The leftovers: a rural weaving of field care practices, taste and value within a local food-producing network

ABSTRACT

More than two-thirds of Denmark's rural landscape is comprised of agricultural fields, mostly conventionally used. The wastage resulting from food production has increased throughout the last 50 years. This article is empirically based on an in-depth ethnographic study of Herslev, an organic Danish farm-based brewery specialising in ‘natural beer brewing.’ Herslev uses ingredients grown locally on biodynamic fields, flavours from plants growing in the wild around the brewery, and ‘leftover’ resources from a local rural network of producers. The article analyses its field-factory practices to explore its understanding of the relationships between landscape care, taste, and value. We suggest the concept of the ‘producer-citizen’ as characterising a food producer operating in a pericapitalist form and space, while exploring and negotiating eco-social ethical landscaping.

KEYWORDS:

• Farm-based foods
• landscape care
• leftovers
• pericapitalist
• valuing

Introduction

The bus ride feels like a boat trip; hilly, picturesque. We drive along field after field; open land. The hedges are few, many places are abandoned or worn-down houses. With the speed, only the structures remain, however, every time we stop, it seems like the details really are few. I am not yet fully able to distinguish which fields are managed conventionally and which are managed organic. I want to be able to better read the fields; what might a biodynamic farm really look, sound, smell like; who grows?

To reimagine, revalue, and rethink the land we inhabit and eat from, (in)visibilities ought to be addressed. Land use is one of the most pressing issues in the green transition, in particular how space should be distributed between production, biodiversity, and recreation. As more than two-thirds of Denmark’s rural landscape comprises agricultural fields, mostly conventionally managed, agriculture must be rethought, and its practices rearranged and what matters revalued. In 2022, only 11–12 per cent of the agricultural area was managed according to Danish organic standards, and on the back of these statistics, food production is associated with large-scale and intensive agriculture that occasions a variety of negative social, economic, and environmental consequences, including those for human and non-human health and well-being. To environmentalists, conservationists, and climate activists, among others, agriculture and farmers are, to a greater extent, being perceived and narrated as bad, even evil.

We want to address this issue by nuancing agricultural food-producing practices by studying how a small-scale Danish farm-based brewery reflects on their management of their fields and production, and look into what we might learn about alternative economies and landscaping from them. The farm-based brewery is located in the middle of the Danish island Zealand – around 20 kilometres southwest of Roskilde or 55 kilometres southwest of the capital, Copenhagen. Based on how they work with landscape care, taste, and valuation, in particular working with ‘leftovers,’ we want to introduce the term ‘producer-citizen’ to draw attention to land use and food production and to reimagine the farmer.

In the following pages, we will first introduce and contextualise leftovers and present a theoretical overview of a relational and pericapitalist perspective on food production. To rethink the farmer and agricultural practices, historical perspectives are most useful and can be surprisingly radical – especially when considering the subject of downsizing breweries and redistributing land, upcycling, and recycling, as these might seem like modern trends but hold long and diverse histories. Therefore, we have included a history of leftovers and of beer brewing, and against these backgrounds, we will examine the work of the contemporary Danish farm-based brewery, and analytically focus on their landscaping through taste, care, and valuation.

The role of producers from a pericapitalist perspective and the emergence of leftovers

This article investigates modern food production – particularly beer – made from leftovers^1,2 that have been gathered, processed, and refined from one mode of production into another, as well as culturally perceived leftovers such as weeds, grasses, and wild plants and flowers. In modern food production, leftovers and recycling practices seem to have a rebellious undertone. The notion of using organic leftovers became culturally embedded as a non-category and as undervalued materials with the intensification of specialised agrosystems, beginning in the 1950s in the Global North (among others: Dahlberg 1994; Kloppenburg et al. 1996; Montgomery 2008; Shiva 2010).

While working with ‘leftovers’ and ‘recycling’ seems a new and very modern concept, leftovers were a deeply incorporated, important, and embodied practice of every household, food-producing business, and farm site in pre-industrial society (Law 2006; Law and Mol 2011). Every part of the vegetable or animal was used for eating or feeding but also for tools, cloth, and energy.

It can be argued that leftovers became leftovers purely because they no longer fit the industrial system, following the emergence of the non-cyclical,³ organised production of food that intensified in the Global North from the 1950s. The word ‘left-over’ or ‘leftover’ seems to have entered the English vocabulary in around 1890, and meant ‘remaining, not used up.’ Leftovers in the sense of ‘excess,’ or meant for eating later, seems to have appeared in 1878 and stems from the Old English term ‘metelef.’⁴ It seems that the word itself was introduced in the first stage of the industrial age,⁵ alongside the creation of modern waste management. But, as Scardifield and McLean (2023) write: ‘We need to be thinking through waste, not just about it.’

Some producers and academics (e.g. McDonough and Braungart 2002) use the concept of upcycling to characterise processes where a by-product or waste stream is turned into a more valuable product by adding labour, materials, and/or energy. In the EU waste hierarchy (defined in the Waste Framework Directive 2008/98EC), upcycling can be regarded either as a preventative measure, if the process is associated with non-waste products, or as recycling, if the processes are associated with waste management practices. From a food production perspective, upcycling can be understood as a process where a low-value organic by-product or waste stream is transformed into a product with a higher economic value in a potential market scenario.

Despite the new and growing interest in upcycling and recycling, leftovers continue to be regarded as low-value, undesirable, and ‘less’ – leftovers are a kind of waste, and Hawkins and Healy (2023) assert that waste should not only be treated as an opportunity but also as a provocation: waste is a residual ‘that has the capacity to provoke various matters of concern and catalyse various actions.’ Industrial systems have shifted from optimising practices focused on reducing material consumption (in the pre-industrialised era) to optimising practices focused on reducing labour costs (in the industrialised era), with consequent generation of waste and undesirable by-products. In monocultural, intensive, and highly specialised food production, and for the cultural narratives of food derived from these practices, leftovers remain controversial as they disturb systems, regulations, procedures, and the cultural imaginations about ‘waste’ (Capponi 2020; Fjalland 2018; Landecker 2019; Lindström and Ståhl 2020). In another soil-situation than agriculture, Rumo (2023) focuses on surplus clay in industrial production, and hereby makes a case for rethinking diverse economies in relation to more-than-human perspectives and time – clay time and pace – as a way to reimagine ethical livelihoods.

Modern industrial food production is highly regulated so as to fit industrial systems. Within that framework, ‘wild’ and ‘leftover’ practices and materials – as performed by the farm-based brewery – seem unruly and disturbing, and can be depicted as an ‘other world-making’ practice. Key to this study is also to grasp how ‘alternative’ economic practices matter within food production. Modernity and capitalism, according to anthropologist Anna L. Tsing (2015), are filled with dreams (and nightmares) of scalability and control that shape progress in the form of expansion and extraction. ‘Progress stories have blinded us’ (Tsing 2015, viii): culturally, as words and stories create desires and visions; physically, as mosaic and multifunctional landscapes and communities have been unpopulated and transformed into large-scale monocultural fields throughout the last 350 years; organisationally, as large-scale, specialised, and monocultural production has overtaken diverse rural agricultural production and social organisation; psychologically, as land-based livelihoods to a great extent have decreased and the populations alienated to the cultural landscapes that feed them. Tsing (2015) furthermore argues that the narrative of progress determines what matters and what is valued, and that practices that do not fit the narrative fall away. Concludingly, it is a process of ‘Othering’ a diversity of economic practices, meaning it can be very difficult to ‘see’ and ‘listen’ to economic practices, values, and matters that do not fit the progress-story.

We therefore, furthermore, find it fruitful to include the work of geographers Julie Graham and Katherine Gibson (of pen name J. K. Gibson-Graham). They (2006) argue that ‘capitalism’ is given a privileged analytical place in academic presentations of social life, landscape practices, and landscape relations, and while this is crucial, this privilege somehow also seems to block the other-than-capitalist imagination: ‘It becomes difficult to entertain a vision of the prevalence and vitality of non-capitalist economic forms, or of daily or partial replacements of capitalism by non-capitalist economic practices, or of capitalist retreats and reversals’ (Gibson-Graham 2006, 3).

For decades, Gibson-Graham’s work has made diverse economies evident by representing and documenting ‘the plethora of hidden and alternative economic activities that contribute to social well-being and environmental regeneration’ (Gibson-Graham 2008, 618). They suggest that researchers concentrate on these economic practices to make them more present as realities – and viable as objects of policy and activism. In this study we have followed this idea, whereby we contribute to the growing research on sustainable transition through an ethnographic study aiming to understand ‘other’ world-making practices and suggesting alternative economic practices and the valuing process.

Tsing (2015) defines the concept of pericapitalist economy as sites ‘for rethinking the unquestioned authority of capitalism in our lives. […] The term pericapitalist acknowledges that those caught in such translations are never fully shielded from capitalism’ (65). Pericapitalist economies thereby becomes a mode of thinking that acknowledges that citizens and companies in the economy are caught in constant translations and transitions between gifts and commodities, commons and markets, especially in farming and food production. One farm or field or factory cannot be seen to be fully isolated from this current dependency; however, humans are inventive and able to test, push, crack. We are interested in understanding this space of translations and negotiations of performing other-worlds: how the farm-based brewery works and creates this space, this land.

Despite the often precarious conditions of exploring and performing other kinds of world-making, and their neglect, ‘alternative’ food and natural resource-producing networks, organisations, and explorations were also previously regarded as contesting and threatening conventional logics, economics, and systems (Fjalland 2018). These organisations seem, then, both precarious and potential, which led us to ask what we might learn from food-producing organisations and field practices that explore alternatives to an extremely pervasive narrative of growth, expansion, extraction, and progress.

To understand the potential farmer-role of citizens and producers in the pericapitalist economy, we will involve Mol’s (2009) concept of the ‘consumer-citizen.’ Mol (2009, 270) describes how ‘citizens are notoriously defined as being willing to serve the “common good” while consumers, by definition, allow themselves to have “pleasure”.’ She found that in practice, consumers and citizens are not so easy to separate. Therefore, we must ‘address a consumer-citizen with a body that is not torn between natural wildness and civic sociality. Instead, this body is sensitive and attuned to its surroundings’ (Mol 2009, 271). The concept of consumer-citizens, then, ‘suggests the possibility of an intriguing normative engagement with the world, one that is embodied and historical at the same time’ (Mol 2009, 271).

Similarly, there is a tendency to separate producers from citizens, perceiving producers as greedy, insensitive to their surroundings (e.g. landscapes, workers, and liveability), and unable to engage normatively with the world. However, in our ethnographical study, we explore alternatives to this way of organising food production with a study of a farm-based brewery and the local food-producing network it is associated with. From this study, we will expand Mol’s ‘consumer-citizen’ concept to the empirical field of producer-networks. In our analysis we will investigate the ‘producer-citizen’ concept and discuss this concept against the empirical findings from the ethnographic case study of the farm-based brewery. We view the concept of ‘producer-citizen’ as a correction to the capitalist stereotype of a profit-oriented, industrialised food producer. With the concept of ‘producer-citizen,’ we recognise a mode of food production that is sensitive to landscape and the situated and contextual conditions under which the production process takes place. Value is understood more broadly: that profit – and the societal impacts of food production – is integrated into the mode of production to support a sustainable development (environmentally, socially, and economically). As this mode of food production is radically different from industrialised food production, but still operating in the market economy, we understand it as a pericapitalist mode of production.

Interlinking landscape care, taste, and value

Leftovers have been researched as a matter of waste from the perspectives of logistics and infrastructure, cities and planning, and cultural and everyday life, among others. To work with leftovers in this particular study has occasioned interlinking leftovers with landscape care, taste, and value in a new way, looking into the producers’ normative and sensitive engagements with the world. Our study crosses a number of fields, and therefore we will briefly highlight those.

Within landscape research, agricultural land has been researched both as sites of social organisations (e.g. Grigg 1982; Løvschal, Arnoldussen, and Johnston 2022; Olwig 2019) and with anthropological work on the ‘Anthropocene’ and ‘more-than-human’ (e.g. Hastrup 2014; Swanson, Lien, and Ween 2018; Tsing 2015), which, among other concepts, suggests an ‘arts of attention’ towards multispecies world-making. Linking care to agricultural food production has been key to, for instance, some agroecological studies (e.g. Shiva 2016), regenerative agriculture studies (e.g. Ahl 2021; Dahlberg 1994), and sustainable food studies (e.g. Coff 2016; Mikulak 2013). We draw on and continue many of the ideas from this research, but to understand the work of the farm-based brewery, we need to add landscape, taste, and value to the discussion of care.

The taste of food has been researched from various positions, researching, for instance, cultural eating preferences and habits (Gibson 2007; Slocum and Sadalha 2013, a.o.). Among others, Mikulak (2013) and Carolan (2011) have researched taste in relation to sustainable eating, and taste has been linked to a sense of place with the concept of ‘terroir.’ Terroir has a long and critical history; the concept comes from the French belief that certain places can generate unique tastes (Ascione et al. 2020; Francis 2019; Trubek 2008), and that soil and roots are at the heart of French cuisine as well. An uncritical romanticising of terroir can unintentionally omit significant considerations of accessibility and injustice in production and consumption structures. According to Mol (2009), taste does not come naturally but is created with practice and with others – relationally. Taste does not just happen impulsively on the tongue; it comes from ‘talking [that] provides everyone with linguistic repertoires that help to refine their ability to differentiate between tastes. Thus, the tasting body is socially embedded and, whatever its age, may learn from others’ (Mol 2009, 278). We will be working with terroir as an ‘art of attentiveness’ and with taste as an embodied and social practice, as we have found that this can lead to an intriguing enquiry into what kinds of cultures and natures the farmers and food producers are nurturing.

Summing up, whereas terroir, taste, and value have been intensely studied from multiple perspectives, as discussed above, the links between these concepts in the practices of modern food producers on the edge of conventional, industrialised food production lack attention in the academic literature. Reviewing the literature within the field of landscape care, taste, and value, we therefore see a research gap associated with our understanding of pericapitalist food production, and more specifically, our understanding of how the practices of such pericapitalist food producers work with landscape care, taste, and value.

Based on an ethnographic study of an organic Danish farm-based brewery, combining ethnographic interviews with participatory observations, this article therefore explores the relationships between the concepts of landscape care, taste, and value within local food-producing networks. The study aims to identify and discuss the existence of the ‘producer-citizens,’ and analyses how such producers interlink taste, place, and practices influenced by ethics and care as a kind of ‘maintenance against breakdown’ and ‘arts of attention’ for multispecies worlds. By studying these interlinkages, we believe it becomes possible both to develop further insight into different, and particular, landscapes of care, taste, and ethics, and valuation (Figure 1), along with open conversations about the producers’ multispecies care work in the landscapes, and to revise ethics and stories of taste as well as of the socio-ecological organisation of landscape.

Figure 1. Interlinking landscape care, taste, ethics, and value.

Selection, methods, and approach

The article uses empirical material gathered from two semi-structured interviews (Denzin 2001; Flick 2008) and two ethnographic short-term field visits (Cloke et al. 2004; Pink and Morgan 2013; Vannini 2015) at the farm-based brewery, Herslev, and the biodynamic farm Østagergaard. These were undertaken during work on a research practice project, The Great Pantry (in Danish, Det store spisekammer), the purpose of which was to study different and alternative types of food-producing collaboration, working bioeconomically or using recycling and upcycling practices, in southern Zealand, Denmark.

Our selection criteria were discussed with the municipalities involved and with the Partnership for Circular Economy in Region Zealand, although they were defined and decided in a scientifically independent manner. In addition to the practices of upcycling, recycling, and bioeconomy, and the geographical delimitation, we sought producers that defined their work as environmentally sustainable, beyond sustainable, or regenerative, and produced a variety of foods. It was also important to the study to find a producer that was reconsidering how to use food leftovers, including being able to reflect on holistic perspectives on food production, systems, taste, and organisations – as these may hold environmentally transformative invitations (Fjalland 2018). In the spring of 2019, we assessed who met the selection criteria. Surprisingly, we found only seven potential producers. We contacted them all and arranged interviews and visits with four. This article focuses on the brewery and the biodynamic farm as they are in the same network and jointly operate as a farm-based brewery.

We designed our qualitative interviews as conversations, with a simple and defined set of topics to talk about. To facilitate these focused and intense visits, we followed the work of Vannini (2015) and Pink and Morgan (2013) on ethnographic interviews and participatory observations. Pink and Morgan (2013, 353) argue that a ‘short-term ethnography is suited to a series of theoretical, methodological, and empirical interests, which converge in the contemporary context in which we are working,’ especially those looking into practical activity (what is done), the outspoken (what they say), and the non-representational or more-than-representational (the unspoken, sensory, silenced). The reason for this approach is based on a situated theory of knowing (Massey 1994; 2005). We sought to understand their practices, perspectives, and experiences, and how these gave rise to ‘leftover’ ambiguities, dilemmas, and tensions.

The conversation themes were sent to the actors prior to the interviews, in order that they had time to prepare some of the basics and formalities. The field visits and conversations were followed up with further conversations by email and telephone and with background research using internet data sources. When writing the ethnographic fieldnotes, we followed Emerson et al. (2011) and Vannini (2015). Additionally, we also took ‘pictures as notes’ (Pink 2006) – some of which are presented in this article. Our conversations and visits took place not only in an office but also on production sites, while walking around and looking at materials, machines, buildings, fields, and processes, in order to gather some of the more-than-representational aspects of the visits. We took notes during brief stops and while having longer conversations over coffee in kitchens and meeting rooms. The notes and pictures were compiled into conversation texts and presentations of each actor, followed by an analytical discussion around four diagnosed dilemmas: meaningful production, rural sustainability, transition and organisation, and stories and senses (Bundgaard and Mogensen 2018; Emerson et al. 2011). In line with ethnographic custom, the interviewees have read, commented on, and accepted these texts.

Beer and leftovers in a changing world

Beer is one of the world’s oldest fermented alcoholic beverages and has a long, tangled history. Beer has long been a part of Danish culture and livelihood; in the thirteenth century it was a daily necessity as a nutritious drink, being preferable to polluted water from the well. Beer was boiled and preserved ‘water,’ and its brewing was a significant part of the material culture, interlinking local knowledge and skills, the landscape, and taste. We have found it important to ‘scale’ our short-term ethnographic study into a longer cultural history of beer brewing. From a purely contemporary perspective, the farm-based brewery we studied seems to be niche and exclusive and alternative, while contextualising their brewing practices and organisation into a longer history brings nuances and possible perspectives of scale: in landscape, practice, and taste.

In the late Middle Ages and during the Renaissance, craft breweries began to appear in castles and monasteries, but most Danish beer was brewed in household sculleries (in Danish bryggers, from bryg, meaning ‘brew’). Beer was made locally, and it is ethnographically evident that it varied in taste from season to season, from household to household, and according to varying local methods, processes, materials, and resources (Højrup 1978).

Early beer brewing

Beer was made from hops (Humulus lupulus), a locally or regionally grown herb, and cereal. Hop gardens could be found throughout the country. However, most farms did not grow hops themselves, but instead bought them from a hop-peddler. In areas of scattered settlements, it was often necessary to go to one of the area’s autumn markets to meet the hop seller. Towards the 1900s, in places where beer was still brewed at home, local merchants took over the sale of hops. For centuries the government had tried to force farmers to grow hops, and in many places today the presence of ‘wild’ hops are often ‘remnants’ or ‘leftovers’ of former ‘beer brewing land.’ Several parishes on Funen’s north-west corner conducted hop farming on a larger scale. It was an important subsidiary occupation, especially for millers, and it was from there that most of the country’s hops originated. Beer was locally produced, and what the contemporary farm-based brewery does in relation to local network En del af Herslev – sharing leftovers – does not seem so odd or alternative when considered from this standpoint.

The raw material for the brewing of beer is malt, which is produced from barley (Hordeum). In North Jutland, where the soil in some places was unsuitable for growing barley, rye (Secale cereale) was grown instead. It was the production of malt – especially the temperature at which it is dried, and the firewood used – that affected the beer’s taste. On Funen, they used alder (Alnus) as firewood, and it was said (Højrup 1978) that this made the malt especially sweet and ‘fine.’ Tending the fire was a trusted job, and the malt had to be turned carefully and regularly and required embodied knowledge. Among contemporary microbreweries and farm-based breweries, there seem to be some links between embodied knowledge, such as ‘wild’ fermentation, and quality, taste, and value; however, they are also reinterpreting and scaling up the uniqueness of ‘particular people in particular places using particular methods.’

Depending on the season, new batches were brewed once or twice a month. Special vessels made from wood, clay, or copper were used. Straw (from barley or oats) was placed as silage at the bottom of the vessel, and the malt was placed on top of the straw and diluted with boiling water. This dissolved the sugar and flavourings in the malt, turning it into ‘wort.’ This was then filtered through a straw when bottling, and after this, the fermentation process and the brewing took place.

Using ethnography, Højrup (1978) describes local technical terms, preparations for brewing, and the brewing process. These practices, along with the tools used, materials, and natural resources, significantly affected the beer’s taste. In poor regions, where barley and hops were scarce, the beer was ‘thin’ and easily soured. Because it was such an essential drink, and linked to livelihoods, malt production and fermentation were the subject of significant care and vigilance – such as cleaning vessels and tools, room temperatures, the condition of materials, and embodied, tactile knowledge of the relationships between fire, vessel, and substance. The process was also coordinated with the phases of the moon. Højrup (1978) describes how it was acknowledged that fermentation was most successful a few days after a new moon, and that when brewing under a full moon, the beer could not be controlled and would not settle in the barrels. Farmers’ wives had to know how much beer was drunk in each season, and coordinate this with the phase of the moon. This would today be defined as ‘wild’ fermentation – compared to an industrial, cleaner, and more chemically controlled fermentation process (Katz 2012) – and what the farm-based brewery describes as ‘natural beer brewing.’

Industrialisation and current beer brewing tendencies

On Zealand in the 1870s, people stopped brewing beer at home and instead bought it. Here, beer brewing became institutionalised and disembodied. But in other parts of Denmark, people continued to brew at home for many more years. In 1847, Carlsberg was established just outside old Copenhagen, and J. C. Jacobsen was the first Danish brewer to successfully brew bottom-fermented lager beer. He pioneered several technical innovations during the transition from craft to industry, introducing a so-called ‘rational operation’ with extensive use of mechanical power. While this permitted increased production, it also streamlined the taste and made beer more uniform – a well-known outcome of industrialisation.

In the Nordic countries, beer has been outclassed for decades by wine, cocktails, and champagne on measures of decadency and status. But it is still seen as an integral part of life by the working class and Danish youth, and perceived both as more ‘folksy’ and as a rather masculine beverage (Darwin 2018). Inspired by American microbreweries and a craft beer movement, interest and innovation in beer began to rise in around 2000 in Denmark. With the growing interest in ‘wild fermentation’ (Katz 2012; Mikulak 2013) and its apparent ability to create particular, delicate, and ‘wild’ variations of flavour, making them ‘alive’ – an image borrowed from the natural wine movement (e.g. Ahl 2015) – the consumption of beer is seemingly becoming more diverse in terms of gender, class, and occasion (Chapman et al. 2018; Ikäheimo 2020; Thorsøe, Kjeldsen, and Noe 2017). The growth of microbreweries and changes in perceptions around beer, along with the ensuing innovations in tastes, textures, and colours, also feature in national and international food trends and stories that the farm-based brewery of Herslev connects with and advances along.

The ‘aliveness’ of the beer is not related only to wild fermentation processes but also connects with growing acknowledgement of the relationship between the biodiversity crisis and conventional large-scale monocultural agriculture, and with the growing awareness of the waste production of otherwise valuable resources. The aliveness of the beer and natural beer brewing are reactions to a changing world, and set out counter-stories to the industrial landscaping. With increasing awareness of the wastefulness in food production and in households, especially in the Global North, various attempts are being made to minimise wastage and to reuse, upcycle, and recycle (among others: Ghisellini, Cialani, and Ulgiati 2016; Landecker 2019; Lindström and Ståhl 2020).

Behind these cultural, political, and technical issues with waste accumulation and waste mobilities (globally, nationally, and locally), modern agricultural practice with its extensive use of chemicals threatens micro-life and clean water resources, as well as exhausting the topsoil. A wave of new food producers is attracted to circular logics and regenerative or biodynamic farming practices. But, keeping in mind the urgency and the growth of varied modes of exploring the recirculation of materials and nutrients within evolving circular bioeconomy practices, we find it crucial to be alert to, and critical of, the socio-ecological effects of circular food production. One must be alert to the ‘greenwashing’ of circular practices.

The farm-based brewery, cattle, and fields

The brewery and the farm are both in the countryside, around 50 km southwest of the capital, Copenhagen. The brewery is in Herslev village, after which it is named. It seems relevant to mention that the focus and agenda emphasising that ‘good’ food is related to ‘good’ produce have been promoted and occasioned by the New Nordic Food Manifesto.⁶ The local and organic farm-based brewery, Herslev, was established in 2004. They brew what it calls ‘natural⁷ beer,’ inspired by the natural wine movement. They use local resources grown on biodynamic fields: flavours from wild plants growing around the brewery, and materials and resources from a local food-producing network with which it is involved. For instance, they use leftover chocolate shells from a small neighbouring chocolate factory, Friis-Holm Chocolate.

Tore, the owner of the brewery, was a farmer, and the brewery is located on his farm. Today he is the brewer, and the biodynamic farm Østagergaard manages the fields around. Herslev has 30 hectares (ha) of land that Østagergaard manages, and the total area including Herslev’s is approximately 200 ha. Herslev sells around 800,000 litres of beer annually, and employs 38 people. They offer six beers and a soft drink, each with a number of variants:

Herslev uses barley malt and oats from their own fields, and the acid comes from the fields’ fermented hay.

Together with the neighbouring chocolate factory, which was built in 2019, Østagergaard farmer Carsten and brewer Tore established a local food producer network and community, called A Part of Herslev, in 2018. At present it consists of 11 producers in the area, all eager to ‘create a sustainable pantry, sustainable businesses and socially sustainable rural areas.’ They collaborate in many ways, pulling together competences and resources, and reusing and distributing leftovers from their varied productions into other production practices and communities. Within this local community and co-operative, the leftovers in use are many: vinegar, chocolate shells, mash, heat, manure (we insist that manure is a leftover owing to its ecological value), grain shells, and many other resources used in feed, compost, and other foods.

In the following three sections we will discuss the taste, the landscape care, and the valuing we see at play, in the practices of both the farm-based brewery and the food-producing network. We use quotation marks ‘xxx’ when quoting their descriptions.

The taste: connecting matters, place, and field-factory methods

I got off the bus, I was too early. And I took my time, looking curiously around while trying not to pry. This day in June was generous; sunny, warm but not dry. There was a sweet smell in the air, not nauseate, but a light sweetness, floral. The ‘wild’ hedges and edges are in full bloom. In the parking area they had planted new trees in front of the chocolate factory. Behind some big black cows were resting, and I walked up and in between the brewery’s buildings. There were barrels of leftover mash; I could not resist touching. I took a picture, and I went on. A window, an opening in a building. A man was working next to a machine, my body was reflected in the mirror while the machine put stickers on the bottles. I took a picture.

The brewer tells me that they make beer using wild fermentation methods to embody the ‘earthy’ and ‘natural’ taste of the local environment. The taste of Herslev’s beers is also found in its tagline, ‘brewing with nature,’ and it is in their production and taste that they seek to be other than ‘uniform.’ The taste is ascribed to the locally and biodynamically grown grains and barley malts; the wild flowers, weeds, and plants growing nearby; the method used (i.e. wild fermentation); and the brewery’s ethics and the sense of local collaboration regarding the leftovers: ‘it is beer that is part of a local community.’ The brewery describes ‘natural beer brewing’⁸ as follows. The beer is brewed with local, organic produce that grows in, and is harvested from, the fields surrounding the brewery. They use as few artificial additives as possible, with no manipulation of flavours, and seek full transparency in the process. They produce using natural processes in the fields, with regard to biodiversity and agroecology, and in the factory, with what they define as ‘wild fermentation.’ They are being attentive to seasons, nurturing the flavours of the particular landscape or terroir, and making beers in which the drinker can discern which fruits, plants, and grains of the local season and land have been utilised (Figures 2 and 3).

Figure 2. Fieldnotes, mash, at Herslev Bryghus.

Figure 3. Fieldnotes, tap mashine, reflection, at Herslev Bryghus.

The brewery is confident that these aspects are reflected in the taste and experience of drinking their beers. According to its descriptions of its beers, their ingredients and how they are produced will affect the taste and give shape to our experience of drinking them. This is especially storied with Herslev’s Season series. This beer is described as ‘a sensuous beer’ with seasonal changes in produce and weather embodied in its scent and colour, thus reflecting and marking the passing of the year in the specific area. This also applies to the Field series, the taste of which is described as the taste of the landscape; it is made entirely from resources harvested from the brewery’s fields and gardens.

I am not that familiar with drinking beers, and I have a stronger embodied knowledge of wildflowers and weeds than barley and other grains. At night drinking one of beers from the Field-series. It is unfiltered, leaving me with a more ‘natural’ experience; there is precipitation, which gives me the impression that it was made from a real matter; the taste reminds me of apple cider, just not that sweet, lighter, and more spicy. (fieldnotes)

The brewery harvests all its grain and barley malts from its own fields, and uses as flavourings local, wild raw materials such as birch, rose hip, sea-buckthorn, and apples. The Field series (formerly named Hay) is made entirely of locally grown resources but is also based on wild-fermented hay, inspired by the ancient natural wine-making practice that is increasingly popular on the food scene⁹ – ‘not only in the sparkling, acidic, fermented taste but also 100 percent Herslev,’ as the brewer explained during the field visit. The natural wine-making movement has taken hold as an alternative to the last century of the industrialisation of agriculture (Ascione et al. 2020; Francis 2019; Trubek 2008). The farmer and the brewer are deeply engaged with ‘changing the industrial, uniform, and monocultural taste’ with their landscape practices – and by exploring fermentation processes and working agroecologically. They also do this aesthetically. As the brewer says: ‘These landscapes shall be desirable and humming with life. Full of scents. It is about creating interesting landscapes.’ And those words did indeed reflect those summer days of our visit.

In every sense, the farm-based brewery seems to resist and work against the domesticated and uniform, valuing instead the taste of ‘wilderness’ and sometimes unruly and non-capitalist forms. Alongside the New Nordic food trend, these have become desired values, even for industrial products. What differentiates the farm-based brewery and its products from large-scale industrial beers is that it grows its own resources, follows its own socio-ecological practices, and undertakes ‘natural brewing’ that gives vigour and flavour to the beers, the landscape, and the local community. We find it to be a renegotiation and translation of leftovers – in aesthetics, story, and sense of taste. And how they specifically manage the land: leaving weeds and ensuring wildflowers, among other plants, are preserved, as they constantly discuss and reflect on how space and resources should be used. For instance, on the day we were there, the brewer was concerned about how their leftover energy, cardboard, beer caps, etc., could be recycled, and whether they should be, or whether it would be more environmentally harmful to do so. This kind of ongoing reflection between producer practices and societal and environmental impacts is key to the ‘producer-citizen.’

As described in the introduction, taste and landscape (terroir) are entwined. One of this article’s main arguments finds grounds within this perspective: that the way in which foods are nurtured and cultivated in natural landscapes, and how they are processed and refined, matters for the foods; that the quality and value of food cannot be storied without including its origins and conditions; that it comes from someone and somewhere; and that this is contrary to the industrial logic of manufacturing uniform tastes, which pays little heed to fostering explicit landscapes, cultural history, workers’ conditions, or intergenerational environmental aspects (i.e. all that seems significant for the storied and performed terroir). This intergenerational perspective of terroir is interesting in the case of the farm-based brewery, as their practices are intended both to ensure and to story the future with fertile, diverse fields and rural communities as well as delicious tastes. ‘The transition must taste good,’ says the brewer.

Also significant for the terroir of the beers discussed in this article are the leftover practices adopted by the food-producing network, which tries to waste nothing and to make use of everything, even the weeds on the edges of the fields, gardens, paths, and buildings. With the growing amount of information about the quantity of food being wasted and about the climatic and environmental pressures emanating from, for example, intensive and monocultural food production, the field of new upcycled or recycled foods is also growing. Some are even being marketed and storied as grim (e.g. Eat Grim¹⁰) and as the tastes of waste. According to Landecker and others (Capponi 2020; Jewitt 2011; Landecker 2019), western cultural connotations of leftovers and waste are strongly linked with disgust and loathing, which is why stories bringing out new cravings and desires must be told.

Also, if taste is not natural but a relational construct (Mol 2009), we learn it by eating and drinking while talking to others who know ‘something’ and might be able to tell other stories about the foods being eaten. And we must say that it was the stories about how they brew and farm that attracted us to beer; we needed the stories before the beer itself. But the decision to eat and drink ethically does not follow a rational or logical argument (‘If we know, we will act accordingly’). Rather, it is a question of the relationships between the attention paid to the eaten matter, the matter that is eaten, and the story and affective experience that go along with it. According to the brewery, food – alongside its stories of becoming, of being the product of someone, somewhere, somehow – should be delicious and pleasurable, and should make eaters crave another world of food.

Acknowledging a relational and material understanding of how taste is made makes it possible to consider how the weather, landscapes, and community matter, and how the methods and practices associated with fields and brewing matter – both ethically and materially. With the stories and names of the beers, tasting them becomes a physical and sensuous act that seeks to connect the drinker to the landscapes. Or, perceiving it the other way around, imagine how your body embodies the beer and the landscapes of its making while you drink it.

We know that pre-industrial beers varied in taste from household to household, season to season, and according to the local methods, processes, tools, and resources used. In the literature it is argued that landscapes affect the experience and story of taste and valuation (among others: Francis 2019; Kjeldsen et al. 2014; Trubek 2008), along with our understanding of taste as a social, relational, and embodied practice (Mikulak 2013; Mol 2009; Trubek 2008). The way that the Herslev and Østagergaard work with that relation between taste and landscapes suggests that field and factory practices, to a great extent, are also a part of the taste and tasting; that a ‘making of taste’ emerges from someone, somewhere, and somehow as a practice of connecting and belonging.

The farm-based brewery’s ‘making of taste’ can be regarded as an environmentally transformative invitation – one that might appeal to some but not others, yet trying to make these beers more ‘attractive’ and so make it more desirable to transform the production landscapes into vibrant and diverse ecologies. In this sense we find that the brewery performs in pericapitalist ways, linking together the art of story, landscape aesthetics, and a production economy.

Landscape care: farmers and food producers as ‘producer-citizens’

While concentrating on creating ‘fine quality and taste’ in its beers, Herslev is also keen and consistent about wanting to take care of the soil, the landscapes, and the local community. The farm-based brewery and the network of which it is a part want to change the practices and perceptions of what a ‘good’ beer is, changing what they see as place-less and season-less industrial beer into beer that’s connected with a local, biodiverse, and temporal landscape. Østagergaard, the farm that manages most of the brewery’s fields and delivers cereals for the production, operates under biodynamic and socioeconomic conditions and produces cereal crops, primarily. It also hosts a social institution for people with special needs and abilities. One Østagergaard farmer explained that it is:

‘crucial for the farm’s inhabitants and workers that what they do is meaningful and really matters […] What we do is important and other people depend on us. We must ensure fine-quality grains for the flours, beers, and fine meats, not for the fun or the pedagogy of it, but because it really matters. To us and the landscapes. And because the young people’s tasks and work matter they become meaningful, and that energy and that attention that is put into the fields and cattle, I see reflected in the workers.’

While we are walking, the farmer is looking carefully towards the fields, the sky, the weather forecast on the phone. April was so cold, we are trying to change the crop-rhythms, he said. In front of us are a purple wheat field and behind that midsummer rye. Some young men are moving cattle on another field, and someone in a machine I do not have the word for. There is a special energy, is it communities-of-practice? Spaces of possibility? (fieldnote)

Returning to the brewery’s description of natural beer-making, among other things it is about nurturing landscapes and diversity, manipulating as little as possible, and respecting that people and plants are in it together. It is about collaborating with all the difficulties that can present themselves, not just mastering an efficient, monotonous output. The brewery’s care for the landscapes is defined by its ‘nurturing of diversity,’ involving a way of living in every aspect and practised in the fields, among the cattle and the grains, in its careful local knowledge and continuous attention to, and observation of, what grows around it. As a consumable, food is different in its vital way; we need it to live. While we might not need beer to stay alive today, the brewery’s practices seem to reach beyond this question. The brewery works to enhance a liveable rural community, and it is transforming a leftover village into a liveable environment. By involving social and organic ‘leftovers’ in its production, it gives meaning to that which would have been discarded or neglected (Gibson-Graham 2008). Along with the biodynamic farm’s field practices and the leftover practices of the other participants in the food-producing network, the brewery’s valuation of food is defined by its ability to nurture liveable, rural socio-ecological organisations (Figures 4–7).

Figure 4. Fieldnotes, flour, at Østagergaard.

Figure 5. Fieldnotes, looking at grains, at Østagergaard.

Figure 6. Fieldnotes, sound, at Østagergaard.

Figure 7. Fieldnotes, workshop, at Østagergaard.

Biodynamic farming seeks to create a kind of mini-cosmos where they practise ‘respect’ for all living creatures and use the forces of (for instance) sunlight and moonlight in their sowing rhythms, but also other planets. Biodynamic cultivation aims to strengthen life forces and health in soil, food, and humans. And maybe an aliveness of the beer. It is a form of cultivation based on anthroposophical thoughts about the interaction between the organisms of agriculture, people, and the forces of the cosmos, with the aim of strengthening the health of agriculture and livestock and thus the quality of the crops. The change of seed is the basis for optimising the health of soil and plants, and manure from the animals creates increased life and humus in the soil.

The farm and brewery practically cultivate ways of thinking with the fields, and how they may thrive. It is a continuing work of care, sensing, and observing – reading – the fields and the species interacting.

The value: what’s it worth? Or what is worth it?

The network is working to create ‘fertile, liveable, and interesting ruralities,’ as the brewer said. The brewery perceives itself as part of a local community where it wants to support and cultivate, and repopulate, and revive the rural. Within the food producers’ network, everyone seems alert to exploring and questioning how their own waste and leftovers may be valued and useful elsewhere. The brewer produces mash and vinegar as leftovers. The mash is used as feed for Østagergaard’s cattle and for pigs at another nearby forest farm. It is then excreted back into the soil, nurturing the brewery’s fields where barley and other grains grow. The vinegar is refined into a tasteful beer-vinegar with another producer, Grønvirke.

The practices of the brewery and the other producers in its network are among several examples in the region of what happens when small-scale farmers, producers, and chefs start to imagine extinction and ghostly landscapes; when they start imagining and sensing how the fabric of life is unravelling and how they could respond by trying to weave it together again. It is about what happens when they start to explore and experiment with living ecologies; when they, with all their knowledge of the soil, cooking skills, and tasting expertise – the embodied knowledge that Mikulak (2013) calls for – question how different species in the landscapes could thrive, and how they can support this, and what increases the liveability of sites, contexts, and actors, as well as production. Then we are building new grounds for new stories, new research, and new politics and legislation.

The farmer and brewer made it clear that we must emphasise that ‘this is not just a cute, idyllic agrarian project.’ If you want to change paths, productions, and practices, ‘You must be very professional, thorough and careful, and make really good products. But you also need to think strategically and take ownership when you work with resources as leftovers,’ the brewer said. They have run into many regulatory issues. For instance, when they wanted to use hay – another existing and leftover resource in the network – they found that it is not categorised as suitable for food. They had to go through a long and time-consuming process to get it approved. ‘But we did it, and it is such an important story to tell.’ This is an ongoing tension and challenges how to negotiate business and societal interests; key to the producer-citizen is more profoundly how to constantly ensure that the business does no harm but also actually creates real alternative.

With the intensification of industrial agriculture and food production systems, a whole regulatory language and framework was introduced, highlighting what counts. Useful and qualified materials such as leftovers, which have been used for centuries in making foods, are being challenged and even found to be illegal in the modern regulatory frameworks, and a diverse range of heirloom varieties, weeds, and even old animal breeds present difficulties within the framework. There is a great job to be done, to make room in regulations and languages for these actors that are crucial in the development of alternative agricultural and food-producing practices: those performing ‘other worlds’ (Gibson-Graham 2008). The farm and the brewery are, to some extent, operating on the margins of capitalist logic; yet, significantly, they are adding value as they have more effect on social well-being, and place care of the environment, landscapes, and ways of living (human and non-human) at the heart of their economic practices.

What makes the beer good? From a philosophical and cultural-geographic point of view, valuing can be perceived as a cultural, aesthetic, and political construct and performance that relates to broader embedded societal narratives about what ‘we’ value, preserve, and care about. Without moralising, the brewery and its beers seek to create other aesthetics and cravings for alternative landscape practices, cultivating liveable ecologies as something that should be deeply woven into the beers’ value, quality, and taste. They are trying to make liveable ecologies matter – even in the spreadsheets.

Discussion: producer-citizens in local food-producing networks

As described in the introduction, Mol (2009) ushered in the concept of the ‘consumer-citizen.’ Continuing this line of thought and anchoring it in the practices of the farm-based brewery and the local food-producing network, we suggest that the ‘producer-citizen’ challenges the stereotype of the capitalist and greedy producer. Rather, we have encountered a mercantile producer, trying to make something delicious while also making ‘good’ foods; ethically alert and serious about responding to environmental and climatic changes by disturbing the humanly induced production methods that brought us into this situation in the first place. Such a producer performs and works within the pericapitalist spaces (Tsing 2015). This practice, we find, is contributing to the growing body of knowledge about diverse economies that ‘is a performative ontological project – part of bringing new economies into being’ (Gibson-Graham 2008, 616).

The farm-based brewery and the food-producing network around it is an example of bringing new economies into being by those working at the margins of capitalism. It is a new type of producer that consistently and attentively investigates every aspect of its value chain and network, revalues and rewrites them, and is aware of all the leftovers it produces and those that it can receive. These producers are seeking new ways of handling unsustainable aspects; for example, how the heat generated from cooler systems can be reused, or how leftover packaging and caps can be reused meaningfully. At the site, this seems to be a steady process of maturation – things happen when the time arrives – and while things seem well-considered and well-researched in terms of social and ecological consequences, they also manage to explore and experiment.

This is seen in their relational and collective effort to manage the fields with biodynamic logic, ensuring a landscape that is alive, responding to the biodiversity crisis. It is seen in their use of all kinds of leftovers – human, non-human, wild, and cultivated – and their attempt to revalue leftovers in relation to taste and to act on the production of waste. Finally, it is evident in their ‘wild’ fermentation processes. All this is evident in the ‘aliveness’ of the beer as they work to enhance a diverse and ‘wild’ liveliness of ‘other’ cultural landscapes.

From this study, we have found that the aesthetics of landscapes and the ethical practices of those inhabiting them can affect both the taste and the value of – in our case – beer. What makes the beer and the brewery so successful are the operational practices involving agriculture, wild fermentation, collaboration with and nurturing of nature,¹¹ and the stories that are formulated and told to make revaluation possible. The value of the beers comes not only from the practices that go into their brewing, and their taste, but also from how they are storied. This is about the connections and mutual affection between taste, value, story, and landscape, where quality and ethical practices are a rather ‘new’ measurement. Importantly, for the producers it is possible to value and story their produce in this way only because it is consistent with their way of working and thinking with the local ecological possibilities, the local organising of producers, and the local community (Figure 7).

This case is an example. The ethnographic case study of the farm-based brewery adds to existing literature on value, taste (Mol 2009), terroir (Mikulak 2013), and soil (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017), through the exploration of the relationship between taste, landscape care, and value. The case study points towards a type of food production network in which leftovers (social as well as material) are revalued to produce stories of taste and regenerate value incorporating non-capitalist elements such as social care, landscape care, and sustainable production with pure marked-economic elements related to the production of attractive products (beers) and profits, adding to Tsing’s (2015) work on pericapitalist spaces. Continuing the line of thinking from Mol (2009), the case study of the Herslev brewery suggests that it can be understood as a ‘producer-citizen’ operating in pericapitalist forms and spaces as conceptualised by Tsing (2015).

The producer-citizen category nuanced the stereotype of the capitalist and greedy producer, to spur anti-capitalist imagination cultivated from those performing ‘other worlds,’ and by rethinking the dominant hegemony of capitalist authority. The small, farm-based, organic brewery is a mercantile type of producer, accumulating non-capitalist elements while making something exquisitely delicious. By translating and renegotiating organic, non-human, and social leftovers, it is salvaging foods, being ethically alert, and being keen and consistent in responding to the environmental and social degradation of rural communities that has come from modern agriculture and food production. To this type of brewery, leftovers are reintroduced as important by-products in the production system. Just as landscapes affect the taste of the beers produced in the brewery, so too do field and factory practices.

Conclusion

On a historical background of beer, brewing, and leftovers in Denmark – a history close to other agricultural societies in Europe – and based on a current ethnography of the work of the farm-based brewery Herslev, we have studied an alternative economic practice, along with a revaluation of natural resources, foods, practices, and production. We have found that brewing is a situated, embodied, and historical practice that relates to landscape care, taste, and valuation. However, particular brewing practices determine particular landscapes of taste and care, and these practices are what occasions new or other valuations of the product. We have investigated what we might learn about liveability, leftovers, and more-than-human care from agro-producers such as the farm-based brewery.

We propose the ‘producer-citizen’ figure to challenge the stereotype of the capitalist and greedy producer, and thereby also occasion imaginaries that agro-producers could reflect. The producer-citizen is – as with humans – a historical and social being, sensitive (able to sense, desire, crave, feel) and able to engage ethically with a living world. Continuing Puig de la Bellacasa’s (2017) ethics of care, ethical practices are in our study not understood as something fixed or universal, natural or authentic, moral or normative, but rather as something that unfolds in situated interdependencies in concrete living environments. This is where producer-citizens act and connect with the living environment they and their production are involved in and emerge from. Making the relationships between landscape care, taste, and valuation explicit and visible as they do so, they reveal that producing and eating are never an individual situation. Food and its cultivation always involve other people and other living creatures – such as plants, animals, fungi, bacteria, and micro-life – and their practices. ‘Natural beer brewing’ makes this evident relation visible, and the producer-citizen revalues it while performing within the pericapitalist spaces and exploring how to support the more-than-human food web through which it can thrive, regenerate, and flourish.

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Herslev Bryghus and Østagergaard for taking the time for interviews and field visits.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The research was funded by Region Zealand (Denmark), the Regional Council Development Funds.

Notes

1 We define ‘leftovers’ more broadly than the uneaten remains of a meal. We define leftovers as something left behind, set aside, or remaining from some other aspect of production, field organization, social fabric, waste management, or capitalist logic.

2 Natural beer is inspired by natural wine-making, which uses local and seasonal ingredients, as few additives as possible, and no manipulation of flavours. Herslev pursues full transparency of the whole process, with the produce traceable down to the grains and soil. It uses what is available in its fields and gardens, and some of its beers are derived from wild-fermented hay: https://herslevbryghus.dk/en/natural-beer/ (accessed December 2020).

3 We are writing in a non-cyclical way to show that viewing the linear, industrial production of food from a 1,000-year perspective is an exception, and we are using a non-cyclical rather than a circular style as the circular has become associated with ‘the circular economy.’

4 From the Oxford English Online Etymology Dictionary: https://www.etymonline.com/.

5 This period is often called the Industrial Revolution – but we will not reproduce this narration of the reorganization of western societies into fossil-fuelled/high-carbon societies.

6 They are summarized here, amongst other places: https://www.norden.org/en/information/new-nordic-food-manifesto (accessed February 2021).

7 See note 2.

8 Can also be read on the brewery’s website: https://herslevbryghus.dk/en/natural-beer/what-is-natural-beer/ (accessed January 2021).

9 Trends and tendencies are always changing, and often emerge in trendy urban cultures. With its ambitious and influential Geranium and Noma ‘vibe’ and network, Copenhagen has entered the international food scene, even being named a ‘foodie paradise.’ The natural wine movement is a strong part of this. See https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/11/25/how-natural-wine-became-a-symbol-of-virtuous-consumption (accessed November 2020).

10 Eat Grim is a Danish company: https://eatgrim.com/pages/about (accessed November 2020).

11 The proper concept here would be ‘nature management,’ but as there are intense debates within the environmental and ecological humanities about ‘management’ as a human-first valuation, we here suggest calling it ‘nature nurturing and collaboration,’ to underline the brewery’s agroecological practices, combining the ecological with the social.