Changing Communities With Food

The philosophy so successfully communicated by these fine people—those priests and doctors—was that if you want to live a long and healthy life on earth, and avoid going to hell, what you have to do is eat something of inferior taste and get it over with in a hurry.

Not only was the food culture of my childhood unsustainable, it was also undelicious. The sad thing is that my mother's and father's generation didn't have the bandwidth to capture the scope of their losses.

Our ambition was not to win Michelin stars; it was to change the system, to change the current paradigm, and we figured out that we could not do that alone. . . . We had to unbolt and engage the most important stakeholders on the scene of food culture into our agenda.

For centuries in Denmark—and also in Sweden and Norway—the idea of preparing wonderful meals for your loved ones was considered a sin, aligned with theft, abuse of alcohol, exaggerated dancing, incest and masturbation.