You might know that miso is tasty. But did you know that it can contain never-before-seen forms of life? In the latest installment of our alumni interview series, Joshua Evans ’12 shares these and other findings from a decade in food research. A former Events and Farm Manager at the YSFP, Evans journeyed from New Haven to Copenhagen to explore fermentation and entomophagy at the Nordic Food Lab. Now, as director of the Sustainable Food Innovation Group at the Danish Technical University's Center for Biosustainability, he combines culinary research and development, natural sciences, environmental humanities, and more to explore how we might create a more sustainable and delicious food system.
This conversation is part of a Voices series about the exciting work YSFP alumni are doing in the world of food and agriculture. The transcript has been edited lightly for length and clarity.
Let’s start at the beginning: where does your interest in food and food research come from?
It goes back to a lot of experiences in my childhood. I grew up in Canada, on Vancouver Island. My dad grew up in Northern Ontario, where there's not a lot of people. Instead, there's a lot of lakes and a lot of space. He grew up fishing and hunting for ducks. Through him, I remember having some profound early experiences, like catching my first rainbow trout. It was just me and him, in a canoe on a lake, early in the morning, and the sky was the same color as the skin of the rainbow trout. I remember him showing me how to hit the trout on the head the right way to kill it well. It was an encounter with the immediacy of taking life, and that being necessary for our own life. The question, at least for me, was less about whether to take life or not — because to persist we must — and more about how to do it well: a question of quality. There were other experiences that I had, fishing with him or picking wild blackberries or hanging around the garden growing up. I always had this sense of glimpsing something that was deeply meaningful. I didn't really understand why, but I felt it.
That explicit understanding only came later, in my teenage years, when I started reading books on food and agriculture by Michael Pollan and others. Suddenly I gained a language for making sense of those profound encounters with these larger webs of life, and how eating necessarily tied me to those. That was one of the reasons why I wanted to go to and ultimately chose Yale, because in the late 2000s, there weren't so many universities that had on-campus farms, and even fewer that had programming around them. The YSFP was the place where I felt like it was possible to explore all the different connections that food had to all these different disciplines in a way that felt really valuable and rare.
After graduating, I moved to Copenhagen to do culinary research and development with the restaurant Noma through their Nordic Food Lab. It was a place that was deliberately set up to be between the academic world and the restaurant industry, to bring together people from these different worlds to explore the flavors and edible biodiversity of the Nordic region. There, especially through a big research project on insect gastronomy around the world, I became really interested in how different knowledge systems interact or fail to. So much of what we were doing — with the insects, with wild plants, with adapting traditional fermentations — inevitably came back to the synergies and the tensions between scientific knowledge and more traditional knowledge systems. That's what led me to study history & philosophy of science and science & technology studies in grad school. And that's what brought me to where I am now, where I have this research group in Copenhagen. We're using transdisciplinary culinary research and development to not just make new products, but to envision more diverse, sustainable ways of eating. We’re trying to use food innovation as a way to connect to and strengthen traditions rather than make them obsolete or somehow be in conflict with them.
Your online description of the Sustainable Food Innovation Group mentions all these interconnected food systems challenges — diversity, knowledge privatization, nutrition — and at the end of that list, you include blandness. How do taste and blandness fit into the bigger picture of these food systems challenges that you're trying to address?
I very deliberately put blandness alongside these other grand challenges as something that demands, I think, equal attention and urgency. I am of course not the first to call attention to this — Slow Food for example has been doing so for decades now — but in many circles, it's still really radical to propose that lack of flavor is correlated with lack of diversity, or that monoculture flavor is necessarily related to the monoculture that we see in agroecology and in our diets. Particularly at Nordic Food Lab, after visiting farmers and fermenters and food producers around the world, I started to notice certain patterns. Even though they can be in wildly different places and use wildly different methods, I've noticed — again, not as the first by any means, but another voice adding to the choir — that the most arresting, complex flavors often arise in contexts that are more diverse. They are structured by a certain orientation to the world. It's not about control. It's also not about being totally hands off. It's something in between. It's something more like tinkering: being involved, pretending neither to be masterful nor absolved. So following that kind of flavor will often lead us to cultivate those kinds of relationships with other species and those kinds of systems of farming or food production.
This ‘in-between’ way of relating to other forms of life is something I've noticed with a lot of fermenters in particular. Maybe it’s something about our relationship with microbes — how tractable, how close to hand, but also how indirect those relationships are. Many microbes are not immediately visible, but they're sensible through their effects. Of course, there are many different ways of approaching fermentation. A more industrial way is predicated on as much control as possible. You can also be too hands off. If you're too hands off, then it just becomes rot.
I have a number of friends brewing kombucha under their bed who I think are maybe a little too close to that end of the spectrum.
And that’s cool! I’m all for experimenting, and far from it for me to tell anyone how they ‘should’ ferment or not — that’s definitely not what I’m talking about. But I think we've all tasted kombucha which is basically just vinegar, and it's not the most pleasant experience. I also don't think it's the most nuanced or rarefied or beautiful expression of what kombucha can be, because if you go too far in that direction, all kombucha just becomes acetic acid. That’s a good example of where there is a correlation between this in-between sweet spot of flavor and a kind of in-between ethics and politics of agency. I think there's a more general lesson in there about how to interact with other species.
What you're saying about tinkering and exploring the limits of human control makes a lot of sense as someone coming from a researcher's perspective. What is the role of research in shaping a more sustainable and equitable and delicious food system?
I think research can be a really powerful tool for supporting the kinds of transitions we want to see in food and agriculture. But of course, it doesn't necessarily do that. Most research in food is based in or adjacent to industry. That’s not to vilify industry entirely, because industry can also be variegated; but only to say that research is not necessarily transformative. However, I think we can be deliberate and try to design our research in a way that is as supportive of transformation as possible. For example, much of our work with fermentation involves DNA sequencing and metabolomics: high-tech stuff that can give us valuable knowledge, but that can also cost a lot of money. It's the sort of analysis that most traditional or DIY food producers don't have access to. I'm really interested in what happens if we give those tools to fermenters and food producers and say, ‘What would you like to know about the microbes that you work with? How can we design experiments together that can create knowledge that can actually feed back into your craft-based process? Can we use some of this high-tech science and interdisciplinary research not to help industry earn more profit, but to help other kinds of producers continue and deepen their practice that is more oriented towards diversity?’ For me, that’s one kind of research — inclusive, participatory, open-ended — that can help shape a more sustainable, equitable, and delicious food system.
I saw the paper that came out last month from the Sustainable Food Innovation Group about microbes and novel misos. Was that approach at play in the design of the study?
Yes! That paper comes out of my PhD, the seed of which comes from the work we were doing at Nordic Food Lab. At that time we were starting to develop what we might call ‘translated’ fermentations: combining techniques from different parts of the world with local ingredients, in the same way we might translate a book from one language into another, to make something that is old and new at the same time. One of the first fermentations we developed at Nordic Food Lab — shoutout to my old colleague Lars Williams who made it — was a miso using pearl barley kōji and yellow peas, whereas traditionally in Japan it would be based on soybeans and rice. So it's definitely a miso, but it had this very un-Japanese, very Nordic taste because of the peas — something that, if you’re a Dane, your grandmother might have served you cooked into a stew. As I learned more about the microbiology behind what we were doing, and how quickly microbes can adapt to new environments, it appeared likely to me that the chefs I was working with weren't just creating new flavors, which was their goal, but that they might also be bringing new forms of life into the world without even realizing it or trying to. We didn’t quite have the capacity at Nordic Food Lab to answer that kind of question ourselves, so in my PhD, I wanted to bring the scientific resources I had access to back to my culinary colleagues to study these novel, ‘translated’ fermentations together. We decided to use DNA sequencing to see, if we vary the substrates using the same recipe, does that lead to different microbial ecologies, maybe even new evolutionary lineages, new species or subspecies or strains, niches for new biodiversity? The short answer is yes — but of course, there's more complexity to it. For anyone who's interested, I can recommend reading the paper, and we have more papers coming out soon going deeper into this topic.
You’ve mentioned how your time at the YSFP shaped your future trajectory. How did the YSFP change the way you think about food? Were there moments on the Farm that felt like important transitions for you?
There were so many moments of learning in and around the Farm for me. It’s hard to point to any single one; I think it was more about the process or the rhythm. I joined the YSFP as an events intern at the start of my sophomore year, continuing for the rest of my time at Yale, and I was also a farm manager in my senior year. Friday afternoons became this ritual special time at the end of the week. I would notice how the same dough recipe would change as the season got cooler and then warmed up again in the spring. I would notice all the interlocking seasons for the different crops as they would appear and then bloom and fade from the pizzas. Somehow the pizzas became this prism — one could see the distillation of the land around us in this little circumference of dough. If there’s one thing I think of with my time at the YSFP, I think of this feeling of process and overlapping rhythms that extend in time, all of those movements and changes in the land over multiple years, and noticing how our tastes and practices of care shaped and were in turn shaped by that land. That reciprocity has shaped how I approach cooking, how I approach research, and why I’ve gone on to do what I have.