App shows you how to forage for wild food
Noma chef hopes model will spread
Noma chef René Redzepi has launched a foraging app — a free resource he hopes will inspire people to sustainably harvest and cook with wild food. Dubbed VILD MAD ( Danish for “wild food”), it’s an educational initiative, which includes park-ranger-led foraging walks in Denmark, a curriculum for schools as well as the app and accompanying website (vildmad.dk).
“Knowing your ABCs in nature, the flora and the fauna, the patterns in the landscape, and the rhythms in the seasons is as important, we believe, as learning math, learning to read, learning to write — especially today when people think cacao milk comes from brown cows,” Redzepi said at the World’s 50 Best Talks.
Although VILD MAD deals with Danish l and scapes, Redzepi hopes other countries will use the foraging walks and curriculum components as a model. Both the website and app have English versions, which include an encyclopedia of wild plants and recipes showcasing foraged ingredients.
The app was created to arm children and adults with the information needed to “stroll through the wild and pluck things like we do from the shelves of the supermarket,” according to a promotional video.
Melina Shannon- DiPietro, executive- director of Redzepi’s non- profit MAD, said in a statement that they “believe it can be an incredible tool for people to become acquainted with the landscape; discover new flavours and ingredients; and start new conversations about where food comes from.”
Noma was named t he World’s Best Restaurant four times in its 14- year run, and its work was central to defining the New Nordic Cuisine movement. Expanding the edible landscape through the use of hyper- local ingredients was at the heart of Noma’s appeal.
Take chickweed (Stellaria media) for instance, which is a common weed with many herbal uses. “It has a flavour like baby corn; it’s quite succulent and delicious. When we first put it on, we might as well have had crocodile on the menu. It was such a weird, exotic thing to eat a green like that. And today, people are eating mosses and pastes of black ants,” Redzepi said in a 2014 interview.
“There is an acceptance that there are lots of things to eat — that the edible world is much bigger than we realized. There’s a much bigger connection to seasonality and I think those things have changed dramatically (since Noma first opened in 2003).”