An indelible image has captured the imaginations of diners for the last decade and a half: A chef, tousled hair and a short beard, work pants and galoshes, slowly walks alone through a moss-covered pine forest. He carries an Opinel knife in one hand, a square plastic container in the other. He pauses, seeing something the rest of us can’t. Dropping to one knee, he delicately plucks a single leaf from the forest floor, inspects it, and gingerly nibbles its edge.
When Noma surged to the forefront of the global dining scene in 2010 as the “World’s Best Restaurant,” this image of the prototypical foraging chef — hand-plucking wild foods from beaches, fields, and forests, before elegantly arranging them on a plate or fermenting them in rustic jars for future use — reeled customers in. Rene Redzepi and his team were building on long-standing local traditions; families in Denmark regularly snag chanterelles from the forest floor in the spring, pick blackberries in the summer, and scour parks for chestnuts in the fall. But Noma cleverly linked these practices to diners’ growing concerns about the environmental impact of industrial agriculture. It seemed like the restaurant represented a way forward, even as it returned to old ways.
Small-scale foraging gradually gave way to an industrialization of the practice, a veritable “wild-washing” on a commercial scale.
Foraging struck a nerve, exposing anxieties about the state of the global food system and generating legitimate discourse — until the market got a hold of it. Redzepi’s approach and aesthetics became fetishized. It spawned a new food writing cliche — the “I foraged with Rene Rezdepi” piece — ripe with imagery that would then influence an entire generation of chefs drawn to the romantic ideals of discovery and preservation. In such a high-demand, high-profile market, people inevitably find ways to exploit novelty. Small-scale foraging gradually gave way to an industrialization of the practice, a veritable “wild-washing” on a commercial scale.
While Noma itself moved past its focus on foraging in 2017, when it relocated from its original home in Christianshavn to Refshaløen, the trend came to define the Nordic region for years. As tourists from around the world traveled to Denmark and Scandinavia to experience new Nordic cuisine, restaurants rose to meet the demand, filling their menus with wild sorrel, pine, sea buckthorn, and famously, ants. Money flowed into Denmark, and the country’s cuisine rippled out, influencing restaurants across Europe and the world. But beneath the glossy, mossy surface, this hyper-focus on foraging had real, negative impacts on the health of Denmark’s food system.
Foraging is not innately bad. Selective and careful harvesting, particularly of invasive or abundant species, is fine for the environment. But the consequences of industrialized foraging are well documented.
Take what happened with ramps in the U.S. in the early 2010s. What was once a special, hyper-seasonal product became ubiquitous. The ramp craze inspired armies of foragers to traipse through delicate spring forests, mashing flora and fauna underfoot as they pulled up entire ramp patches, root and all. (Wild foods advocate Russ Cohen advises that the sustainable way to forage for ramps is to pick one leaf off each plant, leaving the bulb to continue to reproduce.)
What’s harder to see are the ways the fetishization of foraging deprioritized farming and the broader food system.
It’s not quite fair to say that “before Noma, Denmark had no established dining culture,” but the reality isn’t far off. There wasn’t a strong culture of dining out, and Danish cuisine was largely based around simple preparations with a backbone of French technique. There were two major challenges for chefs: lack of customer demand for fine dining and ingredients drawn from large-scale agricultural export industries.
Noma radically changed the former — bringing in money, tourism, and skilled labor — without affecting the latter. In the U.S., the farm-to-table movement spearheaded by chefs like Alice Waters, Dan Barber, and Tom Colicchio led to the rise of grocery stores like Whole Foods, which attracted customers with a range of organic produce and sustainable proteins. Following Noma and the new Nordic wave, Danish home cooks might find pots of verbena or ramson at their local grocer, but staples like fresh seafood or kale remained rarities.
This shocked me when I moved to Denmark in 2014. Coming off the peak of my career in New York, I was accustomed to calling the local butcher or farmer to have my pick of pork breeds: Tamworth, Berkshire, Mangalitsa. In Denmark, there was only “pork.”
Following Noma, Danish home cooks might find pots of verbena or ramson at their local grocer, but staples like fresh seafood or kale remained rarities.
In the U.S., I could order beef by breed, quality grade, even the cow’s diet. In Denmark, beef was without age or grain-finish, and heritage breeds were rare, all but wiped out in exchange for fast-growing industrial breeds. The country’s few abattoirs opted out of a grading system and instead utilized a “first in/first out” methodology. If I ordered two beef backs, I might receive one dark and marbled and the other pink and lean as veal.
These same problems plagued local fruits and vegetables. Wholesale reps could speak at length about every little wild herb, but could only offer two kinds of summer squash. Their tomatoes came from Italy.
The results of these decisions are stark. Small farms struggle to make ends meet, while large-scale agricultural producers continue to snap up land. Denmark has some of the highest allocations of agricultural land on the European continent, yet some of the lowest biodiversity, creating monocultures that are susceptible to disease. In a country that counts five pigs for every resident, where 80 percent of the agricultural land is allocated for growing feed, one bout of hoof-and-mouth disease could mean full system collapse.
Diners have poured money into foraging-focused restaurants. In a low-margin business like restaurants, the temptation is to follow the path of least resistance, to hop on trend. In a free-market system, if the consumer doesn’t demand this diversity, the market won’t supply it.
But restaurants are uniquely positioned to influence tastes and create future demand. If and how they do so is a choice.
Across Denmark, chefs have begun to pivot away from the wild food narrative and toward local agriculture. The Danish culinary community is undergoing a seismic change, finally entering a farm-to-table movement.
A lot of credit goes to international chefs, attracted to the area by the new Nordic movement, who have worked to adapt their native cuisines to Danish produce, often partnering with local farmers to grow what they need. Chef Rosio Sanchez forewent imported tomatillos for her salsa verde at her restaurant Sanchez, instead turning to local gooseberries. Jonathan Tam explores contemporary takes on his Cantonese heritage at Ja Tak with almost entirely local products. Chefs like Sanchez and Tam aren’t just bringing global cuisines to Danish tables; they’re giving local farmers desperately needed attention, funding, and creative license to diversify their crops.
For decades, Denmark has quietly grown arguably the best peas, rhubarb, strawberries, and asparagus in the world. Today, we are experiencing an agricultural renaissance, adding tomatoes, chiles, lemongrass, and husk cherries to the list of great Danish products. Chefs don’t need to hand-forage for ants that happen to share aromatic compounds with lemongrass when we can just grow the plant itself.
We’ve taken this to the extreme at our restaurant, Alouette. We’ve developed a structured approach we call the Plot System. Each plot is a series of dishes, reflecting the products and growing methods of a single farmer or producer. We share the stories of these farms with customers to direct their attention away from the wild and back to the farmers. An evening with us is a narrative journey through terroir, a deep dive into the sustainable systems of localized agriculture, and an exploration of flavorful produce. We use foraged products a little here and there, but they’re far from the primary focus.
The shift couldn’t come soon enough. The world is facing dramatic agricultural changes in the next 25 years. At the current rate, farmland won’t be able to feed the growing global population by 2050, not because we don’t have enough land, but because we’re using our current farmland inefficiently. At the moment, about half of the world’s crops feed people, while the other half feed livestock, biofuel companies, and other industrial products. About half of all food by weight is wasted rather than eaten, partly because people buy too much and partly because of faulty supply chains. Water, fertilizer, and farm equipment could all be used better. All of these problems are solvable — if we empower the farmers interested in solving them rather than accept the industrial farming system as it is.
Chefs may feel like victims of consumer demand, but it’s their restaurants that set the tone and create the demand — especially in Denmark, which has enjoyed the culinary world’s attention for nearly two decades. During the peak foraging era, chefs cast themselves as the star of the show, attracting acclaim for their individual labor in the wild. Now it’s up to these same chefs to turn the page.
Chefs should be concerned less with exotic and esoteric foraged ingredients as a basis for their cuisine and instead be looking to forge meaningful, supportive relationships with farmers. They are uniquely positioned to create and reinforce demand for biodiversity, sustainability, and conscientious dining.
The future is not a single chef, alone in the forest, plucking wild herbs as garnish. The future is a community growing, cooking, and serving together.
