Over the past ten years, many food forests have been planted in the Netherlands. They are often mostly viewed through an ecological lens, focusing on soil health and biodiversity, while their potential to bring food forest ingredients to the market and into our everyday kitchens remains under-explored. A true forest food culinary culture has yet to emerge.
With the Food Forest Taste Test project, we set out to explore what such a culture could look like, connecting farmers, chefs and other early adopters, and prototyping cultural approaches. In this blog post, we share some of our findings.
Imagining food forest chains
On Monday, the 8th of November, over 40 curious eaters, makers and growers came together at MidWest to dream up futures for food forests. Two themes kept bubbling up: helping consumers and chefs recognise these flavours, and building the chains to get them onto our plates. The event started off with presentations, then round table discussions and ending with a presentation of goods from three food forests.
Manon Botha from Voedselboswinkel reminded us that new tastes need to be introduced in a familiar way, for example, turning rosehips into ketchup or pickles makes them less intimidating and easier to use. Saskia Bronts, who forages wild ingredients for Restaurant Rotonde in Rotterdam, swings by the kitchen every Tuesday morning with her finds, sparking curiosity and giving chefs a gentle nudge toward new flavours. Besides recognition, Marieke from Boslekker also talked about creating a strong supply chain so these ingredients can move from niche to mainstream. Boslekker tries to tackle this by coordinating harvests and developing shelf-stable products. Some wild ideas that came up through the round table discussions were: creating a local food hub dedicated to processing and distributing food forest ingredients, proposing a food forest edition of Heel Holland Bakt and creating Food Forest Junk Food to meet consumers where they are at.
Tasting the harvest of the season
On Friday, September 12, we hosted the ‘Streek Smaken Diner’ at Thuishaven in Flevoland, introducing the neighbouring farmers and local policymakers to the concept of a food forest. Chefs Tess and Tessa transformed the season’s harvest into playful hybrid recipes, blending food forest ingredients with regional agricultural products. Together, we explored how food forests could weave themselves into regional agriculture, growing from one-off experiments into a living, connected Flevoland food system.
The Food Forest Taste Test project was generously supported by the Fresh Perspectives funding stream of the Stimuleringsfonds.