To Sustainability and Beyond

Three special guests were invited:

René Redzepi, initiator of the Nordic Food Manifesto, has been head of the famous NOMA restaurant since 2003. NOMA has been named the best restaurant in the world four times.

Christian F. Puglisi, restaurant owner, chef, activist and author, and has been the man behind restaurants Relæ, Manfreds, Bæst and Mirabelle, organic wine shop Vinikultur, Farm of Ideas and the Seed Exchange festival.

Kamilla Seidler Trebbien, chef, co-owner of Restaurant Lola and Loui. She has previously worked around the world, and in 2016 she was named Latin America's best female chef when she worked as head chef at restaurant Gustu in Bolivia.

Sustainability means different things in different places

Kamilla Seidler explained that sustainability means different things to people, depending on where they are in the world. She especially noticed this when she worked as head chef in Bolivia for six years.

“It was interesting to see how the Danish way of thinking has been about sufficiency overall, which is also how we have gotten to where we are food production wise. Then I came to Bolivia where they are struggling to become more sufficient and to feed more people, and then coming back to Denmark again, where we are trying to become more sustainable and going back to the roots. It’s like two worlds clashing”. 

The biggest difficulty for her in terms of sustainability is sourcing the right small producers, she explained. 

Everytime something is cheap, someone has to pay the price

René Redzepi believes we should focus on finding a balance in the restaurant industry where the wellbeing of the staff, the business and the planet is being taken into account. 

It takes time to build an organisation that can properly deal with all these things, and for him and the NOMA restaurant, which started 18 years ago, it is only within the last couple of years that he feels he reached this point.  

René Redzepi also argued that food simply is too cheap and that we need to change our value systems. When he gets asked by journalists about the future food and what it will be like, his answer to them is: “More expensive”.

More difficult running a diverse farm

Christian F. Puglisi initiated the project Farm of Ideas five years ago, as he wanted to get a better picture of what it is like to be out in the fields and being a part of the food production. 

From the experience he said that it is very difficult to produce food of high quality whilst taking a sustainable approach due to an “extremely intricate, political and rigid” system. 

This is because of the bureaucracy of quality assurance and the need for the system to reduce chances of things going wrong.  

“In Denmark we are very focused on an export market that needs to be standardised and industrialised and easy to ship, sell and understand. That makes it difficult for this type of farming”.  

Download the full event synopsis

Watch the entire presentation (for press use only!) The recording cannot be published.

TO SUSTAINABILITY AND BEYOND is the second of the Mad about Denmark series of events, in collaboration with the Danish Agriculture & Food Council, which invite you to discover Danish gastronomy, its great protagonists and its excellent products. Cradle of new trends, Denmark has made its ”Mad”, food in Danish, an international reference and synonymous with innovation.