Feasting Wild: In Search of the Last Untamed Food - Tapa blanda

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Gina Rae La Cerva is a geographer, environmental anthropologist, and award-winning writer who has traveled extensively to research a variety of environmental and food-related topics. A National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow, La Cerva holds a Master of Environmental Science from Yale University's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and a Master of Philosophy from the University of Cambridge. La Cerva lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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I am in the test kitchen of the “best restaurant in the world” and I’m on the verge of throwing up. Around the room, chefs are bent over their culinary investigations. A soundtrack of downbeat reggae plays overhead.

A tall, handsome Australian chef named Brad has just taken me on a tour of Noma’s four kitchens and the private dining room where Metallica ate the week before. At the back of the restaurant, we paused to watch a man in a small shed sweating over a nine-hundred-degree fire cooking charred fish, a bandana obscuring half his face, and I thought about him standing there all day, sixteen hours, full of pride and secret doubts that intensified with each tiring hour.

Noma only uses ingredients sourced within the Nordic region (Scandinavia, Finland, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands). No lemons. No olive oil. It is a challenge to prepare a meal without such basic staples. The chefs must find similar flavors in wild ingredients. The menu changes about five times each month to keep up with the seasonal changes in ingredients, and the restaurant employs a full-time forager.

Now in the test kitchen, Brad and I stand next to shelves lined with jars of experimental foods. “These are the scallops. This is how we dry them,” Brad says as he opens a jar, “and then we emulsify them—with the wax of bees. And that’s how you get that fudge.” The things in the jar look of indeterminate origin and stink something like rancid, dirty laundry. The smell travels through my nose and into my brain, and there in the neocortex it meets signals from my stomach that say I am quite too full from the twenty-six-course lunch I’ve just eaten, and quite too nervous in the presence of this tall man, for such a smell. I start to retch. René Redzepi, the master artist himself, turns around from the photo shoot he is conducting and stares in horror. How dare I gag in his test kitchen. How dare I, indeed.