Food and people

IOS REVIEW BLACK CYAN MAGENTAYELLOW

A reverence for raw produce and simple cooking techniques heralds a new back-to-basics culinary movement

PPlluussThe ultimate Japanese restaurant, summer cocktails

and Skye Gyngell’s gorgeous greenery

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THEINDEPENDENTON SUNDAY

7 JUNE 2009

SUPER NATURALFood Special

IOS REVIEW BLACK CYAN MAGENTAYELLOWIOS REVIEW BLACK CYAN MAGENTAYELLOW

7 JUNE 2009 I THE INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY 8

Food Special

PHOTOGRAPHS BY PER-ANDERS JORGENSEN

BACK TO NATUREWhat happens when you get eleven of the world’s best chefs, take them to a forest and make them forage for

their ingredients? Terry Durack reports on the raw food, raw energy and raw passion of ‘SuperNatural’ eating

At the World Business Summit in Copenhagentwo weeks ago today, the UN Secretary-GeneralBan Ki-Moon urged the business leaders of theworld to do what they could to reduce green-house gases. At the same time, just across town,

in a converted whale-blubber warehouse in Christianshavn,some of the greatest chefs in the world were coming up withtheir own, edible responses to climate change.

Massimo Bottura, the two-Michelin-starred chef of Italy’sOsteriaFrancescana, created a dish for the occasion entitled“Pollution”. “I read a report describing how our oceans willlookin2050,” he said. “There will be no sea bass, no life on thesea bed, just giant squid and seaweed.” Moved by this bleakpicture, he created a cold, primeval pool of swampy greenandgrey juices – made from oyster, squid, monkfish liver and

foraged samphire, and topped with a “toxic scum” of lemonyfoam;achilling, and chilled, indictment of how we are despoil-ingourenvironment. I tasted it gingerly, thinking that I mightdie;but itwasasfresh and exhilarating as a sea-salty breeze.

Bottura was one of 11 celebrated chefs drawn from the US,Italy, the UK, Spain, Germany, France and Japan to ReneRedzepi’s ground-breaking Noma restaurant in the Danishcapital for Cook it Raw!, a culinary think-tank culminatingin a banquet created from raw food, native Danish ingredi-ents, minimum heat and low-energy cooking. The chefs,who have notched up 20 Michelin stars between them, rep-resented numbers one, three, 11, 13, 31 and 40 in the 2009World’s 50 Best Restaurants list.

Most of the dishes were produced using little or no conventional energy. That meant no food processors, ‘

Raw of approval:Tartare BC (beef served

in bark) by Davide

Scabin; left, Claude

Bosi’s spider-crab dish

Jorgensen PhotographyPer-Anders Jörgensenpa@jorgensen.se+44 20 8816 8716+46 705 231494