Vild Mad is René Redzepi’s wild food foraging initiative

Denmark – The aim of the programme and accompanying app is to educate people about how to bring naturally grown ingredients into their kitchens.

As people become more attuned to Whole-system Thinking, from the amount of wastage in the food industry to the value of organically sourced goods, their appetite is growing for seasonally grown crops with unique flavours – often lost in mass industrial farming.

Vild Mad (Wild Food) was founded on the belief that we should be able to gather food from the forest in the same way that we pick up goods at a supermarket. The aim of the programme is to encourage sustainable sourcing, as well as help people see the world afresh by eating it. Visitors can use the app to help them identify edible food in the wild, and visit the website to discover wild Danish landscapes, ingredients and recipes, as well as sign up for educational events.

‘Imagine if our kids were able to stroll through the wild and pluck things like we do from supermarket shelves? Discovering flavours like wild mustard growing along the shore, pineapple weed growing in the sidewalks or ants that taste like lemon,’ says René Redzepi, chef and founder of Mad, the non-profit-making food organisation behind the platform. ‘If our kids are enriched by nature, if they see how much we depend on it, and if they grow up loving it, then they will fight to take care of it.’