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We’re reaching out in light of the recent news about past working conditions at noma. Like many, we found the reports deeply disturbing and want to state plainly: abuse of any type is antithetical to our values.

As you may know, René has announced his resignation from the MAD board. Moving forward, please know that our dedication to MAD’s mission remains absolute as we work to build a more equitable and sustainable hospitality industry.

Our Academy programs, in particular, were created to help confront a systemic culture of aggression and abuse and begin breaking that cycle. The past weeks have made it clear that there is still much more work to be done.

We’re committed to doing that work and believe hospitality should offer the kind of work we would be proud to see our own children pursue: work that is fulfilling, safe, and dignified.

At this moment, we’re taking time to listen and better understand how we can support our community in meaningful and immediate ways. As our advocates, we truly value your thoughts and ideas, please don’t hesitate to reach out (info@madfeed.co) to us.

MAD was built by people who believe this industry can be better, people like you, and we hope you’ll continue with us as we find new ways to move forward.

With gratitude,
Melina & the MAD team

Let’s start with some current events. With immigrants making up 22% of the restaurant workforce, ICE’s horrifying violence in Minneapolis is having an especia…

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Avocados. Bluefin. Chocolate. Salmon. It’s a complicated jungle out there for anyone trying to navigate the sustainability of a number of ingredients. So we’ve started an ongoing series intended to help chefs and restaurateurs cut through the thicket of competing claims, confusing information, and plain old bullshit surrounding some foods. In each issue, we explore some of the key questions and issues and give some pointers on what to look for, and talk to chefs about how and why they’ve made the decisions they have. For this edition, we’re focusing on everyone’s favorite luxury-ingredient-turned-occasional-pizza-topping: caviar.

As the pandemic was winding down, a curious trend took hold. Diners, newly released from lockdown, were in the mood to splurge. Restaurants, decimated by the forced closures, needed to boost their checks. The two sides seemingly arrived at the same conclusion: Caviar on everything.

Restaurants started spooning it not only onto pretty much everything. The luxury ingredient still costs a ton–between 200 to 750 euros per 100 grams for beluga or ossetra. But now, it started showing up on schnitzel, on pizza and pasta, on fried chicken, on ice cream, on the rim of cans of Miller Lite. And, of course, heaped like a pile of lumpy dirty cocaine onto the manicured hands of innumerable food influencers.

The trend hasn’t shown signs of stopping. And with caviar once again showing up on those year-end lists lamenting the over-exposed and predicting the next months’ fads, we thought it a good time to look into how and if caviar can be sourced responsibly.

It may not surprise you to learn that it’s complicated. To understand why, we need to start with a little sturgeon biology lesson.

When people refer to sturgeon as the dinosaurs of the fish world, they’re not kidding: sturgeon have literally been around since brontosauruses roamed the earth. And if the species itself has had a long life on this planet, so too do the individuals that comprise it. Sturgeon in the wild live 50 to 100 years– kinda the same as humans, in other words.

Sturgeon don’t just live long; they also reach maturity later than most other fish. It varies by sturgeon species, but in most cases, their sex can’t even be determined until they are around 4 years old. If they happen to be on a farm when that discovery is made–usually via ultrasound–well, let’s just say it’s not a happy day for the boy sturgeons. Unless they win the aquaculture lottery and are chosen as brood stock, males are slaughtered soon after sexing.

Apparently, it’s not worth keeping the freeloaders around, just so they can eat up all the groceries and play video games in their parents’ basement.

Females, on the other hand, get long-term care, since they won’t lay their first set of eggs until they’re somewhere between 7 and 20 years old (although wild beluga, the late bloomers of the sturgeon family, wait until they’re roughly 35). If they’re left alive after that (not a given; see below) they won’t reproduce again for another two to nine years.

All of this helps explain what makes caviar so expensive. But as we’ll see, it also helps explain why the sustainability and animal welfare issues around them are so tricky.

Farmed, not wild

Through overfishing and habitat destruction, sturgeon populations were already seriously declining through much of the 20th century. But when the Soviet Union, the largest producer at the time, collapsed in 1990, the regulations that the government had tightly maintained for protecting the species as it swam up the Volga river to spawn in the Caspian Sea collapsed with it. Poaching exploded, and within a decade, sturgeon populations were in danger of total extinction.

To keep that from happening, an international agreement called CITES was applied to all 26 species of sturgeon, making the trade in wild sturgeon flesh or eggs illegal. In the wake of that, sturgeon farming took off, and today, there are farms in Europe, the Americas, Asia (China is, no surprise, the largest producer), and even the island of Madagascar.

Today most caviar–a full 380 tons of it each year– is farmed. But that hasn’t entirely brought an end to the wild stuff. There is a lot of money to be made in sturgeon eggs, which means there are a lot of criminals poaching them. In fact, tests carried out by the World Wildlife Foundation in 2021 found that nearly 20% of caviar from the lower Danube and Black Sea was actually wild caught. Making it worse, the CITES labeling system, which was designed to insure that caviar was both legal and traceable, isn’t being correctly enforced. According to the WWF’s caviar trade expert, Jutta Jahrl, there is a problem with both “aquaculture caviar “falsely sold as wild, but also wild caviar ‘laundered’ as farmed to legalize it.”

So, here as with cows, salmon, and carrots, we return to the golden rule of good sourcing: know your farmer.

But…aquaculture?

Yeah, we know. As we’ve written before, aquaculture can come with its own set of problems. One of the key ones facing salmon farmers, who raise their fish in open-net sea pens, isn’t really an issue here: most farmed sturgeon are raised either in land-based tanks or in ponds or lakes where there isn’t the same risk of them escaping and breeding with wild fish.

But there are other issues. Feed is a key one: In the wild, sturgeon are bottom-feeders that eat invertebrates and sometimes smaller fish. On farms, they are generally fed feed based on fish meal made from less desirable fish or fish parts. “Farming sturgeon is still an inefficient use of resources, as it relies on a high intake of fish meal and oil per gram of protein produced,” Hannah Macey from the Sustainable Restaurant Association says. “This comes with its own sustainability problems.”

A lot of fish feed is industrially produced, includes ingredients that sturgeon do not naturally eat, like soy or wheat, and is shipped from far away. More responsible farms often make their own feed–a good sign that they are serious about ensuring their fish get proper nutrition and reducing their carbon footprint.

Water pollution from fish poo and uneaten feed can also be a problem for sturgeon farming, and an especially acute one because contamination can damage the texture and flavor of the prized roe. That’s why closed systems that use a technology called Recirculating Aquaculture System that filters waste (but not valuable nutrients or minerals) from the water before it’s recirculated into the tanks are considered the gold standard.

There’s a trade-off, of course. In the wild, sturgeon are born in rivers. They migrate to the sea to grow up, and then they return to the river of their birth when it’s time for them to spawn. Closed system farms manipulate the cycle. “By controlling the water temperature you can push the sturgeon to mature at a younger age,” says Jacob Marsing-Rossini, the founder of Rossini Caviar. “Or you can let them swim outdoors, using only the sun to heat the ponds.” The latter, he adds, more closely mimics sturgeon’s natural behaviors–and, he says, produces the best quality caviar.

To Kill or Not To Kill?

Once a female sturgeon is heavy with eggs (and here the operative word is ‘heavy’; the average fish produces between 5 and 20 kilos at a go, with superachievers cranking out up to 100 kilos), the farmer needs to figure out how to extract the eggs at the optimal moment while doing least damage to the roe.

For a long time, damage to the fish wasn’t really a part of the equation: the traditional method is just to kill it (most commonly via a blow to the head or bolt gun) and pull out the eggs. But in recent decades, another approach has emerged and positioned itself as more ethical.

Some farms have employed what is basically a sturgeon caesarian, cutting an incision in the belly–sometimes large enough that it requires stitches after the eggs are extracted. But the method that most frequently gets heralded as ‘ethical’ is so-called milking. Invented by German marine scientist Angela Köhler, the fish’s belly is massaged in a way that it releases the eggs. The fish stays alive and can theoretically go on to produce more roe.

Not everyone is convinced that ‘milking’ fish is actually kinder. To get them to release their eggs, the sturgeon are injected with hormones, and the handling itself induces stress. “From a welfare perspective, we just don’t know whether no kill is better, because the ways that they extract the eggs can be quite harmful,” says Wasseem Emam, director of the Ethical Seafood Research organization. “You can see lethargy in the fish afterwards, or changes in their eating behavior.”

And stress, as we all know, can be its own killer. “Does it make much sense?,” asks Marsling-Rossini, whose caviar is produced using traditional slaughter methods. “Because you can milk it, fine, but is the story worth anything, if the sturgeon is killed four or five months later?

But while we’re on the subject of animal welfare, here’s one other thing to ask about: purging. Because the flavor of high-quality caviar is delicate, and what the fish eats can interfere with it, it’s common for producers to stop feeding their fish before they slaughter. In many cases these fasts are a matter of a few days to a week or so. But some producers intent on “purity” extend them for as long as two months, or longer.

Some Alternatives?

In sum: there’s a lot of uncertainty and opacity around caviar. Sourcing it responsibly means getting to know your supplier, and maybe even visiting their farms. It definitely means asking a lot of detailed questions: Where are the fish raised? What are they fed? How is their water cleaned and heated? At what age do they produce eggs, and how are those eggs extracted?

Once you know the answers, you might decide to source it only from small farms that meet your standards for responsibility.

Or, you might decide to start looking at options, either with other kinds of fish roe, alternative versions made from algae, or even the recently developed cultivated version.

Or, you might decide that the many years and amazing biology that goes into producing it deserves a more considered treatment than being sucked off a chicken nugget.

Or, you might take a page from chef Ángel León and opt out all together. Although his restaurant Aponiente in southern Spain is devoted entirely to seafood, it doesn’t serve caviar. “It doesn’t really make sense in my kitchen,” Ángel says. “It’s become a kind of global topping, like mayonnaise. Or ketchup.”

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Starting from Zero-Zero | Eilia Attar

When you ask most people why they became chefs, they will tell you it has to do with love: a love for food, or for the people who cooked for them when they were small, or for the way that food itself expresses love. But what if love isn’t enough?

I was born in Iran in 2000, into a world where food, family, and tradition were at the heart of daily life. My earliest memories were filled with the smell of my mother’s cooking. She was, and still is, an excellent cook, the kind of woman who can create magic with the simplest ingredients. Ghormeh Sabzi was always there, slow-cooked and deeply comforting, with parsley, fenugreek and dried limes. As a child, I didn’t know what “fine dining” meant, but I knew what it meant to love food. I loved sitting at the table, tasting, smelling, and watching. I think that was where everything started, not with a knife in hand, but a spoon.

For a long time, cooking was just a quiet love. I studied mining engineering at university because it seemed like the responsible path. But when I was 18, something shifted inside me. I began learning to cook seriously, watching every detail in the kitchen and teaching myself step-by-step. I started to see kitchens as places where I could build something beautiful with my own hands. I realized that food wasn’t just something I liked, it was the only thing that truly made me feel alive.

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MAD X Belmond

Last week we brought together teams from Belmond Hotels for a series of talks and workshops centered on creativity in the kitchen. Featuring insights on hyper-seasonality and circular cooking processes from Matt Orlando at ESSE, colorful flavor experiences from the R&D labs of Noma Projects and Noma Kaffee, and focused explorations of the Nordic Food Manifesto as a catalyst for cultural revolution. At its core, creativity not only means thinking expansively, but also placing the necessary restrictions to make a change in both a sustainable and interconnected way.

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You might not expect a fine-dining chef like Matt Orlando to get ideas from 7-Eleven.

And yet, as the chef behind Copenhagen’s newly opened Esse, (and Amass before that), recently told a symposium on upcycling at the city’s Hotel and Restaurant School, that’s exactly what happened. After the Scandinavian division of the convenience store chain purchased a large quantity of a chocolate alternative, called THIC, that Matt and his team had developed, to replace the chocolate in their chip cookies, Matt asked the 7-Eleven bosses how they would market the new product. Their reply came as a shock. ‘They said, ‘We’re not,” Matt told the audience. ‘We’re going to replace the chocolate and not tell anyone.”

Once he got over his surprise (at 7-Eleven, they now refer to the sweets flecked with chunks of THIC simply as ‘Light’ or ‘Dark’ Cookies), Matt started wondering if there wasn’t a lesson there for him. At his previous restaurant, Amass, tableside discussions of the ingredients, techniques and processes that went into reducing the kitchen’s environmental footprint constituted a core part of the place’s identity and its guests’ experience. But Amass had closed in 2023, and as he opened Esse, Matt was re-evaluating that approach. “One of the things I came to understand,” he said, “Is that we need to figure out a new way to talk about these things.”

He’s not alone in that thinking. Gathered on stage with him at the November symposium to discuss their own approaches to running environmentally responsible restaurants were some of the most innovative folks working in the arena: Lara Espirito Santo and George McLeod of Lisbon’s Sem; Albert Franch Sunyer of Helsinki’s Nolla; Christoffer Norton and Ben Hurley of Aarhus’ Domestic, and Ryan Walker, from London’s Silo, whose founder, chef (and MAD Academy resident faculty) Doug McMaster pioneered the notion of “a restaurant without a bin.” And all of them agreed: communication was one of the trickiest parts of what they were trying to pull off.

The vocabulary alone can be confusing. Consider the sheer number of words available to describe the approach: Recycled. Zero Waste. Upcycled. Regenerative. Circular.

In many ways, the issue of which word(s) to use in zero waste restaurants mirrors that of sustainability in general. After all, terms like ‘sustainable’ and ‘green’ carry a huge range of nuance and interpretation–to say nothing of questions. (Are you sustainable if you source locally but your guests fly in from all over the world? Can you call yourself ‘green’ if your ingredients are organic but you serve meat? Etc. Etc. Etc).

But the words have also become so overused, and— as anyone who has ever watched as, say, McDonald’s attempts to position itself as climate friendly—appropriated as to be virtually meaningless. At Nolla, Albert says, “We don’t even use the word ‘sustainability’ because the big terms tend to be used by people or groups that you don’t want to associate yourself with.”

Sem doesn’t use the word either. Instead, Lara says, they focus on outcomes like responsibility and impact. And they define very clear goals where “we talk about supporting regenerative agriculture and fighting food waste. Those are the main objectives that guide every decision that we make.”

Beyond the relative value of the words, there’s also diner preference to consider, since it turns out that not everyone wants a lesson on environmental stewardship when they go out to eat. “You want to create an environment where you feel welcome, you feel comfortable,” said Ryan in his talk at the symposium. “Not a restaurant that is trying to shove the idea of sustainability down your throat.”

Yet all of those challenges are compounded when the notion of reducing waste (Or byproducts. Or trim. Or discard. You get the point) is introduced into the equation. The word, after all, “is a pejorative, with negative connotations,” says Lara. “We still get guests who ask, ‘But what do you do with the leftover food on people’s plates?’ Because that’s what they think waste is: something designated for the bin.”

The chefs and founders who joined the Upcycling Symposium have a more sophisticated understanding. With their cooking, all of them strive to use the parts of vegetables and other ingredients that many kitchens discard–and not just incorporate them, but enhance them explicitly for what they bring to a dish. That might mean, as Matt does, incorporating the shells of fava beans into a tart crust for the distinctive flavor–distinctive from the beans themselves–they add, or using fermentation to create, as George does, a tomato amino from the previous year’s seeds that can add punch in the dead of winter. “The constant objective is to create intrinsic value from things that it’s much easier to throw away,” Lara explains.

But ingredients are just the start of it. At Silo, the restaurant itself is built from upcycled products: countertops from used plastics, floors from used cork–an inspiration that Esse followed when it commissioned artist Thomas Dambo to craft its striking chandeliers from upcycled wood.

At Domestic, they’ve dramatically reduced their paper use, and are aiming to eradicate it altogether in the coming year. At Nolla, empty wine bottles are cut and polished into glassware, produce is delivered in reusable crates, and they’ve even managed to reduce the chemicals they use by investing in a machine that ozonates regular water, imbuing it with disinfectant and antimicrobial properties so that they can do away with synthetic cleaning supplies.

These are just examples; what stands out most about each of these places is the holistic approach they take to the entire ecosystem of a restaurant, not just the food on the plate. Yet for all their common purpose, each of the them takes a slightly different approach to actually communicating about what they’re doing.

At one end of the spectrum was a restaurant like Amass, which was, as Matt explains, “very aggressive about how we talked about these things, and really focused on that vocabulary of stems and skins and seeds.” At the other, is Nolla, which doesn’t really talk about its initiatives at all, preferring instead to ensure that, from the guest’s experience, dinner is just like at any other “regular” restaurant. “From the very beginning, we believed that if we didn’t normalize what we do, it would stay something strange, weird, basically artificial,” Albert says. “That it would only be a concept. And not what we wanted it to be, which is a real model. For it to be normal.”

In the dining room, Sem is similarly reticent. “Most people come because someone told them this was a great restaurant, and at the end of the day, that’s what we have to do: we’re a restaurant, people have to come because it’s good,” Lara says. “If we can get some information across it’s awesome, but that’s not the objective.”

Still, there’s a clue for those who want to know more. On Sem’s menu, each item bears a tiny number, like the ones in casual restaurants that identify allergens. Only instead of flagging lactose or crustaceans, these correspond to the dish’s positive impacts: upcycled ingredients, an invasive species, a regenerative method of growing. Importantly, this “impact key” not only gives information to the guests, but to the staff as well. “If people are there just to eat and have a good time, they can look at it, and that’s it,” Lara says. “But if someone’s like, ‘oh, this is really cool or ‘what do you mean by this?’ then it’s a conversation opener for the guests without being in their face.”

Along with communicating openly about their zero waste practices in their social media, creating that kind of hint or invitation in the dining room without being overbearing, is also a common strategy. Everything from unusual looking cutlery to, well, a composter in the middle of a room (Nolla) can function as a trigger, piquing the curiosity of a guest to ask a question, and inviting the staff to go deeper.

But even then, it can be tricky to calibrate. How do you judge how much information a guest wants? How do you train your staff to respond sensitively? These are questions that, as he launches Esse, Matt is considering anew. He knows that he wants the conversation around their objectives to be more refined than it was at Amass, and to that end, he is moving toward a more holistic view of how they discuss the raw materials with their guests. “Before, I think we didn’t know how to talk about in a way that was respectful towards the ingredients without referring to stems and skins and seeds. But if you make a smoked oil from the flesh of a tomato, you don’t call it a smoked tomato flesh oil–it’s just a smoked tomato oil. So if we make it from the skins, why should we say that? It stigmatizes the ingredients out of the gate.”

And, like the others, he and his staff are making a point of taking their cues from the guests. Although each table is greeted with what he calls an ‘opening spiel’ that provides some context they otherwise forego the process-oriented explanations with each dish unless explicitly asked. (Having a dish of noodles made from fishbones usually does the trick.)

All of the chefs left the Upcycling Symposium excited by their exchange, and by the sense–still fledgling but enthusiastically greeted by the students in the audience– that their approaches were cohering into something like a movement. But they also recognize that they haven’t figured out all the answers when it comes to communication.

As if to prove the point, a week after the event, one critic at a Danish newspaper faulted Esse for not explaining enough. “So it’s still very much a work in progress,” says Matt.

Still, there are encouraging signs. On one recent night, the girlfriend of someone on the Esse team came in to eat at the bar. She had never been to Amass, and when she walked into the new place she had no idea what it was trying to accomplish. But at home that night, “she told her boyfriend ‘I left the restaurant and I wanted to do something; maybe I could start by taking a shorter shower,’” Matt recounts. “That’s exactly the kind of reaction that you want: for someone to leave your restaurant and ask, ‘what can I do?’”

What about you? How do you communicate about zero waste and other initiatives in your restaurant—or do you? Share your ideas in the comments!

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WHAT WE’VE BEEN UP TO

MAD Monday LA

Last month we hosted a MAD Monday in LA. We gathered our West Coast friends for a conversation about borders, exploring the richness that movement (of people, ingredients, ideas) adds to our industry. It was the first of a series of events we’ll be continuing in the spring…

Coming Soon: MAD LA 2026

And so the news is out: MAD is coming back to Los Angeles in 2026!

Stay tuned ☀️

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At one of the highest points of his career, chef Aitor Zabala chose to make a statement. As he stepped onto the stage this past June to don the Michelin chef’s jacket that signalled that his Los Angeles restaurant, Somni, had just been awarded three stars, Aitor, who was born in Spain, turned to the audience, and gestured triumphantly to his t-shirt. It was emblazoned with the words ‘Immigrants Feed America.’

That t-shirt (which echoed one that fellow Spaniard José Andrés had worn to the 2019 State of the Union address) may have seemed like a small gesture. But in the current wave of raids, detentions, and extrajudicial deportations directed against immigrants and that have hit the US restaurant industry–where a little more than 1 in 5 workers were born outside the country–with brutal force, even a small act of resistance can inspire others. At a time in which so much is at risk, and in which so many feel overwhelmed and fearful (for their jobs, for the businesses they have built, for their families and neighbors, for their own well-being, for democracy itself), even a small act can remind others that they are not alone, or helpless.

So we thought we’d take the occasion of this newsletter to provide some context. To remind our readers of this industry’s history of resistance, and how, in gestures both large and small, it has in the past said no to injustice and authoritarianism.

In truth, food has always functioned as a form of resistance. From the Africans who carried recipes and seeds with them when forced aboard transatlantic slave ships, and thereby kept their culture from being eradicated in the harsh new world in which they landed; to the ollas communes–or collective kitchens–that spontaneously emerged to feed Chile’s most vulnerable following the 1970s coup (and that were so threatening to the newly installed dictatorship that the Pinochet regime labelled them a terrorist organization); to all of us today who try to eat locally and support regenerative agriculture as a means of rejecting the various forms of damage caused by industrial food production: what we put in our mouths can be an important means of critiquing, rejecting, and in a few cases even overthrowing those in power.

The French Revolution

A case in point: It’s safe to say that there would be no French Revolution had women in Paris’s markets not started rioting over the high price of bread one October morning in 1789, then marched to Versailles to make sure the king knew of their displeasure. But you know what else historians agree contributed to the Revolution?

Coffee houses. Paris got its first–Le Procope, still in existence—in 1686, and it and the others that followed quickly became favored hangouts for smart people with things to say (including a few with names like Locke and Rousseau), to exchange news, and to discuss limiting absolute monarchy and shit. Coffee houses, in other words, provided the space for the exchange of critical thinking and revolutionary ideas that we know of today as The Enlightenment.

Italy under Fascism

In one of the truly more insane measures of Italy’s Fascist government, Mussolini attempted–we are not making this up–to ban pasta. His reasons were partly economic; Italy did not produce enough wheat to meet its needs, and il Duce wanted to reduce reliance on foreign imports and boost homegrown rice production instead. But there were also ideological concerns.

Fascism was inspired by the artistic and social movement known as Futurism, whose leader, Tommaso Marinetti, wrote a Manifesto of Futurist Cuisine that blamed pasta-eating for causing “weakness, pessimism, nostalgic inactivity and neutrality”--in other words, for converting Italy’s manly men into a bunch of lazy sadbois unable to get off their mamma’s couch because their tummies were too full. Luckily, the far more reasonable women of southern Italy were having none of it, and protested the proposed ban, so the Fascists had to content themselves with pro-rice propaganda instead.

Once the Second World War broke out, Italian farmers were required to turn over their crops and other production to the state. Both out of self-preservation and as a form of resistance, many illegally withheld part of their production from the regime. So when Mussolini was deposed and arrested in July 1943, and Italians mistakenly believed the war was over, the seven Cervi brothers of Emilia Romagna were able to break out their stash of flour, scrounge up some butter and cheese from local dairies, and invite everyone in town to celebrate with 380 kilos of ‘pastasciutta’ or ‘dry pasta’. To this day, Italians annually celebrate the day that Mussolini fell, with communal pastasciutta antifascista dinners. It’s on July 25, should you want to join.

Europe under the Nazis

There’s a reason that Casablanca was set in a nightclub, and it wasn’t just to provide Humphrey Bogart with a steady supply of alcohol. Restaurants, cafés, and bars in Europe and North Africa functioned as important hubs for the resistance against the Nazis, providing meeting places, safe houses, and storage for supplies and weapons. At Café Gondrée in occupied Normandy, the French owners, unbeknownst to the German officers who hung out there regularly, were members of the Resistance. Wife Thérèse spoke Alsatian, so she could understand what the German officers were saying; she would tell her husband Georges, who spoke English and would transmit the intelligence to British agents in the area. After the D-Day landings, the couple and their two young daughters became the first French family to be liberated. Their café, renamed the Pegasus Bridge Café, is still in business.

The owner of Cafe Smolders in The Netherlands helped disgruntled German soldiers defect; Frituur de la Bourse in Brussels was a meeting place for the Belgian resistance; the Hotel Montholon in Paris (still in existence!) provided accommodation for the members of the lines that helped citizens escape from occupied territory. The owners of the Martutene pub outside San Sebastián would take care of downed Allied airmen who managed to escape over the Pyrenees and get them to the British embassy. And in Copenhagen, a member of the Danish Resistance assassinated a Nazi snitch at Rosengårdens Vinstue (also still around; the bar’s slogan ‘a shot for a shot’ describes its practice of showing the bullet hole to anyone who indulges in a slug of Gammel Dansk).

It wasn’t just restaurateurs. Winemakers throughout occupied France hid their best bottles from the Nazis, sometimes even slapping good labels on plonk and figuring the barbarians wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. Others fought back in more serious–and dangerous–ways. With his vineyard close to the demarcation line between the Nazi-controlled north and the puppet Vichy regime in the south, wine grower and négociant Jean Monmousseaux frequently had to cross the border with wine shipments—which conveniently allowed him to stuff some of his barrels with weapons and actual Resistance fighters. In Champagne, some of the great houses transformed their crayères–the 2000-year-old chalk caves where they stored their bottles–into secret weapons depots for the Resistance that would help arm the Allies on D-Day.

In Marseille, which remained unoccupied until late in 1942 and, thanks to an underground workshop that forged documents, became the city to go to if you were trying to get an illegal exit visa, a group of artists, intellectuals, actors, and political activists who gathered regularly at the café Bruleur du Loup hatched a scheme to start a secret food cooperative. The fruit-and-nut bars they produced from the dates and almonds still arriving in Marseille’s port didn’t fall under rationing restrictions, so the coop could sell them in tobaccoists and boulangeries throughout the city, providing a sort of cheap energy bar for a population that was already suffering reduced food supplies and a salary for the refugee-workers it employed. For one of the Cooperative des Croque-Fruits’ founders, an actor who was also the organization’s leading salesman, distributing the bars gave him the perfect alibi for his other work: handing out political leaflets and secretly promoting the resistance.

Even the Michelin guide contributed to the Allied war effort, allowing the US Army to reprint the detailed maps (though not, presumably, its recommendations; the military probably didn’t want anyone taking a detour, no matter how worthy) from its 1939 guide and distribute them to Allied commanders to help them navigate their troops eastward from the Normandy beaches.

Russian Invasion of Ukraine

Within days of Russia invading Ukraine in February 2022, chefs like Ievgen Klopotenko had converted their restaurants into canteens to feed both citizens and soldiers, and their kitchens into occasional bomb shelters. Others, like chef and food writer Olia Hercules, who is based in London, launched crowdsourcing initiatives to raise money for Ukraine. Still others, like Private Breus, a former chef at Kyiv’s well-regarded Veranda and one-time participant on Master Chef Ukraine, simply enlisted and kept cooking–this time for his fellow soldiers.

Klopotenko and other chefs also enacted a stunning bit of cultural resistance: he launched an international campaign to get the cooking of borsch, a soup that Russia would like to claim as its own, inscribed on UNESCO’s cultural heritage list. In June 2022, the UN agreed, and gave it protected status.

And… today?

There have been some efforts within the industry in the US to resist the roundups and deportation of immigrants, and to protect staff from the administration’s crackdown. A lot of these are kept quiet, out of fear of attracting unwanted attention. But in Chicago, for example, one bagel shop owner closed the doors of his restaurant but continued to sell bagels out the window so that staff members who didn’t feel safe coming into work could stay home. In the same city, as well as in Washington DC (and probably elsewhere), some industry people have started closed chatgroups on Telegram and Signal to share intel about raids and legal advice. In Denver, Tiffany Hernandez, a bartender and founder of Escuelitas, has been offering Know Your Rights courses for employees.

In Los Angeles, Javier Cabral, the editor of LA Taco, (who will be moderating our MAD Monday on Borders next week!), has reported on some mom-and-pop places that have locked their doors and done service from a window in order to protect their staff. And he sees the introduction of a weekly “Rustic Cantina” night at the fine dining Rustic Canyon as a way for executive chef Jeremy Fox to platform Mexican culture and, more specifically, his head-chef, Elijah Deleon. But he’s been disappointed, he says, that the restaurant community in LA hasn’t been more outspoken.

“I’ve spoken to owners off the record, and they’ll say things like ‘our attorney warned us against speaking out or posting anything because ICE is using social media to target places,” he says. “The more quiet you are, the less likely you are to be targeted.”

He understands why speaking out is a daunting prospect. “I’m not going to tell someone how to do their job or how to protect their workers,” he says. “And I know that some people want to play it safe because it’s a really tough time for restaurants in LA: a lot of places are closing because people aren’t going out to eat, because of the recession, because of the fires, because of immigration sweeps.”

But as someone who “grew up in the East-LA backyard punk scene,” Javier says, he wishes more people were taking public action. “I’d like to see more clear and direct protection from restaurants all over LA to support the working backbones of their restaurants,” he says. “The ones who have had their backs for so long.”

Are you seeing acts of resistance where you are? Let us know in the comments

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WHAT WE’RE UP TO

MAD Monday LA

Join us on November 10th for a conversation about borders and what brings us to the same table. Perhaps it’s a recipe passed through generations, a spice from across the world, or a dish that tastes like home to people from different places.

We’ll explore how our global food system has grown richer through movement, migration, and exchange with speakers Sana Javeri Kadri (founder of Diaspora Spice Co.), Lulu Wang (writer/director of The Farewell and Expats), Anthony Wang (chef/owner of firstborn), and Javier Cabral (editor-in-chief of L.A. Taco). The day includes coffee and a light lunch from Manuela.

Tickets for MAD Monday LA have sold out, but join our waiting list here to be notified if spots open up or for future events.

Taste Buds 2026

Our friends at Noma Projects have opened enrollment for their membership club Taste Buds 2026. And they’ve got a special offer for MAD Digest subscribers.

Taste Buds is how the noma team shares the things too new, too fleeting, and too incredible to stay locked in the kitchen with curious people around the world. Members get a quarterly delivery of limited products from the Test Kitchen, Fermentation Lab, and noma vault. Taste Buds also have a direct line to the noma team’s expertise through recipes, a dive into the weird and wonderful world of fermentation at home, and the chance to opt into access to member-only events.

Use the code MAD50 for €50 off your membership.

Become a Taste Bud

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Søren Ejlersen’s bid to change the world–or at least Danish agriculture–started with a kilo-bag of carrot seeds.

As the co-founder of Aarstiderne, a Danish company that supplies subscriptions of organic produce to consumers in Scandinavia, Søren thinks a lot about how to get people excited about vegetables. So when the creator of a New Mexico seed bank offered him what he promised were some amazing carrots, Søren happily—if a little skeptically— planted the seeds in Aarstiderne’s test gardens. A couple of months later, he was astonished to see the root vegetables coming in, not only in the normal orange, but in yellow, purple, and red as well.

This was in 2001, and rainbow carrots were a novelty in Denmark. As a chef himself, Søren was quick to see their potential, especially after testing proved that the colored carrots were not only trippy to look at, but highly nutritious as well. Aarstiderne began including them in the boxes they sent to their customers. But a collaboration with a Danish supermarket chain to distribute them more broadly failed several times, basically because people were too scared to buy them. “Now you can find them all over Denmark,” Søren says of the multi-hued root vegetables. “But it took ten or fifteen years for them to get there.”

He’s convinced, though, that the whole process could have happened sooner if there had been more chefs involved. Which is why, late this summer, he told the story of the amazing bag of technicolor seeds at the inaugural meeting of a new MAD initiative called Seed Chefs.

Simply put, Seed Chefs is bringing together chefs, farmers, and seed producers to collaborate on a better vegetable future. By leveraging chefs’ deep understanding of deliciousness, the program seeks to revive old plants and generate new ones, but that’s only the beginning. It is also building a network that aims to work all along the supply chain to ensure a market for the newly-introduced vegetables, a revenue stream for the farmers who grow them, and a more biodiverse agriculture.

Chefs working closely with farmers to supply their own restaurants is nothing new of course; entire Portlandia sketches have been built around the phenomenon. But what distinguishes Seed Chefs—which is currently focused Denmark but could serve as a model for collaborations around the world– is the scope: it’s not just about finding better tasting vegetables (although that in itself is a huge deal). It’s also about looking at the whole big picture of how food is grown, distributed, and consumed and saying: hey, you know who could really bring something useful to this conversation? Chefs.

As a program, Seed Chefs roams wide for its inspiration, from Mexican chef Thalía Barrios who works closely with farmers in the Oaxaca Valley that cultivate the heritage varieties of corn that she serves at her Michelin-starred restaurant Levadura de Olla, to Indian chef Ranveer Brar who has helped create a market among consumers for millet and other grains traditional to the subcontinent. One early spark came from chef Joan Roca of the three-star El Celler de Can Roca, who, together with his brothers Josep and Jordi, set out to find the especially tasty variety of beans their mother used to enjoy as a child. The quest led them north—far north. Inside the Global Seed Vault on the Norwegian island of Svalbard, way above the Arctic Circle, they found the variety they had been searching for, brought home a few examples, and worked with a local farmer in Girona, Spain to grow the beans. Within a short while, they were able to present their mom with a taste of her childhood.

At the time, Lisa Lykke Steffensen was director of the Seed Vault, and she recalls being surprised by the request. “We got visits all the time from journalists and scientists,” Lisa says. “But this was the first time a chef wanted to come. And no one had ever asked about deliciousness before.”

(Can we pause for a moment to consider how crazy that is? The largest and most diverse collection of crop seeds in the history of the world and no one had thought about how they tasted?)

The Roca brothers had tapped into an obvious, but overlooked, resource for flavor, and one that Seed Chefs plans to tap into–without necessarily trekking to the Arctic. There are seed banks all over the world, Søren points out, and they are all “filled with the magic stuff that people either don’t grow anymore or don’t even know actually exists.”

But with bigger goals than just satisfying matriarchal nostalgia, Seed Chefs is also looking to examples like Pierre Thiam for how to achieve maximum impact. Born in Senegal, Pierre is the executive chef of Nok by Alara in Lagos and fast-casual restaurant Teranga in New York, and he’s also the author of leading English-language cookbooks on West African cuisine. When he was writing the first one, he frequently found himself searching for substitutions, because many African ingredients weren’t available in the US. “At the same time,” he says, “I realized that one of the reasons Africa remains a net food importer is that our own indigenous crops are too often neglected and underutilized.” An opportunity began to take shape in his mind. “If we could find a way to promote these crops and support the farmers who grow them, we could begin to shift this story.”

The result was Yolélé, an enterprise that works with West African farmers to bring local ingredients to a global audience. Its first product was fonio, an ancient grain that checks a lot of boxes: nutty-tasting and quick-cooking; easy to grow with deep roots that restore soil; and culturally significant for the Dogon, who consider it “the seed of the universe.” It was clear to Pierre that it represented a huge opportunity. “Smallholder farmers in Africa are among the poorest people in the world, yet the crops they cultivate are some of the most resilient, nutritious, and climate-friendly,” he says. Making them accessible to a wider public would be “a triple win: a win for farmers, who would gain access to new markets; a win for the environment, since these crops are drought-resistant and grown in regenerative systems. And a win for consumers, who get access to a greater diversity of healthy, flavorful foods.”

By now, Yolélé not only supplies ingredients for Thiam’s restaurants, but with its retail arm, supports more than 700 farming families. It’s launched new products, like fonio chips and even, in collaboration with Brooklyn Brewery, a fonio beer. And it is expanding to other crops because, Pierre says, “we wanted to support farmers in maintaining their traditional methods of agriculture systems rooted in multi-cropping and crop rotation. We weren’t interested in promoting monoculture, but in strengthening the biodiversity that has always been at the heart of these resilient farming practices.”

Perhaps the greatest inspiration of all comes from Row 7, the seed innovation company founded by Dan Barber, the chef and co-owner of Blue Hill at Stone Barns restaurant in upstate New York (and MAD2 speaker!). Unlike other chef-led projects that focus on recovering old varieties, Row 7 works with plant breeders to develop new vegetables–ones that put flavor, rather than yield, first. The company models the kind of three-part collaboration that Seed Chef hopes to generate: some 175 chefs around the world, including powerhouses like Alain Passard, Mashama Bailey, Daniel Berlin, and Elena Reygadas help identify varieties with extraordinary flavor profiles; the plant breeders use cross-breeding (not genetic modification) to stabilize and accentuate those traits; and the farmers test the seeds in real growing conditions. The seeds that pass all three tests make it to market, including via a partnership with the Whole Food supermarket chain in the United States.

The collaboration has produced some legit blockbusters, like the velvety koginut squash and the sweetly pungent garleek, the love child of two alliums from opposite sides of the track. For all their trendiness, however, their purpose is serious; they and the other seeds Row7 produces are meant to help change food systems literally from the ground up. And with that kind of ambition, simply protecting heirloom varieties and planting heirloom seeds isn’t enough.

“As a reformed evangelist for heirlooms, I understand why you would go there, because that’s where the flavor is,” Dan says. “But the reason heirlooms have that flavor–the reason why our grandparents saved those seeds in the first place–is because the genetics and the environment conspired to produce a delicious plant in a specific place and time. And you can’t mummify that: the environment changes, diseases change, the soil changes, and God knows the climate changes.”

That’s why Row7 looks to plant breeders to select for traits that are both delicious (which, Dan says, is inseparable from being nutritious) and well-suited for growing at scale in current conditions. “If we don’t want to be just producing delicious vegetables for the 1%,” Dan says, “we need to take what we love about heirlooms and advance them.”

Armed with all those different pieces of inspiration and experience, the Seed Chefs project aims to have its own broad impact in Denmark. As Søren Ejlersen points out, that can’t happen fast enough: with 40% of the country’s farms closing down in the last decade, and the total number of hectares devoted to raising food crops is shrinking fast, Danish agriculture sorely needs the help. “It’s not enough for noma to work with one farm, or Geranium to work with another,” he says of two of Copenhagen’s most prominent examples. “Those projects are cool, but they don’t solve enough. We need to be more systematic.”

At his suggestion, the Seed Chef project is considering a project that would have the consortium identify five or so varieties and then introduce them via several vectors at once. “We have a system in place for retail, and another to teach kids in school about them,” he says. “Then you add in some elite chefs, and they’re not only using them in their restaurants and talking about them with their customers, but maybe they’re forming a partnership with a big hotel chain, or with canteens. That could convince the big supermarkets to take the leap.”

The chefs, in other words, are critical. “If they come in and inspire all the others to move forward, it could give the farmers the security they need to grow these vegetables. We could actually rescue Danish vegetable production.”

So watch this space. Seed Chefs held a second meeting in September (there, participants heard both from chef—and MAD7 speaker!—Emilie Qvist about how a carrot she served in her restaurant inspired a guest to seek it out from the farm that grew it and from grower Axel Munsen how small farmers like him spend 75% of their time just trying to sell their vegetables), and will hold three more before the end of the year.

And throughout, they’ll be keeping in mind a core idea, beautifully expressed by Pierre Thiam, that applies not just to Denmark, but to the whole world. “Chefs and agriculture, “ he said, “should be inseparable.”

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WHAT WE’VE BEEN UP TO

MAD Academy 2025

We’ve just wrapped two incredible weeks of MAD Academy that saw ninety eager, curious, and determined-to-make-a-difference students from around the world come to Copenhagen for our course on Environment and Sustainability. Along the way, they heard from Douglas McMaster about “why waste is a failure of imagination,” and learned how Chantelle Nicholson ensured that “no chef should have to give up everything to work” at her London restaurant Apricity. They also sampled coffee vinegar at Matt Orlando’s yet-to-open new restaurant, checked out some Greenlandic ice cores, and debated the meaning of words like ‘carbon footprint’ and ‘organic.’ Throw in a lot of good food and and a lot of new friendships, and it made for a memorable—and impactful—couple of weeks. We’ll have more on Academy soon, but for now we’ll leave you with a few snapshots and this takeaway from one student: “Be generous with your knowledge. It’s your superpower.”

Save the Date: MAD Monday in Los Angeles

On November 10, MAD brings its signature blend of high-octane ideas and community-building connection to Los Angeles. For our next MAD Monday, we’re inviting some of SoCal’s leading local voices for a conversation about Borders, and how they shape the way food moves through our world: who grows it, who cooks it, who serves it, and who gets to enjoy it.

Follow us on Instagram for more information and how to purchase tickets—coming later this week.

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Article: Patagonia Changed the Apparel Business. Can It Change Food Too?, by David Gelles, The New York Times

If you were at MAD7, you understand why we’re suc…

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Ever since Donald Trump resumed office this year and made increased tariffs a central part of his administration’s policy goals, he has plunged restaurants and producers back into the kind of economic tumult not seen since the most Xanax-prescription-increasing days of the pandemic.

For many chefs, restaurateurs and producers, the price increases aren’t even the worst of it. Even harder has been the constant uncertainty. Deadlines, that neared and were extended; percentages that were threatened, then increased, then retracted, then threatened again every time a certain someone in the White House had a temper tantrum or received a compliment.

That’s why many greeted the tariffs that were finally agreed at the start of August—including the 15% duty on goods from the European Union and 35% from Canada—with a degree of relief: the increases weren’t good, but they were less not good than they might have been. And at least there was some kind of clarity. If nothing else, the targets had stopped moving.

Except, of course, that they haven’t. By the end of that same month, Mexico was still waiting. India had been slapped with 50% tariffs for reasons almost entirely unrelated to trade imbalances. A previous agreement that allowed parcels with a value of under $800 to be mailed to the US duty-free (which many small producers around the world had used to ship directly to customers) was cancelled. And to cap it all off, a federal appeals court in the US ruled that Trump’s tariffs themselves are illegal. Just not so illegal that they couldn’t be implemented before the Supreme Court reviews the case or October 14th, whichever comes first.

If you were thinking you were getting clarity, in other words, think again.

“The Administration seems to see tariffs as part of ongoing negotiations,” says Ryan Tuttle, a senior consultant at Euromonitor International, a research and analysis company that focuses on markets and consumers. “So I think it would be a mistake to see any current deal as untouchable. If anything I think there may even be more uncertainty than there was during the spring.”

So how should restaurateurs, producers, and food entrepreneurs navigate the ongoing tumult? In addition to our conversation with Ryan, we spoke to two industry leaders on either side of the Atlantic: Isabel Coss, rising star chef and co-owner of the restaurants Pascual and Lutèce in Washington, DC; and Arianna Occhipinti, the visionary winemaker and farmer of Azienda Agricola Occhipinti in Sicily (and recent MAD Symposium speaker). With their help, we’ve pulled out some key lessons for finding a path through the confusion.

1. Expect more economic constriction

Ryan notes that although prices in the US on foodstuffs are definitely rising, it’s too early to tell how much of that increase is from tariffs and how much from inflation. And because many companies stockpiled goods in the last several months, they may not have had to make new purchases yet. But, he adds, “this is likely to get worse over time, particularly as we head into the winter and portions of the United States that were in their agricultural growing season naturally taper off for the season – leaving the country more reliant on imports for a time.”

Isabel is already feeling the impact. “All the basic products from Mexico–corn, chiles, avocados–those have all increased.” And it’s not just ingredients. She and her partner have been planning to remodel the kitchen at Pascual because the restaurant have grown, and have found that thanks to tariffs on things like steel–which rose to 50% in June–the cost has jumped. “We got a quote three months ago, and when we went to finalize things everything went up like 20%,” she says. “It wasn’t even the material costs themselves, it was just because they were trying to prepare for when they start construction.”

For her part, Arianna says they are not seeing the tariffs reflected in their profits and losses—so far. “Even with all the noise and confusion, the "numbers" on our balance sheets have not yet been directly impacted by these tariffs,” she says. “Our wine is a handcrafted product, with a deep value that goes beyond the cost of production. We don't work with a "just-in-time" logic; we plan ahead with our importers, and that has given us some breathing room.”

She is, however, detecting a slowdown in the market, with orders from the US coming in with what she describes as more caution. “This isn't just because of the tariffs,” she says, “but it’s spreading from the fear and uncertainty caused by a world that seems increasingly unstable, with conflicts and tensions everywhere. We see our importers in the United States becoming more cautious, restaurants postponing orders, and general demand slowing down.” So while their accounts are still in the black, she adds, there’s “a shift in pace that makes us realize the ground beneath our feet has become less stable.”

Both restaurants and the purveyors who supply them, are likely to encounter more constriction in the months ahead. “If prices are forced higher over the winter, Ryan says, “It is likely we’ll see consumers choosing to dine at home more, or trade down the sorts of places that they patronize.”

2. Control what you can control

Uncertainty can be paralyzing, but this is no time for sitting back. Arianna is clear on this. “As artisanal producers, we can't base our future on political hopes or promises. We simply can't afford to wait and see. Our strategy—the only one that makes sense to us—is to not give in to passivity.”

The United States is Occhipinti’s second largest market, representing a full 30% of their sales. So the winery is taking action, but judiciously. “We have decided to focus on what we can control: our physical presence,” Arianna says. “We are not planning new advertising campaigns or discounts. The only thing we are planning is to be more present in the United States with promotional events.”

Like Arianna, Ryan stresses the importance of controlling what can be controlled. He expects that restaurants will be forced to pass higher costs on to their customers, but notes that they have other tools available to help them retain guests. ”Paying close attention to keeping skilled staff and experience,” he says, “Can help soften the blow of higher prices.”

Another thing that can be controlled? Knowledge of your own accounts. With prices fluctuating so intensely these days, Isabel has begun paying more detailed attention to bills. “I’m reviewing prices and costing out dishes every week now,” she says.

3. Be flexible

It was lesson number one during the pandemic, and it’s true again. “Flexibility is key,” Ryan reminds.

For restaurants in the US, that may well mean finding local suppliers for products they have long imported, or swapping one ingredient for another. But it also means pivoting necessary to stay resilient.

Isabel recently removed a lobster dish from the menu because the price of the star ingredient, which her fishmonger had been importing from Canada as rising sea temperatures have diminished populations further south, had increased so tremendously. “It's sad, but sometimes you have to change some menu items that don't make sense any more,” she says.

She and her partner have also had to re-think the approach they’re taking to the French wine bar, called Maison, that they’re opening in DC this fall. “It’s changed the amount of purchasing power we have,” she says of the tariffs. “We would have liked to start with an amazing selection, but now we're going to have to start with something smaller. Instead of getting the case of allocated stuff, we’re going to have to build it little by little.”

4. Tend your relationships

Maintaining good relations with suppliers and other partners will also help, Ryan notes—and is another factor that businesses can control.

Arianna has an instinctive understanding of why those good relationships matter. “In such uncertain times, trust is our most valuable currency.” To that end, Occhipinti Wines has intensified its contact with importers and other partners. “Not to sell more,” she says. “But to reassure them. We constantly update them on our production and shipments. We organize virtual meetings to show them that despite the external chaos, our passion and commitment remain unchanged.”

The same spirit motivates their plan to step up the number of events they hold in the US. “Our wine philosophy is based on direct contact, on the story we tell, and on the emotion a tasting can convey. A physical presence isn't just a marketing strategy; it's a necessity. Tasting our wine, experiencing our story firsthand, and having the chance to ask us questions directly—all of this builds a bond that no tariff can break.”

5. Stay true to yourself

Which brings us to a factor that doesn’t get discussed so much in all the anxious discourse surrounding tariffs, but is crucial to keep in mind for the long term: there’s a reason why you got into this business, and it’s worth trying to keep sight of it.

Because there is nothing like a set of core values to help steer through a crisis. At Pascual, Isabel prides herself on sourcing most of her ingredients locally, getting her lamb and vegetables from farms in the region, and even her hoja santa from a nearby grower. But she is committed to ensuring that corn with which she makes her tortillas is Mexican–and not just for its quality and flavor. “For me, it’s a moral issue,” Isabel says.

The centrality of the corn to Mexican identity, and the devastating impact that NAFTA–which has required the country to import the grain from the US, displacing Mexican farmers and introducing genetically modified versions–has had there, have reaffirmed her belief that some things matter even more than food costs. “For us, corn is cultural,” she says. “And we have to defend culture. Because otherwise, culture disappears.”

That same clarity about what matters is guiding Arianna’s work in these tumultuous months as well—and could be applied to hospitality as a whole. “Our strength in this time of uncertainty is our authenticity,” the winemaker says. “We will not succumb to the temptation of lowering prices or compromising our wines to chase a frightened market. I firmly believe that in the end, people seek a genuine product—one that has a soul, that tells the story of a place and a person, and that doesn't change based on the whims of politics or the economy.”

What about you? How are you navigating the upheaval? Have you learned any lessons or acquired any insights? And have you been able to keep sight of your values?

Let us know in the comments.

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WHAT WE’VE BEEN UP TO

Seed Chef

Last month MAD launched Seed Chef, a new project that brings together chefs, farmers, and seed producers in Denmark for a better vegetable future.

By fostering conversations and supporting collaborations all along the supply chain, the program aims to boost the range of varieties, nutritional value, and flavor profiles of Danish organic vegetables for both professional kitchens and regular consumers.

The next Seed Chef meeting is on Wednesday, September 3, at Månssons Gård in Brande. Join us from 15.00 to 16.30 for a conversation with chef/restaurateur and MAD7 speaker Emilie Qvist.

Want to become part of the network or learn more? Reach out to project leader Caroline Eybye at ce@madfeed.co.

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Avocados. Bluefin. Quinoa. Beef. Chocolate. Caviar. It’s a complicated jungle out there for anyone trying to navigate the sustainability of a number of ingredients. So we’re launching an ongoing series intended to help chefs and restaurateurs cut through the thicket of competing claims, confusing information, and plain old bullshit surrounding some foods. In each edition, we’ll explore some of the key questions and issues, give some pointers on what to look for, and talk to chefs about how and why they’ve made the decisions they have. For this month’s issue, we thought we’d take a page from MAD7, and start with salmon.

Ask anyone who attended Symposium which talks affected them the most, and the chances are good they’ll start gushing about The Icelandic Girls. Andrea Hermó∂sdóttir, Alexandra Hermó∂sdóttir, Arndís Árnadóttir and Áslaug Árnadóttir were the unexpected rock stars of MAD7: seventh-generation salmon fishing guides who they told us, with a confidence most of us could only dream about when we were their age, about the profound threat posed by salmon farming to their family tradition, their river, and the wild species itself. They concluded their talk with a clear message for the hundreds of chefs and restaurateurs in the audience: stop serving salmon farmed in open sea pens.

It was a bold call to action. Salmon is one of the most popular and heavily consumed fish in the world, and 70% of it comes from aquaculture. Last year, 2.8 million tons of Atlantic salmon–the most popular variety– was produced through farming, generating some 15.4 billion dollars and employing over 132,000 people worldwide. Farmed salmon has also been successfully marketed as a healthier and more sustainable alternative to meat, one that helps provide the world’s growing demand for protein without exacerbating the problem of overfishing.

When you consider the social and economic forces behind it—to say nothing of how consumers have acquired a powerful taste for its mild flavor and fatty texture–farmed salmon seems pretty entrenched in the modern diet. So what is a chef who cares both about sustainability and keeping guests happy to do?

Lice, Jailbreaks, and Other Unpleasant Things to Contemplate

Judging the sustainability of almost any product is always complicated, and in the case of farmed salmon, it seems especially complex. It is true, for example, that farmed salmon has a relatively low carbon footprint—producing a kilo of the fish emits about 4 kilos of greenhouse gases, compared with chicken’s 6.5 and beef’s 30. It is also true that farmed salmon has a relatively low feed conversion rate (it takes roughly 1.2 kilos of feed to produce a kilo of farmed salmon), which is another metric used in assessing sustainability.

But farmed salmon comes with big, problematic factors that stem from the system in which it is raised. Open pen farms are essentially giant nets suspended in the sea. In Norway, which is the world’s largest salmon producer, they average up to 60 meters across and 50 meters deep, and hold as many as 200,000 salmon a piece. Because sea water flows freely in and out of them, the pens better replicate the salmon’s natural habitat (if salmon naturally liked to live in the same density to one another as, say, humans in New York City). But if the water goes in and out, so too does the salmon’s waste, along with any chemicals and medicines used to treat them. Add in feed whose components can be problematic, and that often contains an additive that tints the farmed salmon’s light flesh the enticingly deep pink of wild (you really do choose your level of color as if it were a paint sample, just like the Icelandic girls describe), and the kinds of contamination multiply.

Open pens aren’t so great for the sea in general, but they’re especially not good for salmon. For one thing, the density of fish inside the pens makes it easier for parasites called salmon lice to thrive (salmon lice aren’t actually lice–they’re teeny tiny crustaceans, not insects–but they’re nasty enough critters that no one seems to care about the misnomer). Salmon lice consume the mucus and skin of the fish, which can leave the salmon with wounds severe enough to kill it. In Norway, the average mortality rate from sea lice is 15%, and can reach as high as 30% in some parts of the country.

And those critters don’t stay put, either. With open pens, it’s easy for the lice to jump to any wild salmon that happen to be passing by. Often, they don’t even need to jump themselves–they can just sit back and be carried to the wild populatio, because the other big problem with open pens is that salmon inside them often escape. 81,000 made a break for freedom from a farm in Iceland in 2021; 80,000 from a Scottish farm in 2023; 27,000 from one in Norway just this past February. And those are just the big, attention-grabbing bustouts; on average some 200,000 salmon escape each year in Norway.

Those jail-breakers don’t just spread parasites. Once those freedom-loving former captives start mating with their wild counterparts, they share their weaker, no-predators-and-all-the-fishmeal-I-can-eat genes as well. Along with climate change, the two factors of salmon lice mortality and gene contamination have combined to dramatically reduce wild populations of North Atlantic salmon. In Iceland, the stocks have declined 75% since 1970; in Great Britain, they are projected to fall 50-80% between 2010 and 2025; in Norway, they were at historic lows in 2024, having fallen 50% since the 1980s.

“With the right knowledge, you can find the good ones”

As a sushi chef and committed conservationist, Hajime Sato has an intimate relationship with the problem of what to do about salmon. Both Sozai, his James Beard award-winning restaurant in Detroit (which recently closed) and before that, his Seattle restaurant, Mashiko, featured sustainable sushi, which meant Hajime was constantly trying to balance his environmental concerns with his guests’ insatiable desire for the fatty fish. “Sometimes it’s a battle between what you want and what they want,” he says. “At a crazy great Michelin restaurant, you can get the customers to obey the chefs, but unfortunately, 99.9% of restaurants, including me, cannot really do that; we have to satisfy the demand of the customers.”

And when it comes to sushi, customers want their sake nigiri (that salmon was never traditionally used in Japan and only became a stalwart of the sushi menu when the Norwegian seafood industry began pushing its surplus is an irony not lost on him). So Hajime does a lot of research and sources the best salmon he can–which has included wild chum salmon from the Pacific Northwest, and farmed Chinook salmon from New Zealand. He then tries to educate his guest. “If the customer comes in just says ‘salmon,’ I’m going to ask what kind of salmon would you like? And then I can explain why we have those different salmons, and what is in season, and where it comes from, and why it matters.”

For biologist Tor Naesje, doing that kind of research can help a chef distinguish the good production from the problematic. A senior researcher at the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research, Tor has been studying Atlantic salmon for around 40 years. He is also the leader of the scientific steering committee that advises Norway’s Ministry of Fishing on its salmon policy and helped devise its so-called ‘traffic light system,’ where production levels are determined by the fish farms’ environmental impacts in each of 13 regions. And although he is fluent in mortality statistics and genetic introgression levels, he also sees plenty of evidence of some producers doing things right—and he emphasizes that the same information is available to consumers.”Most of the farms now put QR codes on their salmon,” he says “So you are able to really trace it from the hatching of the egg to when it is on the table in the restaurant. There are a lot of very good producers, and with the right knowledge, you can find them.”

The codes contain information about the genetic type of eggs, the mortality rates at both the hatchery and in the sea pen, and whether and how frequently the fish have been treated for lice or given antibiotics (you want less, not more). “The number of treatments and medications is a strong indication of welfare,” Tor says.

There are other resources as well. The Aquaculture Stewardship Council evaluates fish farms according to a detailed set of criteria and certifies those that meet its sustainability standards (the Marine Stewardship Council does something similar for wild fisheries). And the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch is a helpful guide for making the most sustainable choices–including among fish farms (only three of Norway’s 13 production zones earn the “good alternative” qualification–the remaining 10 are marked ‘avoid.”) “For a regular consumer or even a regular chef who isn’t crazy like I am, it helps to follow someone’s guidance,” says Hajime Sato. “Seafood Watch isn’t perfect but the places on it are 3000% better than the conventional bullshit.”

Others working in the field, however, contend that open pen salmon farming is inherently unsustainable. That, for example, is the message of British environmental organization Wildfish, whose Off The Table campaign has encouraged hundreds of chefs, fishmongers, and restaurants to commit to removing open-pen farmed salmons from their menus.

Chantelle Nicholson, chef of Apricity in London (and MAD Academy 2025 faculty!), is one of them. “I think that the consumption of salmon has got out of control in the UK in particular,” she explains. “And there are all of these great alternatives so it doesn't make sense to be looking at something that is so troublesome.” Instead of salmon, Chantelle serves a version of Rainbow trout called Chalkstream, which is farmed in freshwater pens that are fed with river water but separate from the river itself.

Ragnar Eiriksson, whose seafood restaurant Brút also joined the Off the Table campaign, found a similar solution. As the co-owner of Reykjavik seafood restaurant Brút, he’s had a ringside seat to the salmon debates in Iceland. “Basically they’re making the same mistakes here that they made in Norway twenty or thirty years ago,” he says. “It’s a slow motion train wreck.”

Between the escaped salmon breeding with the wild ones in the rivers, the high levels of pollution from salmon waste and the fact that the companies opening aren’t Icelandic owned and aren’t creating many jobs, it was an easy choice to keep it off the menu. “I mean, it’s a shitty product,” Ragnar says.

But because his restaurant also provides catering for the hotel that houses it, he needed a smoked salmon to serve on the breakfast buffet. With no commercial options for wild salmon, he opted for farmed salmon raised locally in land-based pens, which avoid the problems of lice, pollution, and escaped fish by being entirely enclosed.

Tor Næsje points out that more and more land-based pens (as well as the semi-enclosed sea-based one that supplies Restaurant Iris) are being developed in Norway, so there is hope that, in the not too distant future, open-sea pens will be a thing of the past. Already, Canada plans to phase them out by 2029, and a similar measure–supported by 65% of Icelandic citizens—is currently being debated in the Icelandic parliament.

In which case, Alexandra just might get her wish. “Salmon fishing has been a huge part of our entire lives,” she told the MAD7 audience. “And we only wish to be able to continue guiding for a very very long time, until we can finally pass it down to our future children, just like our fathers did to us.”

WHAT WE’VE BEEN UP TO

In July news, we’ve had a blockbuster number of applications to this year’s Academy, and are looking forward to welcoming the first class on September 23rd.

Even MAD needs a little time off, so there will be no MAD Digest next month as we all take a bit of vacation. Until then, happy summer!

This month we take a break from our normal recommendations to offer a list of works from MAD7’s thoughtful, talented—and prodigious!— speakers. We’ll start posting videos of their talks later this month, but if you want to go deeper into their ideas and stories, the books and media below are a great place to start.

Social philosopher Roman Krznaric open…

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And….some MAD Academy news

Ready for more MADness? On June 13, we open applications for the Fall 2025 MAD Academy. Stay tuned for more information, coming soon to our website and social media.

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The MAD7 Symposium was made possible with the generous support of the
Longer Tables Fund, YETI, Blackbird, Farmacy, Guckenheimer, and Cuisine Solutions.

Share MAD Digest

The MAD7 Symposium was made possible with the generous support of the
Longer Tables Fund, YETI, Blackbird, Farmacy, Guckenheimer, and Cuisine Solutions.

Read more