Higher education prepares gastronomes to understand their work as knowledge, to actively see how practical and theoretical knowledge interact in their work. The aim of this presentation is to explore how graduated gastronomes can use their academic knowledge to continue cultivating ideas of sustainability in their professional life after education. An emerging aspect of sustainability is put forward: how a gastronomic mindset can cultivate inner capacities needed for sustainable transformations.
Four culinary professionals with a bachelor's degree, participated in semi-annually recurring dialogic interviews during the first two years after they finished their education. In these recurring dialogues the ideas of the researcher and the participants were gradually brought towards a common explanation. Inspired by Gadamer’s idea of bildung as hermeneutic interpretation, the focus is on the individual sense-making process after a meal.
The gastronomes were catalyzed by their higher education backgrounds as well as their individual endeavors when they further developed ideas of sustainability from a gastronomic point of view. By intertwining academic knowledge with their professional experiences, the gastronomes are found communicating not primarily to people’s role as citizens but rather to them as individuals.
The discussion revolves around how civic sustainable development is dependent on intertwining with an inner cultivation of the self, and that academically educated gastronomes by their work can manage profound links between the individual and the civic perspectives. Thereby, the impressions of a meal can drive change, through how gastronomy communicates communal ideas to the individual self via all senses.