This article provides a history of the New Nordic Cuisine* the ideology, the politics, the criticism, and the counterreactions to it.

The cooking show The Naked Chef (1999–2001) with Jamie Oliver has often been highlighted as an example of the cooking show genre's potential for reformulating masculine identity through cooking. Through a series of close readings of a selection of cooking shows from France, the UK and Denmark post-The Naked Chef and through a dialogue with other works on the subject, this article will attempt to identify the tendencies in the constructions and negotiations of masculinity in the cooking show genre following The Naked Chef and to understand these in relation to a revision of masculine identity in contemporary culture. The article is informed by poststructural gender theory and understands ‘doing food’ and ‘doing masculinity’ as two mutually constituting practices. The analyses identify four new tendencies in the construction of masculinity in cooking shows at the beginning of the twenty-first century: 1) rechefisation, 2) the TV chef as a moral entrepreneur, 3) the TV chef and the revitalisation of the national myth and 4) cooking as masculine escapism. The article concludes that the innovation of the masculine identity that was launched in The Naked Chef has not continued; rather, the genre has become a platform for the revitalisation of traditional masculinity discourses.

In this article, the position that there is a good case for sustainable food tourism despite the negative impact on the climate caused by tourism and travelling practices is argued. This requires, however, that we develop well-designed sustainable food experiences. We need to redesign and rethink the very idea of the food experience with particular focus on participation, the role of the consumer, the accessibility of the food design, and the potential of local contexts, to give some universal examples. This does not mean that sustainable food tourism is or can become carbon neutral. It means that the job of the food designer is to offer climate-friendly solutions and, maybe more importantly, that sustainable food experience designers should focus on how to inspire more sustainable food consumption and anti-consumerist lifestyles beyond the context of the experience. These arguments are presented via a case study of a sustainable food experience from the Faroe Islands.

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This article is a cross-national comparison of how food is promoted on tourism websites offering information about Denmark and Sweden – two countries with big national projects targeting the promotion of culinary excellence, following the initiation of “New Nordic Cuisine” (NNC) in 2004. The aim is to study similarities and differences in the projects of these two countries, both quantitatively and qualitatively. 21 out of 33 (approx. 64%) Danish texts referred to a shared Nordic culinary identity, whereas this was only the case in five out of 51 (approx. 10%) of the Swedish texts. Moreover, the qualitative analysis also revealed that “Nordic” cuisine was almost interchangeably connected to Danish cuisine, while in Sweden NNC was more peripheral and culinary excellence was construed as specifically Swedish. We thus criticise the generally accepted idea that NNC is a post-national food movement, seeing it instead as a means to achieve different gastronationalist ends for these two Nordic countries.