Magnus Westling

Magnus Westling is an associate senior lecturer at the School of Hospitality, Culinary Arts and Meal Science, Campus Grythyttan. Magnus prior education includes the hotel, restaurant, ad catering programme (upper secondary school), bachelor's and master's degree in culinary arts and meal science, and a bachelor's degree in biology. In 2022, he successfully defended his PhD thesis "Sensory qualities and culinary utility of produce: a path towards sustainable gastronomy". The thesis bridges sensory science, culinary arts, and food design, using sensory descriptive methods with consumers as well as trained sensory panelists, consumer tests with different target groups, and a recipe-development process joined up with culinary arts and agriculture.  A central preoccupation of the thesis concerns the coking, continuity, and complexity of gray peas. 

Research area

Magnus' research area is sensory science and consumer science, in collaboration with culinary arts, and the research subject is related to sustainable gastronomy. He focuses on landraces and heirloom cultivars – a journey exploring its diversity, nuances, and functioning in culinary practices and meals. The research is about welcoming and valuing a cultivated diversity that has unique sensory qualities, and understanding how to advance a given cultivar in recipe optimization and development. The foundation underlying the research is a cooking philosophy that assumes that produce can speak for itself if the cook or food artisan take heed.