In the final minutes of Omnivore, narrator René Redzepi reiterates the thesis of the whole thing. “Not every bite is a revelation,” says the Noma chef, “but every bite can be a small vote for the kind of world we want to live in.”
Whether this is literally true is open for debate; Omnivore does not prescribe any specific actions that you, the viewer, might take to nudge the industry toward a more equitable, more ethical, more sustainable future.
Omnivore
But it does make you want it to be true, which counts for something. At a time when the act of buying food can feel almost totally divorced from the process of cultivating or harvesting it (when’s the last time you wondered where salt comes from?), the Apple TV+ docuseries serves up a fascinating and frequently mouthwatering appreciation of the humanity embedded in every grain of rice or slice of ham.
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Unlike most “foodie” shows, Omnivore focuses not on acclaimed restaurants, hallowed culinary traditions, or elaborate dishes, but on core staples like corn or coffee. If its subjects seem basic, however, its ambitions are lofty. Each of these becomes a starting point at which to consider the histories and cultures they reflect, the values that have shaped their path around the world, the specific individuals who ferment your Tabasco sauce or advocate for more diverse bananas.
Occasionally, it overextends itself. Redzepi’s metaphors about the “human recipe” can tend toward preciousness, and some of the supposedly slice-of-life scenes have the awkward, stilted quality of a PSA. Maybe the Indian farmer’s daughter really did want to ask her dad about his work collecting, preserving and spreading traditional varieties of rice, but the ensuing conversation sure sounds like one scripted so that Omnivore might pontificate on the importance of building a better future for our children.
More often, however, the only complaint to be made about an episode of Omnivore is really a compliment: The eight 40ish-minute episodes fly by so fast, touching on so many different intriguing ideas along the way, that each one left me hungry for further exploration.
Omnivore surely required months of careful planning, scripting and editing to execute, yet the series as a whole has the feel of a curious traveler simply going where the story takes them. Sometimes, it’s all around the world — as in the pepper-centric premiere, which hops through Serbia and Louisiana and Bangkok before landing back at Redzepi’s home turf of Copenhagen. At others, it lingers long enough to observe rhythms that unfold over months. The entire fifth episode, “Pig,” is built around a Spanish town with the unusual tradition of raising a single blessed pig each summer and auctioning it off each winter, presumably for slaughter. Its chapters might include bits of sweet romance or heartwarming family drama, morph into a history lesson or a warning about climate change, or drop into a tour through “one of the largest and rarest private banana collections in the world.”
Through all these explorations, a few common themes emerge. The most obvious is the sheer delight the series takes in food. The camera lavishes a loving attention to detail on every ingredient or dish it encounters, whether it’s a mountain of snowy fleur de sel or a country fair corn cob dripping with butter. The finest artisans, meanwhile, are framed like heroes, backlit in an almost saintly glow while they ever so carefully carve into a hunk of tuna or sprinkle salt over cabbage to make kimchi.
Another through line is a reverence for the old ways and, concurrently, a fear that they might become lost in a world that prioritizes convenience over craftsmanship and quantity over quality. In interview after interview, proprietors of family businesses express their worry that the practices they’ve worked so hard to preserve might nevertheless die out with the next generations, lured away by flashier, more lucrative or less backbreaking careers.
Meanwhile, even as Omnivore suggests that the brightest future for agriculture might be one that combines centuries of traditional knowledge with cutting-edge technology, its storytelling exhibits a healthy skepticism of the latter. It might mention in passing the scientists breeding new strains of rice that might be grown in oceans or deserts, but it’ll also wonder if the Green Revolution of the 1960s did not create more problems than it solved.
Despite this, Omnivore‘s overarching tone is one of optimism. While the series acknowledges the bloody histories and environmental catastrophes behind many of our favorite foods, it prefers to spotlight the individuals working toward a better way forward. In “Coffee,” for instance, a Rwandan farmer heartbreakingly recalls the 1994 genocide that wiped out all but four citizens of his village — but the episode’s larger focus is on the recent reclamation of the commodity, once forced upon the population by their German and Belgian colonizers, as a means of community and economic empowerment for Rwandan citizens.
If it’s not the most pointed approach, it’s certainly the more inviting one. To watch Omnivore is to get a better understanding of how much of your grocery list depends on the regularity of the monsoons in India, the containment of a deadly fungus in Colombia, the ancient know-how of pepper pickers in Serbia. It is to reflect upon how many centuries of innovation (and oppression) went into designing the banana you had this morning, how many hands have gone into the labor of turning a berry from the hills of Africa into the perfect cup of coffee. Maybe its lessons will help shape a better tomorrow, or maybe they won’t. But here and now, the show makes a persuasive case that every morsel of food is nothing short of a minor miracle.
