In ‘Omnivore,’ René Redzepi Takes a New Look at What We Eat

The interview has been condensed and edited by Karen Yuan for length and clarity. Listen to the conversation on a special episode of ‘Dinner SOS’ here.

Jamila Robinson: Can you tell us about how the series came to be, what curiosities you were chasing?

René Redzepi: I thought about the great nature documentaries like Planet Earth, David Attenborough, that scope of respect and dedication to the natural world. Could we have something similar for the food world?

Matt Goulding: We wanted to try to aim for the biggest story possible. And that starts with the natural world. How do we understand the food world through that prism, which is something that I think we’ve kind of grown so distanced from.

JR: In each episode you focus on a different ingredient. You cover chile, bluefin tuna, salt, banana, pig, coffee, and corn. If those are manifestations of the natural world, what made you want to choose those ingredients in particular?

RR: To choose eight was actually such an important process, because we could have chosen eight of the staple foods. Like we could have potatoes in there, sugar, wheat, but we thought perhaps it would be a little bit too one-note.

MG: The journey of an ingredient is such a unique and intimate reflection of who we are. I think the idea for us was, “Let’s find a few foundational core staples that really shape civilization.” That’s rice, that’s corn, that’s salt. Let’s also find some ingredients that maybe aren’t necessarily central to our survival but are absolutely central to our quality of life. That’s chili pepper or coffee. And all three of us have a cup of coffee here right now. It’s the kind of thing that’s just part of our life that we don’t normally stop to think about. What if we told you a story about the 40 individual people across the planet who are responsible for bringing that one bean from, in this case Rwanda, to downtown Manhattan to create this cup of coffee?

JR: You just touched on something that I think is so important in this series. You take a walk through the supply chain and talk about the geopolitics of each of these ingredients. Can you talk a little bit about what you wanted people to take away from the culture and politics of each of those ingredients?

MG: I think we’re so used to watching the end of the food chain on television, the cooking of the food. We wanted to restore this sense of food being the most important thing that we have. Having worked with Bourdain, of course, we all know that he gave a sense of, “Food is politics, food is culture, food is society.” So we’re standing on the shoulders of his work or the work of any number of incredible shows that came before it.

We went to 16 countries and five continents. We have directors from six different countries who help bring these eight episodes to life. And so there’s a lot of perspectives.