Introduction

Since the 1970s, seafood provisioning has globalized, becoming dominated by large private corporations and industrial fleets and unresponsive to problems in marine ecosystems (Campling and Havice 2018; Crona et al. 2016; Probyn 2016). Fisheries management tools such as the privatization of fishing quota and subsidies for industrial fleets support these developments. Long fishing trips, on-vessel freezing, and after-landing transfer to large logistical operations take fish hundreds or thousands of miles away to markets. Environmental groups and international organizations such as the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization emphasize that greater efforts are needed to improve marine stocks and eco-systems and support local fishing communities and livelihoods, yet the persistent availability of cheap fish in markets around the world makes it difficult for consumers to recognize the negative consequences of contemporary global seafood supply (Autzen and Ounanian 2021; Crona et al. 2016; FAO 2024).

European initiatives to reterritorialize or re-embed seafood in local and regional contexts seek to counter these trends (e.g., Arias Schrieber et al. 2020; Autzen and Ounanian 2021; Gillette and Vesterberg 2022; Prosperi et al. 2020). In this article, we investigate a recent Swedish seafood reterritorialization initiative entitled Forgotten Fish: Heritage for the Future of Sustainable Fish Consumption. Designed by the culinary civil-society organization Rutabaga Academy, Forgotten Fish assembled fishers, chefs, and other actors to taste abundant, locally available fish that seldom appeared on Swedish dinner plates. Inspiring Rutabaga Academy was the loss of foods with deep cultural and geographical roots in Sweden. Smoked northern herring (böckling) and fermented northern herring (surströmming) were becoming harder to find, while dishes made from other species in local waters had disappeared entirely from Swedish cuisine. With Forgotten Fish, Rutabaga Academy sought to draw attention to the homogeneity of fish in large-scale consumption circuits, threats to marine ecosystems and fish populations in Swedish waters, and the negative effects of the existing seafood provisioning system on local fishers and gastronomy, including in coastal communities where fishing had once been the backbone of local identity and culture. By gathering local fishers, chefs, and others to taste and talk about “forgotten” species which had once featured in local cuisines, Rutabaga Academy invited participants to re-imagine seafood in Swedish gastronomy.

In this study we use concepts from Polanyi’s The Great Transformation (2001 [1944]), namely disembedding and embedding, to investigate Forgotten Fish as an effort to reterritorialize fish and seafood. This initiative, we contend, reflects key contradictions that are often inherent to food reterritorialization efforts. As is frequently the case in grassroots food reterritorialization efforts, participants in Forgotten Fish were dissatisfied with the operations of the current seafood provisioning system and wanted change we identify these tensions shaping. However, our qualitative analysis of documents, media, and interviews, as well as autoethnographic and participant-observation field data, shows that they diverged in their priorities for re-embedding seafood, and that their positions in the food system affected their ability to effect change. While partakers in the initiative shared the conviction that celebrity chefs could transform foodways, our results demonstrate that the small-scale fishers were essential for seafood re-embedding. Further, participating actors’ heterogenous ideas about which fish should circulate at which level (local, regional, national, international), and to whose benefit, had different implications for seafood-system transformation.

We organize our study as follows. In the next section, we present Polanyi’s analytic framework from The Great Transformation (2001) and its application in scholarship on food reterritorialization. We then describe the context of Forgotten Fish and present our materials and methods. Next come sections in which we present participants’ priorities for embedding. Then we discuss the belief that chefs were the key agents of change and the data that suggests local fishers were crucial for achieving seafood reterritorialization. We conclude by reflecting on our case study’s significance for understanding citizen initiatives to promote food reterritorialization.

Polanyi and food reterritorialization scholarship

Polanyi’s The Great Transformation (2001) traces the development of modern market societies from pre-existing socio-economic formations. Drawing on historical and anthropological scholarship, Polanyi argued that the relationship between markets and other social institutions altered fundamentally with the industrial revolution in the west. Before this, social principles such as redistribution, reciprocity, and subsistence (or “householding”), singly or in combination, constrained market activity (2001, pp. 48–57). Institutionalized in “custom and law, magic and religion,” these principles regulated economic behaviour, “safeguarding” society from “interference on the part of market practices” (ibid., p. 57, 64–65). The enclosures, labour migration, and industrialization, however, began the “great transformation”: the emergence of a society in which the economic system was driven by profit, markets became disembedded from social institutions, and society became “adjunct to the market” (ibid., p. 60).

Unlike many political philosophers and neo-classical economists, Polanyi regarded the rise of apparently autonomous markets as enacted by political decisions. He viewed the consequences of disembedding as dire: “To allow the market mechanism to be the sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environments…would result in the demolition of society” and “[n]ature would be reduced to its elements, neighborhoods and landscapes defiled, rivers polluted…the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed” (ibid., p. 76). Such processes inevitably elicited a “countermovement.” Actors and forces seeking to protect society from the ravages of disembedding promoted institutions and practices that re-embedded markets in values other than “the motive of gain.”

Polanyi’s framework has been widely used by scholars studying food reterritorialization initiatives such as local food movements and geographical indicators, as well as organic food, fair trade, Slow Food, etc. (e.g., Bowen 2010; Goodman et al. 2012; Hendrickson and Heffernan 2002; Krzywoszynska 2015; Pratt and Luetchford 2013; Urquhart and Acott 2013; Holt Giménez and Shattuck 2011). Some researchers argue that efforts to reterritorialize food, embedding farm produce, meat, fish, dairy, etc. in values related to specific places, relationships, and environments, counteracts the disembedding of the global food system, with its industrial production, international trade, and supermarkets (e.g., Allen and Hinrichs 2007; Hendrickson and Heffernan 2002; Krzywoszynska 2015; Urquhart and Acott 2013; Weiss 2016). Others are sceptical about the extent to which food reterritorialization efforts yield meaningful change (e.g., Bowen 2010; Gillette and Vesterberg 2022; Goodman et al. 2012). Participants in food reterritorialization movements may have diverging views of who or what is local, why the local matters, and what purpose reterritorialization should serve (e.g., Tookes et al. 2018, Morell 2018, Weiss 2016). In addition, foods that are attached to place, such as products with geographical indicators, may do little to benefit specific local communities (e.g., Bowen 2010; Goodman et al. 2012, pp. 65–84). As they circulate beyond specific local settings, such foods become “locality” foods in international trade (Goodman et al. 2012, pp. 65–84). They reflect social values yet facilitate the international circulation of food or people and are readily harnessed to monetary value and capitalism. While food reterritorialization and other alternative food movements often understand social and aesthetic values as threatened by monetary value, in practice these values can overlap, and people are adept at negotiating between them (Kristiansen and Gillette 2024; Pratt and Luetchford 2013). A full-fledged transformation of the current system would require food reterritorialization movements to ally with radical rather than reformist approaches to change (Gimenéz Holt and Shattuck 2011; see also Kass 2022).

In this study, we identify and theorize the tensions inherent to food re-territorialization by applying Polanyi’s concepts to Forgotten Fish and its participants, augmented by Goodman et al.’s distinction between local and locality food (2012). The contradictions that emerged in Forgotten Fish illuminate how different priorities for embedding entail different consequences for reshaping the food system.

Case study context

Sweden has a long coastline, many lakes and rivers, and a rich heritage related to fish and fishing, yet 72% of the seafood consumed in Sweden is imported, and consists almost entirely of salmon, cod, and herring (Gillette and Vesterberg 2022). Environmental degradation has caused local populations of these species to decline, and this, coupled with fisheries management policies that benefit large-scale actors, has led the number of small-scale fishers in Sweden to decrease dramatically (ibid., see also Gillette et al. 2022). Seafood sustainability, or the lack thereof, has garnered significant attention in Swedish media, with extensive reportage on the decline of small-scale fisheries (Gillette and Vesterberg 2022; Gillette et al. 2022). Despite this, efforts to create alternative circuits for seafood provisioning have been at best marginally successful (Arias Schreiber et al. 2020; Gillette and Vesterberg 2022).

Using EU money for rural development awarded in competition by the Swedish Agricultural Board, Rutabaga Academy (RA) implemented Forgotten Fish (FF) between 2021 and 2023. Commercial fishers working in coastal and inland lake fisheries; civil servants from national agencies, townships, and county administrative boards; chefs, restaurateurs, food journalists, craft food producers, and heritage professionals were invited to participate in five meetings in geographically distant locations with strong connections to fishing (see Fig. 1). Local, regional, and national media covered these events, focusing on how FF brought “star chefs” and coastal fishers together to taste “odd,” “ugly,” and “unusual” fish (e.g., Bergsten 2022; Gotland’s tidningar 2022; Livets goda 2022; Nilmander 2022; Nilsson 2022; Sveriges Radio 2022; SVT 2022; Österlen magasinet 2022). RA concluded FF with a summary event in Stockholm, followed by a final meeting focused on building a social infrastructure through which fish captured by small-scale fishers could get to restaurants. In total FF assembled 152 attendees, of whom 38 were commercial fishers and 78 professional chefs.

Fig. 1
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Map with locations of FF meetings

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RA (Swedish Kålrotsakademien) is a civil-society organization founded in 2015. Its 18 members from diverse professional spheres share concern for Swedish food culture. RA’s symbol is the rutabaga (or swede), the only cultivated food crop known to have a Swedish origin. According to its website, RA strives to “advance the cultural heritage and geographical connections between the choice of ingredient, its qualities and their expression in prepared foods, courses and meals.” RA’s projects include propagating heritage seeds; collecting and preserving specific crop varieties, fruit trees, and berry bushes; publishing books and editorials on Swedish culinary heritage; and arranging public meetings and seminars on food-related topics. In 2019, author A, who had been active in craft food circles related to seafood, was asked to join RA, specifically to assist in including fish in RA’s activities. Author A worked closely with two other RA members (Hans Naess, agronomist, food activist and a RA founder, and Mathias Dahlgren, a well-known Swedish chef and restaurateur) to design and implement FF. Naess and Author A shared primary responsibility for designing, organizing and administering the project, and Dahlgren provided culinary expertise for taste-testings and cooked and served “forgotten fish” at three project meetings.

Materials and methods

FF sought to co-produce knowledge among a mixed set of practitioners and researchers (cf. Snyder and St. Martin 2015). Author A was one of the RA members who designed and executed the project, which has implications for how we conducted our study. Author A’s insider position enabled insights into RA’s motivations and aspirations and deep knowledge about how FF played out, yet his commitment to FF’s goals made it potentially harder to discern the project’s strengths and weaknesses. To facilitate a critical gaze, Author B, an experienced food researcher and initiative “outsider,” participated in all stages of the research process.

We use a qualitative social science approach to investigate FF. Ethics approval was sought by Author B as part of a larger project on sustainable seafood (Dnr 2022-06811-01). Data sources are summarized in Table 1. They include RA- and project-related documents and communication; film footage from five meetings in Stockholm, Herrvik, Simrishamn, Spiken, and Sundsvall; media coverage in newspapers, radio and television; Author A’s notes from seven meetings; Author B’s participant-observation field notes from one meeting; and semi-structured interviews, ranging in length from one to two hours, with 10 participants.

Table 1 Data sources and analytic methods
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Authors A and B jointly chose interviewees to reflect all categories of participants and target key voices. Interviewees are listed in Table 2. Author B interviewed Author A as a co-founder of the initiative. All interviewees were informed of our intentions to conduct research and provided written and/or recorded consent. We also asked those interviewed if they preferred anonymity or use of their names; all chose to have their identities published.

Table 2 Interview participants
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The authors transcribed all interviews and film footage. These and all other texts were then coded manually. We coded for emic categories and etic concepts from Polanyi and the food reterritorialization literature (cf. Arias Schreiber et al. 2020; Gillette et al. 2022; Krzywoszynska 2015, Snyder and St Martin 2015). For example, Polanyi’s model directed us to look for embedding and disembedding. We drew on the food reterritorialization literature to specify embedding as embodied/sensorial (related to taste, gustatory experience), local or based in particular socio-geographic fishing communities, linked to specific local ecosystems (e.g., “ecological embedding”), or connected to regional or national identity (“locality”). Examples of emic categories we used to code include homogeneity and “garbage fish.” “Celebrity chefs” was also an emic category, one which also appears as an analytic concept in the scholarly literature. As is typical for qualitative analysis, consistent patterns emerged in collective representations, visions, and priorities. These were in turn captured as key themes (cf. Silver and Hawkins 2017), which we present as our results below.

Results

In general, our results show that FF participants shared dissatisfaction with Swedish seafood provisioning. During FF meetings, in interviews with the authors, and when talking to journalists, they voiced criticisms about what Polanyi calls disembedding and supported re-embedding. When it came to the specifics of embedding, they diverged in their visions: we found a relationship between particular actors’ priorities and where they were located in the food system. Finally, FF participants shared convictions about who could drive food system change. In some respects, their beliefs misapprehended who was essential for seafood reterritorialization.

Shared dissatisfaction

Despite coming from locations with their own distinctive histories, ecologies, local fish species, culinary traditions, and relationships to commercial fishing, participants in FF shared a strong sense of dissatisfaction with the Swedish seafood system.

RA hoped to change the role of fish in contemporary Swedish foodways. Throughout FF, RA complained that the dominant food system supplied homogenous and bland fish, while Swedish waterways offered a rich diversity of species whose gastronomic potential was unrecognized or forgotten (e.g., Vesterberg 2021; SVT 2022). RA thought, as narrated in the film from Stockholm, that “the link between Swedish fish consumption and marine ecosystems is broken.” The social consequences of seafood provisioning were also concerning. Hans Naess explained in his interview, “the global perspective…has been dominant for so long, free global trade, that has revealed its downside more and more…if you think about the social aspect, there is something deeply worrying when everything loses its identity in some way.” Viktor Vesterberg recounted during his interview that the current food system was inappropriate for our social worlds. Too much was left out of the large-scale industrial food system, and small-scale actors were especially disadvantaged. “Food that is vacant of memories, feelings and experience becomes impoverished, meaningless, and uninteresting,” he concluded.

Fishers participating in FF also voiced discontent with the existing system. For example, fisher Stefan Nordin, who attended the meeting in Sundsvall, pointed out during his interview that fish from local waters had disappeared from local markets. “Earlier, we have bought so much local fish, but that has disappeared that market, entirely,” he said. “If you go into the town square here, there is no fish-related commerce in the square anymore. It’s gone.” Stefan fished with his wife Manjula Gulliksson. Northern Baltic herring, previously a staple of their business, was virtually uncatchable in 2022. They blamed large-scale fishers and oversized fishing quotas for this development. Stefan recounted,

We have never seen anything like this here on the High Coast, we have a history of many hundreds of years with northern herring as the base. Our catches have gone up and down, but it has never happened before that there was no catch. We are not getting enough for our private clients or our own store [let alone selling to local fermented herring processors, which they previously did]. It is not for lack of trying. We come home with a kilo, and can show that we have tried, so no one can say to us that we haven’t tried to catch herring. And we’ve been everywhere.

At the summary meeting, one inland lake fisher complained that too much fish was captured and sold to industries that produced fertilizer. Another noted that fish travelled long distances in the current system. He asked, how do we get fresh fish into the mouths of consumers, and who is going to pay for eating fish that is really fresh?

Participating chefs felt strongly that the fish in the current system was inadequate. Like RA, they were concerned with homogeneity and blandness. They wanted variety and alternatives of higher quality. For example, prize-winning chef Stefan Eriksson complained during his interview, “Our food system doesn’t work to deliver diversity. It is driven by commerce in daily products, it is all about products. Sure, there is commerce, but there is no food…we need to go back to basics. We need to get back to real food.” At present, the “global system” provided Swedish consumers with fish that was “mediocre” or “lowfat milk” (mellanmjölk). As he said to participants during the Stockholm meeting, “Think about being able to eat Crucian carp, rudd, asp, burbot, smelt, roach, sprat, tench, bream, vendace, pike, ide, whitefish, and wild salmon—shit, how awesome, I mean, suddenly it becomes dynamic!”.

Attending civil servants also expressed dissatisfaction with the seafood system. One said during an interview that “lots of the finer establishments [in Simrishamn] serve fish and seafood that have no relationship to Simrishamn. It is not our own fish. Even in the local harbour restaurant you see this.” When we asked Jonatan Fogel of the Stockholm County Board if local fish were part of local food culture and gastronomy, he laughed and replied, “No! If you go out to a restaurant today, in the overall gastronomical scene, my answer is no. If you look at the menus, if you look at what is served, it doesn’t have a local flavour.” He thought that the county’s coastal fishers could fish sustainably and deliver to local markets, but “the management system has failed. It has not aimed at all three dimensions of sustainability, it has let economic sustainability come before the other dimensions.” Aksel Ydrén of the National Centre for Craft Food (Eldrimner) expressed similar views during his interview. He stated, “Right now the liberal market drives how we manage the ecology. And the result is that we are destroying ecologies.”

While heterogenous, FF participants shared feelings of dissatisfaction with the existing seafood system. They disliked its organization, the fish it circulated, its impact on small-scale producers, and its environmental and culinary outcomes. Yet while all wanted something else, they prioritized different values when reimagining seafood provisioning. We describe the main patterns below.

RA’s vision of embedding

As seen in the project application, an article about FF authored by a RA member (Vesterberg 2021), invitations to project events, the Stockholm educational film, and interviews with RA members, RA thought seafood provisioning should reflect the unique and context-specific value of local places. RA understood a local place as having ecological, social, cultural, and sensory dimensions. Each place had its own distinctive value and richness, aspects of which were experiential and could not be fully commodified. RA expected fishers to contribute place knowledge about what fish were available from local waters, their seasonality and accessibility, as well as knowledge about whether these fish had a historic role in local fisheries and cuisines. By bringing fishers and chefs together, RA hoped to inspire collaboration and commerce. As Naess told us during his interview, FF was about making “there” “relevant in an entirely different way.” Specific places had “special regional species,” but “we have become bad at seeing them. And it is them, that is part of our task, to discover these things again.”

RA adopted two strategies to advocate for the distinctive values of particular places. First, FF occurred in five far-flung locations with their own specific fish populations and ecosystems, small-scale fishers, chefs, restaurateurs, civil servants, and heritage sector workers. In each location, RA, together with one or more “star chefs” renowned in Swedish and international gastronomic circles, assembled these groups to taste locally available fish species. Participants discussed place-specific knowledge related to which species were locally abundant, when and how they could or should be caught, and how to prepare and eat them. Presentations were given about the local context, e.g., its history, traditions, heritage related to fishing, and fish in local gastronomy. The movement of RA and celebrity chefs, which was emphasized in local media, drew attention to the rich contextual specificity of each place and marked it as valuable.

RA’s second strategy for highlighting the value of local places was connecting them to distinctive sensory experiences. At each meeting, RA emphasized tasting, smelling, observing, and then eating the specific fish from that particular location, first raw, and then fried in butter. Participants were asked to describe each specific taste, using a strategy that resembles how sommeliers taste and talk about wine. Depending on which fish were present, what their qualities and characteristics were, and how they were transformed into food via specific local cultural knowledge, different places offered distinctive sensory experiences. The importance of taste and fish’s sensorial qualities appears over and over in RA’s public materials on FF, always connected to particular places. To RA, each fish, each dish, each ecosystem, each community, each store of cultural knowledge, each sensorial experience had a unique value. Aspects of this knowledge were tacit and embodied, which meant that the value of place was not fully defined by the market and could not be fully realized through market transactions. The value of place arose experientially, through irreplicable, intimate, sensorial interactions.

RA sought to re-embed fish in local places by emphasizing the fish’s environmental, social and cultural connections to unique geographical spots. Yet although RA emphasized the value of local places, aspects of its initiative contradicted this message. While RA spoke eloquently about the value of local ecosystems, local fishers, local heritage and local food culture, they invited celebrity chefs to prepare the fish at their events. These chefs were not from the specific places that RA visited. Their fame had nothing to do with the value of specific local places but rather with their talents and renown in international food circles. Furthermore, the chefs did not necessarily draw on local gastronomy in their food preparation choices. Their skills and knowledge of cuisines were much more cosmopolitan. At the meetings they served dishes inspired by many different national and internationalized cuisines, with sashimi an obvious example.

Chefs, restaurateurs, and food journalists’ vision of embedding

For the chefs, restaurateurs, and food journalists who attended FF, taste, sensory experience, and the specific characteristics and qualities of particular fish as ingredients were the core values that should reshape seafood provisioning. Discovering new tastes made FF exciting to this group. During the meetings, they raved about trying new species, tasting them raw, and discerning their distinctive qualities. Many remarked how wonderful it was to learn that a fish they had thought was “garbage” was actually delicious. This group enjoyed teasing out the specific properties a given fish possessed. For example, in Sundsvall a reporter from Sweden Radio participated in trying raw vendace, about which she was vocally sceptical (Sveriges Radio 28 June 2022). She turned to Johan Bakéus, a local chef and restaurateur, and asked what he thought. He replied enthusiastically, “Super good! Very, you know, buttery, a beautiful consistency, it’s, like, fatty, it is very easy to experience it, I think it is fresh.”

The local—a focus for RA—was important to chefs, restaurateurs, and food journalists in that localness meant non-generic fish, fish with particular characteristics and qualities, and ingredients that were higher quality than what was available through the conventional system. While several chefs liked the idea of developing “local delicacies” or “really gourmet products from local fish” (Nilmander 2022), they were also eager to order high-quality fish from locations distant from their own restaurants. Indeed, the two Stockholm chefs who participated in FF meetings around the country quickly placed orders for fish from these sites, which were then delivered long-distance to their restaurants.

Taste and experience were this group’s primary values, and they felt strongly that a fish’s specific characteristics and qualities determined how it should be prepared. Chefs should draw on their gastronomical knowledge, informed by international cooking techniques and cuisine, to deliver the most rewarding eating experiences—which meant that a particular fish from Swedish coastal waters might become sushi rather than a Swedish dish. As Dahlgren put it during his interview, “you have to try the potential and see what you can do.” He explained,

I mean, I was probably 20 when I ate sushi for the first time. I had never eaten raw fish. I had eaten smoked salmon and cured salmon, maybe whitefish, but never raw fish. It was not there in my childhood in Sweden. So sometimes you need to take an ingredient, fish or something else, and transform it into a contemporary culture…That you make a new culture does not necessarily mean that you kill the old culture. I think there is a fear of new culture, in society at large. People are scared that if we have too much new the old will die out. But I think it is the opposite. The more culture, the stronger other cultures.

In short, while this group liked local fish, they wanted fish to travel if that meant better quality and variety in their restaurants. The origin of fish interested them when it conveyed specific qualities, either sensory or cultural, but their focus was on what the fish could become.

Fishers’ vision of embedding

The fishers participating in FF were heterogenous in terms of fishing waters, fishing methods and gears, size of boats and target species. Inland lake and coastal fishers, those who operated small coastal trawlers and those using various passive fishing gears, attended. Some sold their entire catch through conventional large-scale channels, others sold directly to clients and some had their own restaurants and artisanal processing sites. Unsurprisingly, the members of this group expressed differences about which aspects of a more embedded seafood system they thought important, and their own ability to effect change. Nevertheless, they shared the goal of bringing attention to local fisheries, and hoped the attention of celebrity chefs would inspire interest in local fish and fishers. They emphasized the value of their intimate understanding of fish in local ecosystems, and sought markets for parts of their catch for which they currently had no outlet. Creating support for small-scale fisheries was a core ambition.

Fishers said during the meetings that they wanted to make use of “what is there” in local waters and bycatch. They wanted to commodify fish for which they currently had no markets, rather than “throwing [it] to the eagles” as one fisher put it. Selling a wider selection of target species was also a means to a fishery more in tune with local ecosystems. If fishers could “invest not in quantity, but in breadth” and fish according to seasonal availability, a particular target species could rest during periods when fishers focused on others.

At all five meetings, fishers shared their intimate knowledge of the local ecosystems in which they worked. They explicated the many and complex factors affecting their fishing waters: what the different species ate; how they interacted with other species; and how different types of fishing, and indirectly fishing regulations, affected life in the sea and their own livelihoods. As one fisher put it, “it’s all connected.”

At meetings and in interviews fishers stressed the value of forming relations with chefs and other attendees. FF was an opportunity to rally support and understanding for their situation (Bergsten 2022; Nilmander 2022). Explained Stefan Nordin during his interview, “You feel stronger if you have the same values. Suddenly you are not alone.” While some saw price and logistics as challenges to incorporating “forgotten” fish into seafood provisioning, all the fishers emphasized the importance of “a better understanding of the fishery sectors conditions,” “fostering relations,” and “united action and co-operation.” Embedding was about generating a sense of collective responsibility among all actors in the food system, one that encompassed fishers’ livelihoods as well as the cultures, communities and ecologies in which they were embedded. Local seafood markets were less important than strong public support.

Civil servants’ vision of embedding

The civil servants prioritized sustaining local fisheries and coastal communities when envisioning a better food system. This group valued how local fisheries contributed to food security, employment, and cultural heritage. Cultural identity, and the role of fish in local heritage, was important for place-branding and the economic livelihoods of townships and municipalities.

The civil servants favoured seafood reterritorialization for environmental and social reasons. One explained during an interview that seafood provisioning should reflect a “sense of responsibility” to local communities and ecologies. “We need to eat local so that we have a connection to local ecosystems, local populations,” he said. Another in his interview imagined a “Baltic Sea fish counter” that was “localized,” showing the totality of species available in the Baltic, as opposed to the cod, herring and imported species currently sold in supermarkets. A civil servant working for the Stockholm County Administrative Board explained during his interview that “the aim is to make possible a coastal fishery in the region, by broadening and marketing a wider selection of fish species, which will also strengthen the food security in the region.” In other words, the civil servants believed that collaboration and trade outside of the specific geographical areas for which they themselves had professional responsibility were important for strengthening small-scale fisheries.

While the civil servants found FF’s attention to taste and sensory experience exciting, and appreciated how the initiative spread local knowledge about fishing and gastronomy, they linked experiential and heritage values to seafood marketization. In meetings and interviews, civil servants talked about how being able to communicate the taste and characteristics of a particular species and its relation to place yielded “tremendous added value.” They saw chefs as key to producing and communicating this “added value” to a wider public, thus enabling it to be monetized. As one explained during an interview, “We are trying to facilitate business. We want functioning systems, and functioning value chains, and to get that, business is necessary.”

The civil servants thought that the “forgotten fish” which FF investigated could at best become an exclusive delicacy offering extra income for small-scale fishers but not sustaining them. As Aksel Ydrén of the National Centre for Craft Food explained during his interview, “Alternative is not going to replace the current system, but we can have alternatives.” He continued, “We cannot only be idealistic, we also have to be realistic. We cannot ask food artisans to do the world a service. They have to make money.” At the summary meeting, one civil servant spoke up to remind participants that they could not only focus on taste, they also had to work to change fisheries policy and politics. He continued,

We are facing dark times now, very dark times. We have to work on quota, how fisheries management is handling quota…we have to work with parliament, and the government departments. We cannot ignore them. We cannot pretend to ourselves that we can create meaningful alternatives without working for political change.

Civil servants wanted to replace the current unsustainable outcomes of the seafood system with more sustainable social and ecological relations. They perceived the local and qualities that could be connected to it as having market potential, and so something that could contribute to supporting place-based fisheries and communities. Including local fisheries in wider contexts, and regional and national food security, was a priority.

Shared convictions and misapprehensions about food system change

Although attendees enunciated different priorities for embedding seafood markets, all were convinced that chefs were the key to change. Fishers said during meetings that engaged chefs were the way to “make a breakthrough.” Civil servants spoke enthusiastically about how chefs could make a difference for local fisheries by speaking out on their behalf. RA, the chefs, the restaurateurs, and the food journalists were also convinced that chefs would lead change. As RA member and Chef Mathias Dahlgren told a journalist, “I am convinced that it is we chefs who can call attention to our Swedish products, but do it in a non-traditional way also. It is we who can make the histories of our new products” (Nilmander 2022).

Despite this conviction, our research points to fishers as crucial for facilitating (or blocking) seafood embedding. Here RA’s experiences of organizing FF meetings provided the first clue. Interest from chefs, restaurateurs, civil servants, food artisans, heritage professionals, and other local residents to attend FF was overwhelming. RA repeatedly turned away interested parties for lack of space. Not so with the fishers—they had to be persuaded to attend. Author A was responsible for ensuring that RA included local fishers at each meeting. He said repeatedly during his interview that he had to work hard to find fishers who would agree to participate. Recruiting fishers typically took multiple phone calls and contacts.

When we asked why fishers were reluctant to come during interviews, Manjula Gulliksson responded that “people are busy.” She continued, “Maybe they don’t think it’s so important with the forgotten fish either.” At the meetings, the fishers reminded other participants that “forgotten fish” could not replace important commercial species, like herring and cod. They emphasized that the main issue—industrial fisheries “removing too many fish from the sea”—desperately needed addressing.

Another reason fishers were skeptical about FF related to the fact that specific species have short fishing seasons. The fishers saw this as an impediment to trade, a feature that made it difficult for them to make a living. Chefs and RA, by contrast, viewed seasonality as a value in its own right, a quality that could be used to embed fish in local ecologies, cultures and gastronomy.

RA member Mathias Dahlgren noted other difficulties related to mobilizing fishers, namely conservatism and an unwillingness to change. He reflected during his interview,

People are not listening enough to recalibrate, people want to do things the same way that they always have. … Take for example Simrishamn. We went down and then the next day was Herring Day [an annual local celebration], but there wasn’t any herring, so the herring came from Denmark. I think that was a tragedy. But then you do not have much fish in Simrishamn, and when we are sitting there at the meeting, so they tell us that there is a huge amount of Baltic prawns. You just need to go down to the pier and pick it up. Well then, I think, well, right, why isn’t anyone doing it? Because there are surely a lot of people who would like to buy that. But they don’t do it. And it is there. And why do they not adjust and do it? Why do they not see the new possibilities?

At FF meetings, participating chefs eagerly expressed interest in buying fish directly from the fishers who were present. Some fishers and chefs made deals for deliveries, and several restaurants served “forgotten fish” after FF. However, in other instances fishers were hesitant to change or expand their business practices. Logistics, the extra labour involved in catching more species, and price were constraints that fishers brought up at FF’s meetings.

Discussion

Although The Great Transformation predates neoliberalism as a specific form of market society, Polanyi’s work remains useful for understanding contemporary processes, including initiatives such as FF (cf. Kristiansen and Gillette 2024; Sutton 2022). Participants in FF were dissatisfied with conventional seafood markets. They partook in FF because they wanted change. However, different categories of actors emphasized different values when imagining a desirable system. One key difference was the extent to which seafood provisioning should promote local or locality fish. Local fish would circulate in specific places, connecting local populations to the ecosystems surrounding them, and nourishing local small-scale fishers and seafood-related businesses. Locality fish would travel across Sweden and/or invite travel into and across Sweden, broadening gustatory experiences for consumers whose homes were distant from the ecosystems from which the species came, facilitating businesses that were non-local, and contributing to “putting Sweden on the map,” as the celebrity chefs and food journalists put it. Related to this divergence were, on the one hand, the extent to which “forgotten” fish were valuable for their specific characteristics and the local fishing and culinary knowledge that developed in the particular places where these species were available (local fish), or, on the other, whether their qualities and this type of knowledge was instead valuable because it could facilitate niche markets and tourist experiences (locality fish).

The broader scholarly literature indicates that locality food easily becomes a niche product in a global market and does little to disrupt the conventional system (e.g., Bowen 2010; Goodman et al. 2012; Hendrikson and Heffernan 2002; Morrell 2018). It may benefit producers and businesses in particular territorial contexts, but it also facilitates global trade and large-scale actors. Locality seafood, like other locality foods, is vulnerable to appropriation; as Goodman et al. put it,” the material and cultural meanings of quality can be translated into flows of economic rent” (2012, p. 76). Practitioners in the food system may not perceive this as conflicting with embedding, since negotiating monetary and other values is part of everyday experience (Kristiansen and Gillette 2024; Pratt and Luetchford 2013).

Among FF participants, RA manifested the strongest commitment to local fish, even while FF’s design also supported locality fish. The chefs, restaurateurs, and food journalists prioritized locality fish and a rich variety of high-quality fish. Distinctive locality fish should travel to top restaurants in Sweden, becoming part of fine dining experiences across the country, and locality fish should entice tourists who wanted distinctive culinary experiences to travel. Put differently, seafood’s geographical indicators were a component of cosmopolitan lifeways. By contrast, civil servants and fishers prioritized local livelihoods and saw local fish and locality fish as commodities that could enable thriving local fisheries and coastal communities. These groups enjoyed the experiential dimensions of FF, but their primary goal was enabling small-scale fishers to stay in business, and coastal communities to retain their fishing heritage and identity. Whereas the chefs, restaurateurs, and food journalists raved about quality, the specific characteristics of particular fish, and distinctive taste experiences, the civil servants and fishers repeatedly drew participants back to what they regarded as the central issues: small-scale fishers who were unable to make a living, degraded local ecologies, and coastal communities that unwillingly witnessed commercial fishing’s declining economic and social importance.

All FF participants were convinced that chefs could change the seafood system. This unanimous faith in the power of celebrity chefs to re-embed seafood resonates with other studies which find that celebrity chefs are often the public face of “sustainable seafood,” promoting a cultural politics of the environment that is fully compatible with the neoliberal economy (Silver and Hawkins 2017). Such narratives of sustainable seafood place the responsibility for ethical consumption firmly on the consumer. The role that fisheries management, science, and economic policies play in seafood’s sustainability, or lack thereof, are left out of such representations. Yet significant evidence demonstrates that the current problems of wild capture fisheries have more to do with fisheries management and economic policies than individual choices about what to eat (Autzen and Ounanian 2021; Bresnihan 2016; Hamada and Wilk 2019; Probyn 2016).

RA initially thought that FF could conclude by giving participating fishers a list of the restaurants and chefs who wanted to buy their catches, but decided to add a seventh event in response to challenges raised at the summary meeting. This additional meeting had the specific goal of “starting a flow” of fish from fishers to restaurants, as Hans Naess told participants. Grossists (middlemen) were invited for the first time, a move that indicates RA realized that the fishers could not be expected to shoulder full responsibility for the task of getting catches to buyers (cf. Gillette and Vesterberg 2022). At this meeting, fishers again brought up logistics and price as obstacles to address. They wanted “increased cooperation,” “united action,” and “collective responsibility” among all actors in the food system. Put differently, they emphasized building a community of concern (Snyder and St Martin 2015), in line with the priorities for embedding that they had earlier articulated. Rather more surprisingly, at this final event the fishers also requested more opportunities for convivial assembly: for participants to continue cooking, tasting and eating together. One participating fisher even offered to host such an event in the future.

Conclusion

In this study, we investigated a Swedish citizen- and professional initiative designed to reterritorialize fish. In Sweden as in other European contexts, most of the seafood available to consumers is “food from nowhere” (Campbell 2009), a homogenized commodity sold in a global system. Underpinning conventional food supply circuits are neoliberal economic policies, which have led to degraded marine environments, declining numbers of commercial fishers, and the virtual disappearance of small-scale fisheries (e.g., Bresnihan 2016, Campling and Havice 2018, Hamada and Wilk 2019, Ounanian 2016, Probyn 2016, Silver and Hawkins 2017; see also Kass 2022).

The Great Transformation argues that as “free” markets and processes of disembedding intensify, they catalyse political countermovements to re-embed markets in social values and institutions (Polanyi 2001). FF is an example of such a countermovement, one in which linking fish to place played a significant role. Participants in FF wanted seafood provisioning to be guided by social values. However, our analysis demonstrates that actors occupying different positions in the food system had diverging priorities for re-embedding. A significant difference concerned whether “forgotten fish” should become local food, locality food, or both. Both local and locality food have stronger territorial links than much food available in supermarkets. Yet while local food embeds fish in small-scale circuits, communities, and ecologies, locality food can circulate in international trade and incite national and international tourism. FF’s capacity to counter the dominant system hinges crucially on which type of embedding it promotes. Considered from this perspective, FF, and indeed other food reterritorialization movements, could be said to encompass Polanyi’s “double movement” between embedding and disembedding. Some participants’ actions, goals and motives were compatible with business-as-usual in the global economy, while others were more radical.

FF participants believed that the celebrity chefs, through their ability to influence wider audiences, had the power to reshape seafood provisioning, but our study indicates that FF hinged crucially on the participation of fishers. Fishers could facilitate or block seafood reterritorialization by what they did with their catches. In some respects, it was easier for fishers to continue operating in the dominant provisioning system that disadvantaged them relative to large-scale actors. This choice offered security, even as it made earning a livelihood challenging (see Gillette and Vesterberg 2022; Gillette et al. 2022). Persuading fishers to change their business practices requires building a robust community of concern, in which multiple actors take responsibility for learning about and supporting coastal fisheries (cf. Snyder and St Martin 2015; see also Autzen and Ounanian 2021).

FF was at best a first step toward creating the social and environmental relationships that might undergird a change in the seafood system. Its value lies not in creating niche markets for “odd” fish, but rather in creating a forum for reimagining what seafood provisioning could be. Intriguingly, FF suggests that commensality has potential for inspiring collective action aimed at embedding food in more sustainable circuits. How commensality and conviviality can be employed to strengthen food reterritorialization initiatives, and perhaps reorient them toward more radical change, is a topic that merits further research.