Unwrapping The Northern Sea cheese - Enacting place in the Danish dairy food sector

Summary

The Nordic foodscape has changed radically over the last decade. In Scandinavia there is massive focus on a Nordic gourmet food evolution in general and in Denmark specifically also a cheese revolution.
Notions of terroir and place specific foodstuffs are rapidly gaining interest in the Nordic countries. In the fall of 2008 Thise Mejeri won an annual Danish gourmet dairy prize with their speciality cheese ‘Vesterhavsost’. The judges noted that: “The cheese has character, and it has the “terroir” that we search for. It means that it is characterized by the origin of the milk, as well as the area of production and maturing. It has a good story” . The Vesterhavsost (Eng. ‘The Northern Sea cheese’) was thus inscribed in an (it seems) ever-growing trend towards food related site-specificity.