If we take away one thing from his new TV series, celebrity chef René Redzepi hopes we will understand more about what goes into making the food we eat.
In Omnivore, the Dane behind Noma – the renowned Copenhagen restaurant that he is closing next year – travels the globe to find the stories behind chilli, salt, banana, pork, rice, coffee, corn and tuna.
The idea behind Omnivore began simmering about a decade ago when Redzepi thought there was room for a different type of food series. At the time, he was beginning to earn a reputation for crafting a modern Nordic cuisine using the seasonal and local ingredients he foraged for.
As he began starring in food shows and documentaries about Noma, it struck him that food television typically fell into three categories: food travel shows, cooking competitions or cooking shows.
“The idea for something along the lines of Planet Earth started to happen,” he says. “[David] Attenborough would travel the world showing that nature is the most important thing on Earth. And we just thought that we could do the same with food. It’s the exact same thing. Food is nature. Food is our nutrition. Food is who we are. Food is everything. Food has built us. And so why can’t we try to lift this idea and notion on how to present food and how to value our food into something at a different level?’’ he says.
Omnivore is narrated by Redzepi and made by American food journalist-turned-producer Matt Goulding, a former publishing business partner of the late Anthony Bourdain. They’re together in Copenhagen for joint Zoom interviews.
“Food television is often the end of the story, showing the chef in the kitchen. It’s so often the end of the chain,” says Goulding. “But we wanted to show where does this start and what’s in between?”
Next year, Redzepi will close the doors to his three-Michelin-starred restaurant, which has been named the world’s best restaurant four times since 2010. He will transform the space into a pioneering test kitchen developing new products. He will also run Noma pop-ups – one in Kyoto, Japan, for later this year has already sold out.
When the 46-year-old announced Noma’s closure, he declared that the fine-dining model – employing 100 staff to create meals for 45 diners a night – was too exclusive, and he wanted to turn his attention to spreading his culinary message.
Making Omnivore is part of his new focus, he tells the Listener. “One of the projects that came out of Omnivore is something that we call the future food staples, in which we are looking at all the food staples that exist today, like rice and corn and the grains of the world, and potatoes. Most of them are in some sort of trouble.
“At Noma, we’ve chosen some ingredients like seaweed, mushrooms, legumes, bugs and insects. Once you open up those worlds, there’s a whole dimension in each of them to be explored. That work got solidified and crystallised in my mind because of what we learned from Omnivore.’’
Throughout the series, he says he doesn’t “stand on the soapbox’', but raises questions about food production and what we eat. “How we eat dictates how healthy you are. It also dictates how healthy our planet is. It’s as simple as that. So, choosing something wisely is participating in this. People understanding that more, not through lessons or preaching but through delightful entertainment and respectful information, that’s something I would love for people to get out of it.
“It’s about us understanding what we eat and choose to buy is hugely important, to ourselves and to the Earth.’’
When choosing which ingredients to profile, they sought a balance between staple ingredients that have left their mark on history – such as salt and rice – and those with stories that might be more surprising, such as bananas and chillies. They also sought a geographical spread: as well as featuring the Noma kitchen in some episodes, they travelled from salt pans in Peru to coffee forests in Rwanda, banana plantations in India and a Spanish village to meet pig farmers.
In Serbia, Redzepi meets string pepper farmers whose livelihoods depend on the spicy peppers. Footage of trucks carrying vibrant red chillies along cobblestone streets are romantic, but small farmers are competing with global food giants and young people don’t want to work on the pepper farms.
For a chef who chooses local and seasonal ingredients where he can, he asks why a species such as tuna – which he tells us used to be a “trash fish’' until conveyor-belt sushi arrived in the late 1950s – can be pulled into fishing nets off Spain and be on the auction floor in Tokyo 24 hours later. “Is that how we should be eating? Should we be doing this blindly?’’ he asks.
Asked about his discoveries during the filming, Redzepi says he was amazed by artisans, growers and farmers who dedicate their lives to growing or producing the ingredients we take for granted.
“The food world is full of that. You see something amazing and similar when you have people who love [growing] asparagus in Copenhagen and they do everything they can just to grow the best ones … and then you see the same with a banana farmer in India.’’
Redzepi hopes food production will strike a balance between “big ag’', which is touted as the only way we can feed the world, and traditional producers who use age-old techniques but are struggling to keep up. “Big agriculture needs to listen to traditional knowledge and ancient values that have been at the forefront for thousands of years. And when those two fuse together in perfect harmony, we can really move forward.’’
Omnivore is now streaming on Apple TV+.
