The NOMA ready-mades

Etnobotanica brings together papers on European wild plant use in places that I would consider obscure (ohh that Dutch self-centredness). There is much on Albania and Macedonia for instance. It's a fantastic resource and I have pointed to another paper earlier. 

"Wild food plant use in 21st century Europe: the disappearance of old traditions and the search for new cuisines involving wild edibles" by Łukasz Łuczaj and others gives a broad overview on the current status of foraging. It notes that one hand the traditional knowledge of wild food is disappearing while at the same time it is reinvented (not reintroduced as the paper argues) in avant-garde cooking. 

In all it is a bit scattershot, but that is only to be expected for such a huge and complex field in which every country has its own history and where generally there little overlap between separate traditions exists. Good piece to get you talking. I am happy in the meanwhile with the different plant lists like this this stocking-list from a South Swedish wild food firm that also supplies Noma. It is a list that contains so many plants that are growing between the cracks of the pavements or in neglected gardens that it once again shows how much of Michelin-starred wild food cooking resembles the experiments of Surrealism to create extraordinary sensations by rearranging ordinary and/or discarded material like bus cards and cut-outs from newspapers. 

Nordic anarchism and NOMA's ethnocoockery

Redzepi with aboriginal guide in S. Oz.

Rene Redzepi's NOMA has been covered here twice before. The first post noticed that NOMA foraging breaks with the Mediterranean tradition of olive oil and fatty sauces, the second post was a rambling attempt to find something to say about NOMA and/as art. The fascination of NOMA is threefold: 1) it is obviously something different 2) the reliance on foraged goods can be said to represent a break with the culture of agriculture and the accumulation of goods and power 3) the return to Nordic traditions (and the making of them at the same time) takes a break from the old Catholic idea of Europe as a cultural zone that emerged from the south (most notably Italy) and civilized the north.


Andre Breton refused to visit Italy because he resented the dominance of Latin culture. Good man.


Looking through the '90ties urban exploration journal Transgression I suddenly realized there exists a predecessor to Redzepi, one who creates a connection between NOMA and the avant-garde traditions of the 20th century: Asger Jorn, the Danish painter and situationist angel investor. 


Let's quote Ann-Charlotte Weimarck on Scandinavian anarchism:

One of his basic ideas was that Nordic art was unique, that it together with what he called Latin art and Byzantine art built up European cultural history, which was thus based on complementary value scales, conditions and approaches. He was of the opinion that an unenslaved and undisciplined man existed in Scandinavia from the earliest times which also can be traced in the arts. Free and undisciplined living conditions were the reason that Nordic art differed for example from that of southern Europe. He based his opinion on the fact that slavery never appeared as a mode of production in Scandinavia. Here is the basis of what he called Scandinavian Anarchism. He also thought that the Scandinavian artist had a different role from his colleagues in the rest of Europe: here, our artists were neither divine nor enslaved, here, the artist was of the people and the art in Scandinavia was an integral part of the environment, it grew free and was what he termed "use-art". Furthermore, it was no primitive offshoot of classical art but was based on its own aesthetics, constructed on a "dissymmetrical" structure as opposed to the rest of European art which he believed was based on a centralized and symmetrical structure.

Did you know that foraging cultures persisted in Scandinavia long after the rest of Europe was farming? Parts of the quote, "art as part of the environment" can easily be reworded to fit NOMA: "food as part of the environment". Food as part of everyday life not something fenced in as 'art' by artistic professionals, artism. Redzepi is of course a professional's professional but as the Meemalee blog review of his London talk shows, he has an ironic sense of humour that you never get from watching Britain's Great Menu. It would be interesting to know what Redzepi (whose father is Macedonian) would make of this connection to the Danish primitivist tradition. Could you email him?

So what about 'foraging'? And what about 'art'? And what about the 'hype'?

Foraging pine needles, yummie, taken from a Phaidon cook it raw series

"Possibly the arts are well placed to lead an ecological insurrection by again valuing food as contiguous with cultural production, and possibly the arts are well placed to be radical again as it continues to attract odd bods and those that are not so well adjusted to a ‘profoundly sick society’ (Jiddu Krishnamurti)" - Patrick Jones.

The above quote, taken from an article by the yam foraging slow poet/Permapoesis blogger/homesteader from  the People's Republic of Abba has been on my mind for a while. What does it mean in relation to art that reflects on foraging and how does it tie in with the recent discovery of Neanderthal cooking (as understood from food traced in fossilized dental plaque, a discovery that immediately led to all sorts of speculation about the lifestyle and cognitive abilities of the 'other humans') ... and ... what do mean when we use the word 'art', exactly?: 

"The aura of fashionable sophistication that surrounds the world of the arts today tends to obscure their fundamental role in society: to provide basic vehicles for speculative inquiry into the nature of human experience."  

The above quote is from an obscure source, (Daniel M. Mendelowitz, Children as Artists, Stanford University Press, 1963) but it brilliantly formulates something that is at least implicit in the work of all my favourite 'artists': the museum, the gallery, all those pretentious bullshitters scavenging for leftover crumbs that have fallen from the art funding table have nothing to do with art, they are part of a totally corrupt and self-serving financial system.

"Always watch the quiet ones at the back, all they want is the smallest scrap" - Crass

Food as culture, cooking as art. 


Consider Rene Redzepi (earlier) whose restaurant Noma has moved away from the exalted spheres of fine dining into canteen like atmosphere serving Ikea-patterned foraged goods with intentionally mismatched cutlery. I hadn't realized this earlier but Redzepi's first book was marketed, to all intents and purposes, as an art book: as an expensive limited edition collectors item with the size of a large handbag. Given that most of the recipes are impossible to reproduce for a home cook and they often rely on Nordic ingredients it was not even a cookery book but a catalogue. Such tactics can backfire: once you are in fashion you must go, no you will be brought, out of fashion. Redzepi is even being Assanged as a criminal when sharing his knowledge with the public.  


Here is a fragment of Catherine Phipps review of cooking books of 2010: 

The inaccessible Noma Cookbook... I loved it, but was also incredibly frustrated by it – due to the specialist kit needed the dishes are nigh on impossible to recreate at home. I know it's not really the point of this sort of book, but looking at the photographs made me feel like a child squashed up against the sweetshop window; unable to get in.

Redzepi is the King of the Locavores, and with the Noma Cookbook that particular movement probably reached its peak. I think we're now moving away from books which focus on the local and seasonal, which have so dominated the past few years. This has to be a good thing - there is only so much you can say about our own produce without being repetitive, and going foraging to discover more outlandish ingredients is unrealistic for most of us and is even causing controversy with environmentalists.

That's what happens if you prefer a glossy tome over a Xeroxed zine like Nancy Klehm's "reap where you did not sow, a guide to urban foraging' or Edible, Medicinal, & Utilitarian Plants, Volume I. Art conveys prestige but at a Faustian price. Hohum...

United foragers against olive (oil)

"Øllebrød" and frothed milk

A while ago I caught the finalists of Masterchef professional 2010, a BBC cooking competition, visiting Copenhagen's Noma. And so I learned about the best restaurant in the world of 2010 as voted by the chefs themselves. It is not easy to miss that Noma is something special: the chefs are not fat bastards but healthy looking, cool dude designer types. Head Chef René Redzepi has as a cardinal rule that at least 1/3 of all dishes should consist of foraged goods and his explanation makes perfect ecological sense in the present but are also typical in the wider sense of foraging as an activity of reinhabitation, skill, concentration and awareness.

All of the people who work in the kitchen with me go out into the forests and on to the beach. It's a part of their job. If you work with me you will often be starting your day in the forest or on the shore because I believe foraging will shape you as a chef. I know it has shaped me. If you see how a plant grows and you taste it in situ you have a perfect example of how it should taste on the plate. But it's more than that. When you get close to the raw materials and taste them at the moment they let go of the soil, you learn to respect them.       

Central to the argument of the great forage revival is that it reintroduces an ancient practise wiped out by the aggressive spread of the culture of agriculture. Redzepi tells us that choosing local, foraged, ingredients also means breaking with the great tradition of fine dining: fat! And this is no surprise: not health or food security but calories were the killer app of agriculture. 

So when we came to open Noma, with our commitment to a new style of cooking that turned away from the otherwise terrific classical French repertoire – no olives or its oil, no tomatoes unless briefly in season, no bulb garlic – to something distinctive and regional, it made sense that a lot of our ingredients should be those we could find, not least because they are so available. That's the beauty of Copenhagen. You can just go into its parks and find the likes of wild garlic and yellow star of Bethlehem and march violets, all of which we use in our dishes.

Another returning fascinating point is answered as well. How do you actually learn to forage. Mostly by being instructed. The 'rare character' mentioned at the end, one of those persons with real knowledge doesn't sound open to the suggestion of  sharing his sites with the internet dummies finding edibles for free the augmented foraging easy way. There is a discussion about this earlier.  

Other things came from further away. I studied recipe books and nature books, learned about wood sorrel and ground elder and particular kinds of seaweed to be plucked from the shore. We also developed a network of professional foragers. We have one man who has been doing it for decades. He is one of those rare characters, with teeth that go in all directions and a book in which he has been keeping notes about the weather and the locations of particular mushrooms since the 1970s. This information he keeps to himself, like it was the recipe for Coke. They are his life, his treasure. 

The pictures below are from a Flickr Photoset that contains many more goodies. The quotes are taken from an interview with The Guardian in April 2010. 

Blueberries and pine

Cook it Raw