Claus Meyer, one of the founders of the “new Nordic” cuisine movement, opened Noma with chef René Redzepi in 2003. The restaurant went on to win two Michelin stars and was voted best restaurant in the world in 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2014. Meyer is also the founder of the Melting Pot Foundation — an organization dedicated to driving social change through food. Melting Pot’s most recent project is a culinary school, cafeteria, and community kitchen in Brownsville, New York.

Hesperios sat down with Meyer at the Great Northern Food Hall in Grand Central Station — another of Meyer’s New York enterprises — to talk with the man who has had such a dramatic influence on the global culinary landscape and to learn a little more about his ideology.

INTERVIEW

Hesperios

What does bread mean to you?

Claus Meyer

It’s the beginning of civilization, or the foundation of modern civilization. But otherwise, for me, it’s one of the most basic things to eat. It’s probably the last thing I’d want to give up. What else? It’s comfort, and then it’s also somehow a symbol of — how do you say that — subsistence?

Hesperios

State of mind?

Meyer

Yeah, but the state of a food culture or the state of a family. Bread represents a perspective on life, on what means something, what matters. So, if you get bread right, it’s a good start. If you come to a restaurant and the bread sucks, something is wrong. It’s as basic as a glance or a handshake. Bread has to be healthy and be made in a healthy way. If you wing it or fake it then something is wrong — for a restaurant or a person. Not that I would stop seeing a friend or something if I was offered Wonder Bread.

Hesperios

But you would judge him.

Meyer

No, because I’m not very judgmental but — if you ask a philosophical question — then I think bread is very impactful. And it costs so little. One hectare — you can only grow five tons of grain. So, if you take an interest in grain, remunerate the farmer for doing his work properly. And because everybody can afford what is made out of grain it’s a very scalable democratic avenue, if you want to change agriculture and defend biodiversity and clean up the ground water or free it from pesticides. All that is difficult and expensive to achieve through animal husbandry but through grain — one of the most affordable food items in the world — it’s possible. That was the whole point of that [TED] video — bread lends itself very well to a public food revolution. And leaving aside the whole agricultural thing, there’s also the whole diabetes, obesity thing. Bread can simply be banal, refined sugars that are super unhealthy or bread can be one of the most healthy food items you can imagine. And, again, it’s affordable. Even if you don’t bake it — but particularly if you bake it — most people can afford the best bread in the whole world.

Hesperios

A lot of Americans will have grown up eating sandwiches on sliced white pullman bread which — as you say — is largely refined sugar. I get the impression that that’s not the case in Scandinavia where, if you take a sandwich to school, it’s more likely on rye, and that white bread is considered a luxury or almost cake, in a way. Do you think that has something to do with culture?

Meyer

I don’t think rye bread in Denmark is a kind of a sophisticated expression of who we are. I think it’s more like a simple tradition that relates to the fact that it’s easy to grow rye in Scandinavia. For many years there’s been this idea floating around — and it was this idea that inspired me to start this revolution — that you can’t make wheat bread out of wheat grown in Denmark or in Northern Europe, the reason being that there is so little sun and heat that most modern wheat varieties don’t achieve the gluten and protein level that is needed for the dough to contain air. If you use normal wheat and don’t take a very particular approach then you will get a very dry, compact wheat bread without everything we like about wheat bread. For that reason also, wheat has for the most part meant animal fodder in Scandinavia. But then smart farmers have done a lot of work, researching into other wheat varieties that maybe don’t provide the same yield per hectare that modern ones do but that happen to produce a berry with a different composition of compounds — such as more gluten and more protein but smaller berries, or simply a slightly smaller yield per hectare. We have found out that some of the wheat varieties that we have started growing since 2007 and 2008 have as much protein as the best wheat — or not exactly as much, but a very high quality of gluten and protein — meaning, thirteen grams per hundred grams. That is definitely enough to produce a wonderful bread.

Hesperios

And what is your take on the whole “gluten free” thing?

Meyer

I don’t really have any take on it. Leaving aside those that truly have gluten allergies, I do think there are a lot of people who think they have that gluten intolerance that simply have gut issues — people who have problems with their stomach in general and then just attribute that to bread.

Hesperios

Or if they have good bread, it wouldn’t be an issue for them.

Meyer

I don’t know enough about diseases to say that, but I’ve heard from a number — a large number — of people in Denmark who say that they couldn’t tolerate wheat bread made from aggressively grown modern wheat, but suddenly when they start eating whole grain bread made from the slower wheat varieties, they don’t have a problem. So is it the whole grain, is it the other wheat varieties? I don’t know.

Hesperios

In the TED video you talk about how important water is for bread. Did the water and the grain that’s available in New York have anything to do with your decision to come to New York over any other place?

Meyer

Not at all.

Hesperios

Not at all?

Meyer

No. I didn’t choose New York because of that. No, it was just a decision out of pure joy and the desire to live in this magnificent city. It was more or less my family who made the choice. I mean, when we look back in ten years, of course, we would never have missed out on it — it’s an amazing opportunity to leave your life in Denmark and then have a couple of years in New York, the greatest city in the world. But it had nothing to do with the water and the grain or anything. It’s funny now that we ended up here — the climate in Connecticut and Maine resembles the climate in Scandinavia pretty much.

Hesperios

The wave of Nordic cuisine — which you were part of starting — promotes a broad range of local, natural, and seasonal produce in the context of purity, simplicity, and freshness. When you decided to move your project over here, bread became a real focal point. Why?

Meyer

If I had been Japanese, I would probably have done something around rice but, coming out of Scandinavia, I feel that this is one of our
strongholds and also one of the areas where I had a certain amount of stuff to contribute to the food scene. Also, we have twelve bakeries in Copenhagen so it’s a very big part of what I stand for. It’s a foundation for so many wonderful things — open-faced sandwiches, normal sandwiches, the vegetable flat breads that we also make — so it would have been very strange to come here without that. I mean, in Scandinavia we don’t have pasta, we don’t have sushi, we don’t have ceviche, we don’t have these iconic food items that are world renowned. If you ask somebody from Chicago or somewhere else, “What is the Danish cuisine?” I wonder if people would be able to say anything. So it made sense. And also I just know how good fresh bread is, so I guess I found it very natural to try to bring that here.

Hesperios

What are you most proud of that you’ve done so far in your two and a half years here?

Meyer

Brownsville.

Hesperios

We were reading about that; we really want to go. Will you tell us a little bit more about it?

Meyer

It was reviewed in Time Out a few months ago, did you see that? It actually got a very good review.

Hesperios

You just opened, right?

Meyer

Three months. Two, three months old.

Hesperios

Will you tell us a little bit more about the project. Why did you start it?

Meyer

I felt I had to somehow.

Hesperios

Yeah, why?

Meyer

I didn’t know how tough it would be to open a business in America, I definitely underestimated. Before I arrived here, my goal was to open my business and get that to a good place, to help a young chef to reach out for his dreams, and then to bring the spirit of Melting Pot here through some sort of philanthropic endeavour. Having supported Fredrik [Berselius] in the opening of his restaurant, I think the cycle is — what do you say — the circle is ended?

Hesperios

Full circle?

Meyer

Yeah. I mean, it has come as a surprise how difficult it is to navigate in a place like Grand Central. If you move a lamp or want to have an extra toaster, we have to wait one month for an answer and arrange access to new electricity and the union has to install it and the Landmark Commission has to approve it.

Hesperios

I can’t even imagine.

Meyer

And the rent is a little bit crazy also. But I felt that I was totally on top of everything I was doing and I cannot just come here and benefit from this wonderful opportunity and then not do more. So I felt that I had to do something.

Hesperios

That’s very un-American of you.

Meyer

I’m not very used to being spoiled that way. Once you start working with these kind of projects like the Bolivian project, and the prisons, it’s very difficult to not spend a decent amount of time on that kind of project — it’s almost like it cleanses your mind.

Hesperios

Sure. Purifying, yeah.

Meyer

It actually makes you feel proud of who you are. When you open a business, there are so many tough decisions, and it’s also shortsighted in a certain way — a lot of people are focusing on their own short-term, egoistic interests. It’s just a very hard city — everybody is fighting for oneself. In Copenhagen it’s different, but it’s not that different. Having gotten to a point in my life where I was able to help people who were in trouble —whether in prisons or in a poor country like Bolivia — it just feels so much better and you kind of want to do only that. And then you want to also be in the Formula One a little bit but…

Hesperios

Yeah, and you want to take care of your family and, you know…

Meyer

My shoulders are broad enough to do it — I can carry it, so of course I have to do it. I thought I could easily do it but it became much more complicated than I thought. That is the risk you run when you live your life without having a clear road map. I don’t typically pick the challenges that I can easily handle, I typically just throw myself into strange arenas and just hope that I’ll get out of it.

Hesperios

Will you tell us a little bit more about the Melting Pot?

Meyer

I started the foundation in 2010 and the first thing we embarked on was to explore the field of re-socialization and see if food could be used as a vehicle to start a conversation in society about the nature of re-socialization and the concept of giving someone a second chance. There was a big existential ethical discussion that started around that — and then more concretely around what we did — and it was very provocative at the time because of who I was. My original project in Denmark involved going to a closed prison, offering them an education and telling them that they could be amazing chefs if only they would shut up and listen and work together. And then we eventually tried to turn it into a formal education, authorized by the Ministry of Education. That means that inmates would no longer be just rotting away or increasingly broken down, but potentially walking out of prison not having lost X number of years in addition to being deprived of their freedom — which they probably deserved — but walking out with a profession and a hope that they can change career and not just rob people or steal or do worse but basically take a job. I mean I could speak at length about why cooking is a super meaningful activity for somebody to get back on a good track. It’s more than getting a job, it’s more than a profession — it’s also about caring.

Hesperios

You get to be proud of something you do.

Meyer

Yeah, and so few activities have that kind of capacity or quality that cooking has. So when people start cooking, something magical happens. It’s an expression of a culture and a history and a landscape and of one’s own generosity — there’s just so much to it. Few people can say that they don’t care a shit about food, most people somehow can be brought to a point where they actually care very much about it. It’s not a competition between different expressions, it’s just that the food has this amazing quality and that was what I could bring to the plate. It started out with the prison service collaboration in Denmark, but that was a detour in a way because the real idea — the real reason why I started Melting Pot — was that I got the idea that maybe the whole infrastructure and approach embedded in the Nordic cuisine movement could be applied not just in rich countries but in poor countries. That it could be almost like an instrument for development and not just a way for Denmark and Scandinavia to brand themselves in the modern world. Noma was aspiring to be number one in the world and everything seemed to be going well and I asked myself, “Is this just it or is there more to it?” And then one day I got a sense that maybe what we had done in Scandinavia — or were about to do and achieve — could be applied in different places. That brought us to Bolivia where we more or less tried to copy as much as we could from the setup of the Nordic cuisine movement.

We started a foundation — the Melting Pot — just to be able to operate there. Then — in a very fine collaboration with people and institutions and governments in Bolivia — we started a movement, we started a festival, we started the restaurant, we started some more food schools in the slums, and we just tried to learn from operating. We have made a lot of impact and progress in just five years and without spending a ridiculous amount of money actually.

Hesperios

As you said, it’s a way to take pride in your culture and your nature and your surroundings and what your country has to offer.

Meyer

In Bolivia you also probably find the richest unexplored biological diversity of any place on earth.

Hesperios

Bolivia?

Meyer

Yeah, the largest unexplored biological diversity anywhere on earth — four climate zones. I mean, very few countries have four climate zones. You can take a bike ride from a snow-dressed mountain to the rain forest within four hours. It’s a dangerous bike ride but you can do it, down from five thousand metres. So it had a very special history and a very special nature and that is probably one of the most important prerequisites for a great food culture and it has an amazing diversity of ingredients, everywhere. The Spanish cuisine, the Italian, the French, the Chinese — all these cuisines that are counted amongst the greatest ones in the world have benefited from a huge diversity that comes from different climates.

Hesperios

Is that why you chose Bolivia?

Meyer

That was one of the reasons why we chose Bolivia, one of the main reasons. The second one was the level of poverty. There had to be some sort of demand, some sort of infrastructure, but it had to be that fine line — an emerging market where it was still a very poor country. Because that was the whole thesis I wanted to explore — if this could be used to fight poverty.

The other thing about Bolivia was that I felt some sort of culinary, cultural suppression. I also felt I could see a younger generation growing up without pride in being Bolivian. Like in America, they wanted to eat hamburgers. I don’t like the concept of a world where everybody wants to be like America. That is also one of the reasons why I decided to fight for a Scandinavian tradition because in the bigger picture this was about a dream of a world full of diversity and an original people with original stories, and not just one global disaster.

I saw Bolivia as a very fertile place for this kind of philosophy because deep within the culture there is some sort of sleeping pride that comes from the indigenous tribes — they have preserved their languages. It was just under the surface.

Hesperios

So how much does that apply to what you’re doing in Brownsville now: the pride, the diversity, the cultural pride in where you’re from?

Meyer

In New York we also started a local not-for-profit, Melting Pot USA, a 501(c)(3). We’ve been talking with a lot of seniors in the different public housing structures about what kind of cuisine they grew up with. The project is extremely informed by the people of that community and that is one of the ways in which we have won trust and become relevant.

Hesperios

So you’re giving people the tools to get a career but also the tools just to cook for themselves.

Meyer

That’s a very important point. Just like in Bolivia and with Noma, the idea was from the very beginning to find a way to impact the community outside the walls of the physical place. We have been careful with that message in Brownsville. We are only two and a half months into the operation and, as the place is run by students with complicated backgrounds and complicated lives, it is not smart to start preaching to the whole community of Brownsville. But this is the point, this is our dream.

There’s a community center component and we will be teaching free classes to people from the community. We dream of going into schools and being able to bring healthy food to people in a thousand different ways — in through the homes and apartments and schools and senior centers and hospitals. We just have to find our ways and we have to make sure that we can fund it down below. It’s super complicated. And it’s no way given that we’ll still be going two years from here. We really have to earn our credit and we have to win trust not only in the community but also with funders — whether I fund it alone for the next twelve months, or not. We are getting some help but this is one of the most critical factors now. Not that we need a lot of money to operate it — $1.3 million a year, out of which we are paying stipends to fifty students. $23/24,000 a year — this what it costs to get an education. Less than half of what it costs to keep one person in prison for a year. But we have to find the money in a consistent fashion.

Hesperios

I have an unrelated question — what is your earliest fond memory of bread?

Meyer

I think my earliest memory of bread was when I was only seven years old. I come from a very small village in Southern Denmark and there was a bakery at the end of the road.

Hesperios

Where in Denmark?

Meyer

It’s called Sundby. It’s on the island of Lolland. And at the end of the road where we were living there was a bakery. And I was one of the three, four kids who were living on the street. I just loved that place and I ended up having a little assignment, so I was coming every day at seven o’clock before going to school and I was carrying the bread from the bakery to the shop across a courtyard, like twenty meters. And I went up there and I was carrying maybe twenty — what do you call it, a pallet?

Hesperios

Yeah, ok.

Meyer

Bread pallets with four or five loaves on each and some pastries and some danish. And I just got used to the smell in the bakery and I was very proud of being assigned that job. I looked forward so much to the Saturdays when I would collect my salary — five Danish kroner, which is like eighty cents — and then a little bag of candy from the mother of the baker.

A little microecosystem — and it was such a little street, no cars. It was just very, very slow and silent. A peaceful place to grow up as a child. And then, later on, my parents divorced and my father moved away and a lot more complicated stuff arrived in my life. But for those first ten years this was, I think, very important. A way to connect with other people, to feel the responsibility on your shoulders, to earn your own money even though it’s just a simple thing.

After my parent’s divorce and my years in high school, I ended up being — as I explained in the TED talk — an au pair boy and I went to France to work in Paris and eventually with a baker in Gascony, who became more of a father than my father had ever been. And then came the whole journey.

The stay there was what fired me up and gave me the idea that I should be somebody who was working to improve food in Denmark. That was a calling, that’s why I’m here. But it all started with that and it culminated obviously with Nordic cuisine and the Noma thing, where I figured out a way to efficiently impact a community, our country. I’d always been trying to do that, but I was not really able to. I mean I was a young entrepreneur, I didn’t have a lot of money, how can you change food culture? You can’t, I mean, it’s not very easy, right? How can I change the world? But with the Noma thing, I really found a very powerful approach where without money you could become like a benign virus, a catalyst, an insider. And it was all due to the one year spent in France.

I came back and started working for a baker in Denmark. And that’s the only time I’ve been fired in my life. I was basically cleaning pallets with danishes in the basement before I could justify having a bit of a position in his bakery. I was untrained, I had no formal education, so I was placed as a cleaning guy. And I lived with it because I just wanted to be in a bakery, until I was fired because I was so slow. I wasn’t really slow — I was just seeking out the best part of caramelized almond paste, instead of just cleaning with my head under my arm. But he fired me anyway. The next day I went back to him and said, “Well, you fired me yesterday but I have a business idea. We could become partners.” And he was like, “What the fuck are you talking to me about?” And I said, “I know your bakery is empty at two o’clock in the afternoon, so what if I come here at three and then I can make some bread, and have my own clients and we can share the profits?” And he accepted that.

Hesperios

Amazing.

Meyer

That’s what he said. He said, “That’s the most crazy thing anybody has ever told me. I’ve fired a number of people in my life and no one has come back the next day, suggesting that we become partners. You’re a courageous young man.” And it taught me something — it taught me a lesson about politics and also about how to benefit from excess capacity.

Hesperios

How old were you when you did that?

Meyer

Twenty. I was studying at that time.

Hesperios

And how long did that partnership last?

Meyer

Half a year. I had two customers — restaurants — and I delivered the bread across Aalborg from the bakery to the restaurants and shared the profit with the other guy. It was fun while I was studying. I did it after school, after college. Yes, I was fired, but it was also what I was standing up for. Actually, when I try to explain my critique of civilization, I always think about the concept of time, because what I found in excess in France was patience and slowness.

Hesperios

When it’s ready, it’s ready.

Meyer

In Denmark, all that had been cut away by modern industry. I saw myself as a defendant of the slow and therefore it was a paradox that I was fired for not being fast enough. It kind of reinforced some kind of fighting power within me that I was fired for being what I wanted to be.

Hesperios

Bread’s a labor of love.

Meyer

Yeah.

Hesperios

Bringing that ritual back.

Meyer

The idea that just standing down there, eating caramelized almond paste, was a sort of wonderful endeavor. But still, I was being beaten up by the baker and his perspective on what it means to be good or bad. My father was the same man — there was only one thing that counted and that was efficiency. I hated my father for many reasons — I hated the concept of efficient even though it’s inevitable that you have to be it.

Hesperios

And that brings me back to another thing you mentioned in the TED talk that we listened to. You talked about time — time makes good bread.

Meyer

That goes back to the whole thing — that bread is a reflection of something. When I tried to say that bread reflects the state of a civilization or the state of a culture, I forgot to mention time. The symbol of modern bread in the most stressed-out country in the world — modern America — is Wonder Bread. Bread with a ton of yeast and in thirty minutes, it’s ready. Our bread always takes twenty-four hours. Twentyfour hours is provocative almost to the modern industrial world.

Hesperios

Well, it’s a big slap in the face to everything that our culture is now — everything has to be fast and perfect and efficient. Everything has to be Wonder Bread. Twenty-four-hour bread, that’s really cool. I kind of want to go home and bake bread now. It’s the kneading. You’ve got to knead it for at least ten, fifteen minutes.

Meyer

Yeah. Or you’ve got to knead it for a couple of minutes and wait ten minutes, and then you can actually slow down your efficient working time by leaving the rest of the work to time. You can probably not knead at all. You could walk around, just touching your dough every hour or so. Jim Lahey from Sullivan Street Bakery has invented a method where you just mix water and flour together quickly. And then you now and then just take the dough and lift it over itself and wait again. So that’s another approach. The waiting time and the concept of using very little yeast is more important than how many minutes you actually knead intensively in one kind of move.

Hesperios

In the TED video you were also talking about more water. Why did you say more water?

Meyer

Because most bread contains too much flour. Especially when you have whole grain involved — the fibers turn bread into a dry substance unless you have a lot of water in it. It’s important to have a soft, moist crumb that almost makes the bread feel juicy.

In a typical daily recipe you would have seventy percent water. For most people it’s much easier to handle a dough when it is firm. Wet dough almost looks wrong, almost looks like a porridge — how can this become bread? It challenges everything you have learned about bread.

Hesperios

But a rye bread, when you put it in your bread tin, it’s almost a liquid.

Meyer

Well, it’s still firm in a way, but it has to be poured into a mould. But a wheat bread has to be able to stand on its own. So why is water important? Because it basically gives the bread an almost brioche-like texture even though it’s packed with fibers. So it feels light, juicy, nice, and then it has a longer shelf life.

Hesperios

So more time and more water: it just sounds like something you should live your life by.

Meyer

And less yeast.

Hesperios

Yeah, and less yeast.

Meyer

The yeast is like — what is it like? Cocaine, or like the symbol of everything that breeds greed. Sugar and greed and yeast and drugs. I think they’re part of the same family of ingredients.

Hesperios

Yeah, giving the bread some steroids so it does more in less time.

Meyer

And I think you probably pay a price at some point. Bread should take many hours. And there can’t be too much yeast.

Readers interested in the Melting Pot Foundation and the Brownsville Community Culinary Centre can learn more at www.meltingpotfoundationusa.org. Donations welcome through the website.