Kaja Sajovic is a journalist with more than twenty years of experience, covering foreign affairs, culture, and food. She wrote this piece independently, without briefing or coordination, after following the events surrounding René Redzepi’s resignation. I am publishing it here because it says something that needs to be said – and says it with a clarity and courage that the mainstream coverage has conspicuously lacked.
Andreja Lajh
If having worked as a journalist for more than 20 years taught me anything, it is that the world is not black and white – the vast part of it is actually grey and all shades of it. Even when we are talking about war, there’s so much that goes into it: the history, the cultures, the religions, the geopolitics. Leaders of democratic countries who pride themselves on »European values« and »Western values« massacre kids and women under the pretext of some higher goal. Pedophiles get away scot-free and continue to play a role in politics as long as they have the right connections. All of this absolutely applies to the country where Rene Redzepi had the misfortune to pick as his last pop-up at the helm of Noma.
And yet the US, especially its so-called liberal, socially conscious echalon, loves to see social issues as black and white. The whole cancel culture is built like that. Under the guise of improving society, the righteous warriors find immense, very unhealthy joy in bringing down individuals whom they deem toxic, racist, abusive, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, you name it.
Their battlefield is social media. They cast their judgments, with 0 room for grey, 0 room for healthy debate, and, honestly, 0 room for true improvement. What they do, though, is install fear. Fear in people to speak up, to offer a broader, more nuanced view.
Noma is one of the world’s most lauded restaurants. Not because of the way the fruit leather bugs have to be composed immaculately, but because of the way it transformed not just the Nordics from the barren land no one would visit for food to a culinary mecca. How it transformed the gastronomy from molecular cuisine, so abstract to an average person, to a gastronomy that is built on the axioms of locality, seasonality and uplifting small producers.
Noma transformed everything. And yes, it crushed a few souls along the way. But you know what, there’s not a single successful business that doesn’t. Restaurants in particular attract a very interesting, not always the most mentally sound or stable mix of individuals – huge talents and even bigger wannabes, huge egos and masochists, broken people and those with a God complex. They work under pressure, and some break. Some come out of it stronger. Some recognise they need to change, and they do their best. Redzepi, by all accounts, did just that. But for internet social warriors who discovered Noma and that high-end kitchens are not a kids’ playground about a week ago, that doesn’t matter. It’s been so long since Rene faced his demons that they can’t scroll with a few clicks.
By profession, I am a political journalist. Going through photos of charred bodies of toddlers on a daily basis. Of a whole school blown up. Oopsie. Mistake. All done and signed off by the aforementioned democratic governments with “western values”. Dead kids are collateral damage of wars we sponsor, but don’t know why we started. The EU imposes additional sanctions on nations that fight back. The twisted world we live in. The destruction, wars for nothing. But y’all internet warriors are trying to convince me that somehow we should hold chefs to much higher standards than the governments we voted for.