century physician Galenos (157–216 CE) consistently recommended light and simple dressings of oil, wine, and garos for vegetable dishes. The ancient tradition of producing garum is now being revived by small companies in Italy and Spain [65,66], cf. Figure 3.

Another ancient umami-rich staple is dried fish roe, usually from tuna, cod, or grey mullet, which was considered a great delicacy called bottarga in Italian, botargo in Spanish, boutargue in French, and avgotaracho in Greek [67,68], cf. Figure 4. The roe sacs were removed whole from the fish, then cured with sea salt for a few weeks, and finally dried for a month. The salt draws liquid out of the roe, making it firm and hard. Bottarga has a rich umami taste, and it can be grated or ground on vegetable dishes, quite similar to modern-day uses of parmesan cheese that is also umami rich. Bottarga is, along with other traditional uses of marine products [69], an excellent way of using seafoods for the umamification of a sustainable plant-forward diet [70].

Discovering ancient tastes and developing them for use in nowadays different cuisines, however, do not in themselves implement new habits and routines. A cultural analysis is necessary in order to understand how former taste practices in different local contexts can lead to future taste preferences.

4.3. Revival of Past Food Culture in the Name of Sustainability

Turning from tangible food items and their taste as discussed above, we now have a look at a recurrent theme in the evolution of cultural behaviour reflecting a return to or inspiration of the past and past virtues. This behaviour is typically highlighted within arts, architecture, crafts, clothes, etc., but it is equally relevant when it comes to foods, cooking, and eating behaviour. Apart from a nostalgic component and trivial changes in fashion, looking to and learning from the past bears witness to the fact that many of the fundamental challenges in human life remain the same despite huge variations in environmental factors. The need for sustainable living and healthy eating behaviour are examples of such a factor. A current trend, therefore, involves rediscovering and reviving previous food production methods and cooking practices with a focus on sustainability, diversity, resilience, regenerative farming, and reducing food waste. It is interesting that this trend includes the wider use of fermentation methods, the use of all parts of a food ingredient, cutting down on animal-based foods, and increasing the consumption of plants, in particular vegetables and legumes.

It is interesting that governmental programs geared towards impacting changes in people’s eating behaviour [71,72] are now starting to realise that nutritional information and advice regarding healthy eating behaviour alone cannot provide the necessary driving force for a change, but input from food historians, anthropologists, and behavioural scientists are also critically needed. As an example, the Danish government, as a consequence of the worrisome growth in unhealthy and unstainable eating behaviour and the loss of elementary cooking skills, not least among children and young people, has, in 2024, launched an initiative The Past in our Future Food to revive aspects of past food culture and culinary practices to help families to change eating behaviour towards a more healthy and sustainable diet inspired by traditional Danish cooking practices.

5. Discussion and Conclusions

As it has become clear in the present essay, changes towards more sustainable culinary practices are not likely to be viable in the long run unless the foods produced appeal to our sensory preferences, both innate and culturally determined. This brings umami into the picture again, and the present authors would argue that the most effective way of implementing a sustainable green transition in our eating behaviour would be to learn from the past regarding how umami-rich foods and condiments can be used to produce delicious food, making changes in the composition of food ingredients on the plate but keeping the umami taste adiabatically invariant.

If we accept that taste plays a pivotal role for the cultural acceptance of certain foods or special cuisines, we need to prepare, educate, and train ‘taste-makers’, i.e., chefs, cooks, and food producers, regarding how to act in order to both preserve essential aspects of a cuisine and to transform it to conform to the green goals of today. This work is already in process. The sustainability discourse has activated chefs all over the world to experiment with sustainable cooking as never before. Counihan and Højlund find that this work goes on at many levels; it includes working with the local community, building on the cultural heritage, and generating political actions [73], but it is also a work that includes the craftmanship of working with taste.

We highlighted the Mediterranean Diet as an example of a cuisine that is much more than a well-defined inventory of possibly healthy ingredients but involves a complex of cultural cooking and eating practices that could be exercised within a sustainable framework, and, thereby, provides inspiration for how to connect taste, food culture, and sustainability. With the example of how the Mediterranean Diet as a concept has moved from stabilising itself through health promotion to, 30 years later, being a brand of sustainability, it became clear that each cuisine has its own cultural and dynamic history. We use this example to argue that in order to succeed in changing a cuisine towards sustainability, we need to be aware of its local history. What people eat is to a high degree motivated by their taste preferences. These are not universal or context-less preferences.

To introduce more umami-rich food, which can enhance the attraction of plant-based meals, we need to understand how people in a specific region have practiced umami-based cooking and what meanings they have attached to such practices. The ideas about a cuisine are never the same as the actual eating practices in a specific region. The Mediterranean Diet, but also ‘the French’, ‘the Nordic’, and many other well-known cuisines, are constructions changing all the time in response to other discourses and brought into practice by eaters—or not—in many ways. Traditional cuisines are, however, in risk of disappearing from younger generations’ repertoire and memory. With the focus on taste, e.g., the basic tastes, the experience of eating and the local traditions of taste preferences, we have here argued that should be possible to engage future generations in using cultural heritage as a driver for sustainability. It seems that many eating cultures (‘cuisines’) around the world can agree that tradition is important. The term ‘grandma’s food’ has significant meanings in many food cultures, expressing the importance of memory, continuity, knowledge transfer, and close family relations.

In a time where the demand for sustainable food consumption is increasing, reflections on cultural eating habits and diets are essential. If we (the global or at least the Western ‘we’) continue to eat as we have done until now, the food system will be under more pressure. As a response to this, the food industry is intensively working to invent new food products and new production methods—as, e.g., cell food or so-called fake meat. But even if eaters must abandon some habits, certain crops, and specific production methods, it is still necessary to respect and include past traditions. As Claude Fischler has argued [74], eaters are always developing their eating habits in a continuum between the well-known food culture and innovative new foods. Different traditional cuisines have potential for adopting sustainable food futures, but they cannot be developed without a connection to taste, as well taste preferences, taste craftmanship, and taste experiences.

All these meanings of taste are part of the current redefinition of gastronomy, which, therefore, is a fruitful framework for working towards more sustainable cuisines. To establish this new framework, based on both physiological and cultural understandings of taste, the future of gastronomy must be shaped by interdisciplinary collaboration. This essay is an example hereof and an attempt to inspire, including multidimensional perspectives in the study of the future of sustainable tastes. The specific example mentioned of using an ancient condiment, meligarum, in the context of the green transition and a future sustainable cuisine highlights how lessons from the past may hold promises for the future.