“You are what you eat,” Rene Redzepi utters the adage at the beginning of his new Apple TV+ docuseries, Omnivore. While the quote generally refers to health and fitness, Redzepi, who serves as the show’s co-creator, executive producer, and narrator, takes it in a much broader sense.
Chef and owner of Noma, the Copenhagen-based three-star Michelin restaurant that has been named one of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants five times, Redzepi has spent the last two decades studying food — not just how it gives us energy, but how it connects cultures, powers economies and drives politics — and how food is not only the building block of our bodies, but also a mirror through which humanity reveals its greatest strengths and worst vices.
Each episode of Omnivore invites viewers to tell the human story behind an ingredient as diverse as chili, tuna, salt, bananas, pork, rice, coffee, and corn. Along the way, we experience humanity at its best – feats of ingenuity and cross-cultural connection as advances in genetics and chemistry help feed a burgeoning global population, how growing demand for tuna spawns engineering innovations, and how a simple ingredient like chili connects people from as far away as Bangkok and the Louisiana bayou.
We also see the worst of people. We meet workers at the bottom of global supply chains, marginalized by low wages and unsafe working conditions. We witness how climate change and biodiversity loss threaten farmers’ harvests and livelihoods. We come face to face with the brutal reality of industrial animal agriculture. We even learn that raw materials like coffee and bananas were at the root of some of the last century’s worst humanitarian disasters, including the Rwandan genocide and political uprisings in Latin America.
If we are what we eat, Omnivore paints a complex portrait: are we cunning and compassionate, or cruel, willing to harm the environment and society in order to make a quick buck and eat cheap food? Perhaps we are a little of both.
Redzepi and writer, co-creator and executive producer Matt Golding joined Atmos on a video call from Noma to reflect on lessons learned from the show ahead of its release.
