Chef René Redzepi explores ingredients that changed the globe in new series

It’s a tasting menu at the highest possible level. The Copenhagen restaurant, NOMA, has helped transform the world of fine dining with a focus on hyperlocal foods prepared and presented with extraordinary care. Now, its co-owner and chef René Redzepi widens his view to explore ingredients that have changed the globe. Jeffrey Brown reports for our arts and culture series, CANVAS.

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Geoff Bennett: It’s a tasting menu at the highest possible level.

The Copenhagen restaurant Noma has helped transform the world of fine dining with a focus on hyperlocal foods prepared and presented with extraordinary care.

Now its co-owner and chef widens his view to explore ingredients that have changed the globe.

Jeffrey Brown reports for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Rene Redzepi, Chef: Everybody got a pepper?

Group: Yes!

Rene Redzepi: Let’s have a fantastic service.

Group: Yes, sir!

Jeffrey Brown: The fire in a bite of chili, the pleasure in a cup of coffee, the raw wonder of sushi. But what’s behind it all? Food is never just food. That’s the theme that runs through “Omnivore,” an eight-part series on Apple TV+ that takes us around the world to look at the production, history, culture, and sustainability of eight key ingredients that go into much of what we eat.

Rene Redzepi: An endless flight to Australia.

Jeffrey Brown: The guide, chef Rene Redzepi.

Rene Redzepi: I think it’s a new way of actually trying to understand a little bit about who are we through the foods that we eat. And that’s what were trying to do.

Jeffrey Brown: Is it your sense that most of us don’t know this or don’t stop to think about it? We just consume?

(Laughter)

Rene Redzepi: Yes, we just consume. I don’t think I could have said it much better.

I think we are so far removed from where our food comes from and what lies behind, and we have lost touch with that.

Jeffrey Brown: Redzepi is one of the world’s best-known chefs, complete with a recent cameo on the FX on Hulu series “The Bear.”

His Copenhagen restaurant Noma, earning three Michelin stars and regularly ranked world’s best, became ground zero for what’s been called New Nordic Cuisine, a hugely influential approach to food gathering, preparation and presentation featuring unexpected, hyperlocal and seasonal ingredients.

Rene Redzepi: The simple idea was, we’re in the Nordics. What is available to us? And we discovered this new treasure trove of ingredients, particularly wild foods. And we found seagrass that tasted like coriander.

There was roots of trees that tasted like cinnamon, flavors that were exotic to the average Danes, but they were right there underneath our feet. That whole thing fueled like a lifetime of curiosity.

Jeffrey Brown: “Omnivore,” a collaboration with food journalist Matt Goulding and filmmaker Cary Fukunaga, explores how once-local ingredients rose to global scale. There’s one ingredient per episode, chilies, tuna, salt, bananas, pork, rice, coffee, corn.

Rene Redzepi: We’re trying with the show to just give people and inspiration to want to try to understand more about he everyday things that we eat and just how mind-blowing it is, and how many wonderful stories and people lies behind the everyday stuff, like a cup of coffee or a bowl of rice.

Rene Redzepi: Arthur Karuletwa has made it his life’s mission to fight for the people who produce our coffee.

Jeffrey Brown: Mind-blowing, too, in the geopolitical, economic, and environmental impacts these ingredients have had in the past and that continue in various forms today, as the global food network changes local cultures and lessens food variety.

What jumped out at me is that there is a sense of loss almost as much as a sense of wonder.

Rene Redzepi: It is true that within the food system and how we produce food, that it has a huge toll on everything. And it is true that the craftspeople, they are disappearing slowly.

And, with that, some of our culture gets lost, and I believe some of the very essence of who we are get lost, if we don’t remember to celebrate them and value their work.

Jeffrey Brown: If the appetites of all of us as humans are behind many of the food resource problems you’re documenting here, can our appetites be changed?

Rene Redzepi: Yes, I have no doubt that we can change. I think at the heart of change in food lays deliciousness. I think that’s the change factor for us as a species adapting new ways.

If things taste amazing, we’re going to be there, very quick. And it’s going to travel throughout the world when something delicious hits us. So this also tells you that, yes, the human appetite can be ferocious, but we can quickly change things around. So, we have that hope and that knowledge and that optimism.

Jeffrey Brown: But that, too, cuts both ways, as the series shows with the example of bluefin tuna, which turned from trash fish into treasure, think sushi, through changes in global shipping, business and tastes, to the point of a new threat from overfishing.

The series focuses on efforts to preserve local practices, resources, and food varieties amid such pressures. Sustainability is also a factor in Redzepi’s world of fine dining. In fact, citing grueling hours, endless workplace demands and the high costs of the labor-intensive work, he announced last year that, despite its critical success, Noma would close as a traditional restaurant by the end of 2024.

It will now become a food laboratory to develop, test, and market new flavors and foods. I asked how he sees the role of chefs like himself in changing food awareness and habits.

Rene Redzepi: I think, for me, I have always believed and still believe today that chefs, they are sort of ambassadors for seasonality, for flavor, for the love of a meal.

And they act as a sort of almost a community hub where flavor happens. And they spread that into the world. I always believe that they have that impact, that we have that impact.

Jeffrey Brown: The eight-part series “Omnivore” is now streaming.

For the “PBS News Hour,” I’m Jeffrey Brown.