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Sustainability is a key concern within the restaurant industry, which offers a variety of initiatives and approaches to it. This, in turn, creates different shared understandings, what we here call sustainable cuisine imaginaries. The practices fostered by these imaginaries are now facing unforeseen challenges due to the coronavirus pandemic, creating a dissonance in the way restaurants normally operate. By using storage and preservation practices as an entry point, this ethnographic study of six Swedish restaurants uses the concept of imaginaries to explore the different beliefs and ideals for restaurant sustainability and the practices fostered by those ideals. Three distinct imaginaries of sustainable cuisine were identified: locality as a quality, reducing meat in favor of vegetables, and the creative and knowledgeable professional. These imaginaries are materialized through different storage facilities, like root cellars, wine cellars, or meat aging fridges. This study shows how disruptions in restaurants, triggered by unexpected situations, exposed the fragility of these imaginaries. We argue that the sustainable cuisine imaginaries, as a complexity reducing mechanism, help restaurant professionals manage the intricacy of sustainability. However, they also demonstrate an array of simple solutions very susceptible to external factors. Sustainable practices can thus easily become unsustainable.

Little is known about restaurant professionals’ views on wine sustainability and how these beliefs are embedded in cultural norms of wine quality. Using wine spaces as an entry point, this ethnographic study sought to explore the norms and practices that guide restaurant professionals in their assessment of wine quality and sustainability. The article depicts wine spaces as emblems mediating a particular wine culture with its own norms which guide such assessment. These spaces provide professionals with a setting to accumulate culinary capital as curators, and so wine spaces can be understood as the realm of experts. The results show that incorporating sustainability in wine assessment is challenging for restaurant professionals. First, there are inherent conflicts between environmental and sociocultural sustainability. Second, some norms and practices ingrained in heritage and tradition act as barriers to the adoption of, for example, more sustainable packaging. Third, the perceived sensory attributes of more sustainable wines are sometimes considered detrimental to wine quality. However, we argue that in their role as curators and intermediaries, restaurant professionals can use their expert status to challenge norms and give sustainability the same importance as other parameters such as acidity, tannins, and overall balance.

The Swedish Arctic, which is part of Sápmi, the ancestral lands inhabited by the Sámi, the Indigenous people of Europe, has witnessed a rise in gastronomic venues in response to increasing visitor numbers. Research highlights that local actors, both Sámi and non-Sámi, express their intention to foster a sustainable industry, hence encouraging regional sustainable gastronomy. The article aims to identify how lived experiences of gastrotourism entrepreneurs shape how they enact sustainable gastronomy by using the analytical concept of culinary capital. Four illustrative vignettes, based on ethnographic fieldwork that follows the wild Arctic char in the Swedish Arctic, are used to illustrate the way gastrotourism entrepreneurs understand and enact sustainability. Three dominant approaches emerged: reclaiming Arctic sustainability, stewardship based on heritage, and flavoring authenticity.  These views allow them to accumulate and display culinary capital in the gastronomic sector. The findings show that sustainable gastronomy in the Swedish Arctic is a negotiated space where sustainability emerges not as a standardized ideal but as a situated practice grounded in heritage, ecological responsibility, and everyday economic realities through which local actors seek to build viable and successful businesses. Culinary capital enables entrepreneurs to legitimize their practices, differentiate their offerings, and influence how sustainability is imagined and enacted within Arctic gastrotourism. 

Is local gastronomy viable when traditional ingredients become inaccessible? In Swedish Sápmi, the region historically inhabited by the Sámi, wild Arctic char has been a staple ingredient for both Sámi and later settlers. Today, it is symbolic to northern Swedish gastronomy but hardly found at stores/restaurants and accessed mainly through informal networks. Using the concepts of commoditization and singularization as analytical tools, I follow the wild Arctic char from when it is fished to when it is served in gastronomic venues, with the aim to explore the different meanings ascribed to the wild Arctic char in Sápmi, and how they impact on the conditions for sustainable gastronomy. Results show that the wild Arctic char eludes commodity status when understood as part of the cultural landscape, as a marker of time, or as an exclusive and gastronomic experience. I argue that these moments of singularization show that the sustainability of local gastronomy does not only depend on the way food products are obtained, prepared, served, and discarded, but is also connected to a democratic principle based on cultural values, norms, and customs. This entails having access to foods which connect individuals and communities to their origin, ancestors, traditions, and identity.