Forgotten fish and food reterritorialization: a Swedish citizen- and professional initiative to re-embed seafood

Mounting evidence demonstrates that the global food system degrades the environment, disenfranchises small-scale producers, and homogenizes foodways. Given that more than 50% of seafood worldwide enters international trade, efforts at transformation must attend to seafood as well as agricultural products. In this article, we investigate a Swedish citizen- and professional initiative, designed and implemented by the culinary civil-society organization Rutabaga Academy that reimagined Swedish seafood provisioning. Forgotten Fish: Heritage for the Future of Sustainable Fish Consumption assembled small-scale fishers, chefs, and other actors to “joyfully explore” the taste of abundant, locally available seafood and its potential for mitigating the homogeneity of fish in large-scale consumption circuits, threats to marine ecosystems and fish populations in Swedish waters, and the disadvantages of the existing food system for local fishers, heritage, and gastronomy. Participants tasted “forgotten” fish species that once played a role in local cuisines while articulating the values of the seafood provisioning system they wanted. We use concepts from Polanyi’s The Great Transformation to explore the initiative, interrogating the roles of participants in reterritorializing seafood production and consumption and the tensions characterizing their diverse visions. Participants shared a conviction that change was needed, and a belief that celebrity chefs could catalyse this change, yet the values they prioritized varied depending on their position in the food system, with different consequences for what reterritorializing seafood meant and for whom. Fishers were essential for re-embedding seafood in local and regional contexts, while chefs contributed primarily by building communities of concern around forgotten fish.