Recipes and Culinary Creativity

Abstract

In the past years, food has found itself a central focus of creativity in contemporary culture and a pinnacle of this trend has been the kind of culinary creativity displayed at Noma in Copenhagen. But what is culinary creativity? And what is distinctive about the kind of culinary creativity displayed at places like Noma? In this paper, I attempt to answer these two questions. Building up on pioneering work on creativity by Margaret Boden, I argue that creativity is a matter of adding new valuable things to the world. I then distinguish three different ways a recipe can be creative, building up on different culinary trends. I then focus on the specific case of Noma and argue that what is specific about the kind of culinary creativity displayed at Noma is that it emphasizes the role that recipes can play in mediating our relation to the environment.