DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm TV critic David Bianculli. Apple TV+'s newest nonfiction series is an eight-part food series called "Omnivore." Hosted by celebrity chef Rene Redzepi of the internationally renowned restaurant Noma in Copenhagen, it's not about competitions or specific recipes. Instead, "Omnivore" is about the history and cultural impact of eight specific ingredients, each given its own program, from tuna and pigs to coffee and salt.
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RENE REDZEPI: This is the story of everyday items that have changed the world in ways most of us have never considered. Add them all up, and you get a recipe for humanity.
BIANCULLI: Every episode of "Omnivore" focuses on a specific food ingredient, from spices to meats. But there's an additional ingredient that runs through all eight episodes. The secret ingredient is passion, and "Omnivore" is bursting with it. "Omnivore" is co-created by Rene Redzepi, who appears on camera and narrates. That was his voice you heard in the opening. His main collaborator is Matt Goulding, whose last food series was with Anthony Bourdain.
Goulding writes most episodes, while his chef host tells stories, loves putting things in a wider perspective and asks a lot of questions, not only to his fellow chefs and food enthusiasts, but directly to viewers, as in this show on chiles, which covers everything from the mild peppers used to make paprika to the nastiest ones at the fiery end of the Scoville scale, which measures the heat of a particular pepper.
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REDZEPI: What's the spiciest thing you've ever eaten? Take a moment to think about this. Do you remember how you felt, the detonation of your nervous system, how the pain broke across your body, the throbbing burn in your mouth as if you swallowed a firecracker? Will I ever be the same, you begin to wonder.
BIANCULLI: You know those scenes on the scripted Hulu series "The Bear," when Carmy and the other chefs obsess over ingredients, draw sketches of imagined dishes and savor each step in the cooking process. The cooks in "Omnivore" from all over the world do that, too, and a lot more. Their interest doesn't begin once the ingredients show up at the restaurant. They're fascinated not only by the quality of the items they use, but by the labor it takes to produce and distribute them, and where they come from and why.
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REDZEPI: When I first stat out as a cook, salt was just salt. It was the same fine table salt that any restaurant had. Only when I start really traveling and exploring the world I realize there's more to salt than just salt.
BIANCULLI: Chef Rene is so into it, he talks about salt caverns the way Werner Herzog discusses cave paintings. Sounds like him, too.
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REDZEPI: Skimmed from mountain ponds, carved from caverns, boiled from the ocean, dynamited from mines - pink mountain, black volcanic, blue crystal. Of all the salt rested from the earth, few have the quality or the cache of the salt skimmed from the tidal pools of France's western coastline - fleur de sel.
BIANCULLI: Each episode makes you appreciate things in a new way. Halfway through the episode on coffee, after seeing how much love and care went into the harvesting, drying and sorting of quality coffee beans in a Rwanda co-op, I stopped to brew a fresh cup and taste my Rwandan coffee - really taste it - for the first time. The episode on bananas covered not only imperialism and past and present banana blight, but also how one man and one company popularized the banana in post-war America and beyond.
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REDZEPI: Minor Keith's business, the United Fruit Company, flooded the market with newspaper ads, radio jingles, even a book called "The Food Value Of Banana." New recipes were invented. Pamphlets were handed out in classrooms, touting their nutritional benefits. They turned to doctors, celebrities and, of course, a little anthropomorphized banana to get the message out.
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PATTI CLAYTON: (As Chiquita Banana, singing) I'm Chiquita Banana, and I've come to say bananas have to ripen in a certain way.
REDZEPI: The result - bananas went from an obscure jungle fruit to one of the most popular items in the Western pantry in a matter of a few years.
BIANCULLI: Even in the episode on pigs, "Omnivore" goes in unexpected directions, like the treasured Iberian black-footed pigs of central Spain. We meet an Iberian pork ambassador who travels the globe and a village pig caretaker and a highly specialized carver.
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REDZEPI: An American butcher might divide a pig into 12 pieces - a Chinese butcher, maybe 18. In Spain, a real butcher breaks down a pig into 32 pieces - a mixture of prized specialty cuts sold fresh and upwards of a dozen different pieces that will be salted and cured to stretch through the seasons. It's an ancient craft that conveys both respect and necessity, born out of a 2,000-year-old tradition of turning a single animal into a year's worth of eating.
BIANCULLI: The way "Omnivore" tells this story, you care deeply about the pig, which is revered by the locals. But you care about the pig caretaker and the butcher as well. The pig sustains the people, and the people revere it for its sacrifice and give it the best life they can. You have to live life is the moral we're given, and that moral pertains to the pig and the villagers. It also goes for the coffee growers of Rwanda who fought their way back from genocide and for the tuna harvesters of southern Spain, who continue to use ancient techniques to provide for some of the most demanding sushi chefs in the world. They're all devoted to what they do and extremely skilled and overwhelmingly passionate. In "Omnivore," and maybe in life itself, passion turns out to be the most essential ingredient of all.
Coming up, we remember Dr. Ruth, the diminutive grandmotherly German Jewish sex therapist who became a media star. This is FRESH AIR. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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