“We should know where our food comes from." This is one of those clichés we use when discussing everything we eat whether it’s in a restaurant or if we are cooking at home. But it's rare to see the journey of food from where it’s grown, to how it’s sold, to where it’s plated.
Omnivore, the new docuseries streaming on Apple TV+, takes viewers on a detour through the global food supply for an insightful look at eight common ingredients that are foundational to cuisines, essential for life, make food more desirable—and sometimes luxurious.
The show is the concept of René Redzepi, the Danish chef of Noma, the acclaimed restaurant last named best in the world in 2021, and Matt Goulding, a James Beard Award–winning journalist and the cofounder of the food and travel brand Roads & Kingdoms.
Redzepi and Goulding focus on one ingredient for each episode and use powerful storytelling to highlight the people who farm, grow, and sustain the systems behind each one. These compelling stories are supported by mounds of sea salt, eye-popping bites of chiles, and mouthwatering stacks of tortillas. It’s an engaging journey that takes viewers inside Tokyo’s fish markets, where the prices that are set determine how much an omakase will run in Los Angeles or Chicago.
Omnivore is one of the few food series that shows why geopolitics impact your burritos as much as it does foie gras. “Coffee” takes viewers to Rwanda to explain how our daily habits have a relationship with that nation’s genocide in 1994. “Tuna” explores the world’s changing palates — especially those of Americans and Westerners — that are fueling demand for fattier seafood as oceans are being depleted. And there are well-rounded perspectives on corn, whose heirloom varieties are being preserved in parts of Mexico while industrial versions are stretched for ethanol in Iowa.
This is a refreshing change for a food show that asks tough questions about the environment and sustainability, including, “Can our food system sustain our global appetite?” Will climate change make it difficult to cultivate rice, a food that sustains three-quarters of the planet.
I sat down with Redzepi and Goulding to discuss how Omnivore came to life and to ask more questions including whether we’ll be able to enjoy some of the world’s most important foods in the future.
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.
JR: Each episode doesn't necessarily go to where the ingredients are indigenous to. For example, you're in Serbia talking about paprika and talking about chiles. Why did you decide to go to some of these places that people wouldn't necessarily think of going to?
MG: The amazing thing about food is how it's traveled, how it's moved around the world. And I think, in the case of chili pepper, it's honestly one of the most extraordinary journeys of all. We're talking about a fruit from the Amazon basin that was eaten by birds. And the seeds spread outwards from there, and then suddenly the Portuguese bring them back to Europe. And from there, it goes to India and to Goa, and then it just explodes. And it becomes not just an ingredient, but an integral part of the identity of these nations and people and cultures.
JR: You're asking us to take a pause and think about an ingredient’s local communities. Can you talk a little bit about that?
RR: If we understand these systems behind foods, we make better choices, I'm 100% certain of that. If we choose well there, the world is better off. And while we want Omnivore to inspire people to think about that, we definitely don't want to be a lifted finger telling everyone, "Do this, don't do that.” We want to inspire people through these beautiful images, wonderful people, and help them understand, “Wow, this really matters. I can be, in a small way, a part of a productive change by switching up my coffee.”
JR: What are some of the choices that you think people should be making?
MG: I think the classic example would be commodity coffee versus specialty coffee. Commodity coffee is an example of an ingredient that comes essentially through colonization and was perpetuated by that type of relationship. And if you look at it as we do in our “Coffee” episode with Rwanda, before the genocide, coffee was exacerbating social differences and making the discrepancy of wealth even greater, and so it was a contributing factor to this extraordinarily horrific event that took place.
What we see in this episode is what happened afterwards. People who escaped the genocide and came back and helped plant the seeds for a new coffee economy, one built on respect for the ingredient and the ones who were growing it. And now they grow some of the greatest coffee in the world. And it has been a fundamental piece of the economic transformation of Rwanda.
JR: Tell me about the questions around sustainability and climate that run through each episode.
MG: We tried to build as many of those ideas into the “Rice” episode as possible, which is an ingredient that is so deeply affected by climate and by this highly variable monsoon that's only getting more unpredictable as time goes on. And so we really wanted to look at the tension inherent in an ingredient that we need more of to feed the world, but that we're growing less of due to unpredictable harvests. I think we tried as much as possible to remind people just how directly connected food and the weather are.
RR: Climate is potent, it's a main theme, but we don't want people to be scared to participate in change. And we don't want the series to be a doomsday watch because there's plenty of that. Rather, we wish for people to watch Omnivore and be hopeful.
JR: What are you hoping that people will take from this series into the future?
RR: We met incredible amounts of people who are working so hard to just make things better with no real economical future ahead of them. It's just pure passion driven by wanting to make things better. And I wish for people who watch this to also feel that.
JR: What's your favorite episode?
RR: I love “Chile” because we collectively, as a team at Noma, had 15 minutes of insanity together when we all ate that spicy, super hot pepper. The one that perhaps surprised me the most was “Banana.” It's this fruit that's everywhere. Even if you're in the Arctic Circle and there's a store there, there's hardly anything but there will be bananas. The same Cavendish everywhere. I was actually floored by the story of the banana. It truly is stranger than fiction. That one fruit can have done so much.
MG: For me, I have to say my favorite episode is “Tuna.” I live in Spain, where the episode begins. It was kind of the first idea that we had. We said to Apple’s creative team, "Listen, this is what it could be. We're going to go to southern Spain and follow a single tuna as it makes its way from the Mediterranean to the auction floor of Toyosu Market in Tokyo."
Beyond being a highly charged, swashbuckling episode, I think the underlying idea is, food has always been at the forefront of globalization. It's always been the driving engine of these types of massive global shifts. It is truly at the very heart of everything that we do and everything that we are. And that ultimately is what we're trying to show you episode by episode in Omnivore.