Forgotten Flavours and the Flavours of the Forgotten: Ecological Flavourscapes in Scotland

This paper proposes a preliminary inquiry into Scottish ecological flavourscapes, and the various ways in which they mobilise forgotten foods and flavours towards ecological and food security ends: as national biocultural heritage, as wild ‘larder’, and as un- or under-tapped pools of genes and nutrients. The paper explores some of the continuities, contrasts and tensions between different conceptions of the ‘forgotten’, the visions of ecology, sustainability and ‘transition’ they are associated with, their distinctive paths to economic value, and how ‘flavour’ (or non-flavour) upholds each of these. Finally, I suggest that taken together, these flavourscapes should be understood, after Jacques Rancière, as a distribution of the ‘flavour-sensible’, with its assigned positions and exclusions, and that actual ecological transformation through a politics of flavour would take shifts in such distribution.