Sit with Bitter — Nomi Toirkens

↗ Social designer, food enthusiast, bitter reclaimer and researcher working at the intersection of food, ecology, and social practices. My work explores how sensory experiences (especially taste) can reconnect us to what has been bred out, forgotten, or overlooked. Through foraging, craft and collaboration I create tools, tastings and narratives to invite new ways of relating to food, the natural world and lost knowledge.

Sit with Bitter

Sept 2024 - Jun 2025

Bitterness is a taste in retreat. Removed from our diets, it has become unfamiliar, quietly pushed aside by a food system shaped by processing and sweetness. Sit with Bitter explores what happens when bitter returns, how making space for it can shift our relationship to food, flavour and the body. The project unfolds through a series of guided tastings that reintroduce bitterness into our mouths, our routines and the way we think about taste. Bitterness is approached here as both a taste and tool: a way to support digestion, stimulate liver function and reconnect with local plant knowledge. The dandelion is the star ingredient, a species often dismissed as a weed, yet rich in bitter compounds, nutrients and resilience. To ‘sit with bitter’ is to reacquaint the senses with something once known and nearly forgotten.

The project began from a personal place, shaped by years of digestive discomfort and a growing interest in nutrition, gut health and wild edible plants. What started as a search for relief gradually unfolded into a design practice grounded in taste, memory and the reactivation of embodied knowledge dulled by modern food systems.

Each tasting builds gradually in intensity, building up with my bitter drink and concluded with a bite. Together, they train the palate to sit with the unfamiliar.

Glass in collaboration with Marc Barreda.

reclaiming bitter taste, taste education, sensory design, food systems, foraging, dandelion, digestion, embodied knowledge, edible resistance, flavour reintroduction, taste as protest, seasonal eating, plant-human connection

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