Claus Meyer: Changing how Danes think about food

By Anders Lorenzen

With an unshakable belief that food can change lives, Claus Meyer has spent more than four decades redefining Danish cuisine. From awakening a nation’s taste buds to co-founding Noma and championing social change through food, the TV chef, entrepreneur, and educator continues to stir both pots and minds. His mission remains simple yet profound: to reconnect people, nature and flavour.

“It was almost like an out-of-body experience, I was reborn,” the legendary Danish chef Claus Meyer recalls to Scan Magazine. He is remembering how at 19, during a stay in France, he experienced a beautiful connection between life, love and food, and felt a sudden awakening, immediately realising his purpose in life.

Today, at 61, Meyer is a household name in Danish food, television and culinary innovation, as well as a respected entrepreneur, educator and grassroots leader. This is a man still burning with passion and still struggling to sit still. When we planned this interview he was, in true Danish fashion, on his bike en route to a lunch meeting.

Photo: Christian Als

“There is something rotten in the state of Denmark”

Meyer’s French experience presented him with an awakening that there was something completely wrong in Denmark. He was perplexed that Danish society, though in many ways more advanced than the French – at least outside the cities – had a food culture that lagged so far behind. “I could not understand, nor could I accept, why Denmark consumed food that tasted so poorly, and lacked any form of taste, in contrast to what I experienced in France,” he says.

Meyer believes that his own family was a mirror of the whole nation. “Looking at my family’s approach to food, neither my mum nor my dad wanted to use money or time on the daily meal; it was just a chore that we had to get over and done with as quickly as possible, with no connection to or understanding of the seasons,” he reflects. “Coming from a divorced home, the absence of love coincided with the tasteless meals.”

Meyer outside one of his three Meyers bakeries in Copenhagen, where organic Nordic grains are milled and baked in-house. Photo: Claus Meyer

“We taunted nature”

The state of seasonal fruit and vegetables was dismal at best. In Meyer’s words: “Much of the food was ultra-processed and unappealing, just pulled out of the freezer. Vegetables had been pre-cooked in Eastern Europe and then frozen; they lacked any taste or love.”

“Unlike French cuisine, in Denmark there was no tradition of using herbs, spices and stocks,” he continues. “It was food produced without flavour and taste, made without love, effort and pride, and there was no consideration or appreciation for the soil that produced the vegetables and fruits.”

How Denmark valued, protected, and appreciated nature did not ease his frustrations. “We taunted nature,” Meyer proclaims. He adds; “Decades later, that is clear for everyone to see, not only in terms of how we destroyed nature, but we added one industrial food process after another, and with that, a highly consumed meat culture.”

At 19, Claus Meyer travelled to Gascony, where living with pastry chef Guy Sverzut and his wife introduced him to the joy, flavour and love of French gastronomy. Photo: Claus Meyer

Vision and inspiration

When the 19-year-old Meyer arrived in Gascony in southwest France, he stayed with pastry chef Guy Sverzut and his wife, who introduced him to the region’s food, lifestyle and warmth. There, he sensed a deep connection between flavour, joy and love that would shape his life. “I felt as if I had been adopted by the family I stayed with, and truly seen. I formed a special bond with these two strong French people who couldn’t have children.”

Experiencing in France a completely different way of approaching and appreciating food, Meyer realised upon returning home that something was deeply wrong with Danish food culture. “The French had a connection to the land and the soil, a sense of time and place, the so-called terroir was embedded in the French food culture, and most meals were an expression of generosity and a tribute to life,” he explains.

“The naïve thought came to me that since I was given this experience in France, it was my duty to do something about it,” Meyer recalls about the almost religious experience he experienced when he found his calling. “I wanted to change Danish food culture.”

“I wanted Danish food to be outstanding”

Shortly after returning to Denmark, he undertook a master’s degree in combined language, economy and cultural understanding at Copenhagen Business School. But already at this stage, his flair for cooking and entrepreneurship was evident. He began producing sandwiches in his apartment and sold them at the school’s café. Shortly after, he owned his first business when he won his bid for the school’s canteen.

Meyer’s first objective when returning to Denmark was to “awaken the Danes’ slumbering sense of deliciousness,” he explains. He drew inspiration from a theory suggesting that within every human lies an innate sense of beauty. “But in many cases it lives in a withdrawn state inside our minds due to learned societal behaviours,” he adds. In that, he saw a direct parallel to Dane’s relationship to their food.

“My simple idea was to find ways to put something extraordinary inside people’s mouths,” Meyer says, about how he approached getting consumers paying attention to taste. He adds; “I quickly realised that if I could only succeed in getting them to pay attention to the taste, regardless of whether it was a piece of chocolate, an aged vinegar or a piece of raw milk cheese, then this single taste experience could have a transformative power.”

Photo: Claus Meyer

Grassroots, development and Inclusive initiatives

In time, thanks to his hugely popular TV show Meyer’s Kitchen, his approach started to bear fruit. “Consumers discovered their longing for delicious food,” Meyer recounts. “It was all about giving it my own flair; this was what Meyer’s Kitchen was all about.”

But Meyer’s ambitions did not stop there. “What I really longed for was not only for consumers to discover the beauty of taste, but also for food producers to create outstanding food products.”
Meyer went on to educate Danes not only on TV but also through numerous other initiatives, including co-founding the internationally renowned Michelin-starred restaurant Noma, launching the highly successful New Nordic Cuisine movement, and establishing the Melting Pot Foundation.

Melting Pot leverages the power of culinary craftsmanship and the language of food as forces for community empowerment and social change. To give a snapshot of the kind of projects they get involved with, Meyer highlights an initiative in Bolivia where young trainee chefs and waiters from low-income families built confidence and careers exploring their own food culture at the restaurant Gustu. He adds that so far, “every initiative of the foundation has reconfirmed how deliciousness and social responsibility can flourish together.”

One recent initiative is Det Længste Bord, a two-year project uniting Democracy X, Meyers and the municipality of Brøndby to normalise delicious, plant-rich meals via long-table events and local training – a community experiment inspired by EAT-Lancet. According to Meyer, the ultimate goal is “to make plant-rich diets the new norm, with all the gains this would imply for the health of each individual, for nature and for society in general.” If successful, Meyer wants to scale the findings both nationally and internationally.
Indeed, even though Meyer’s mission is more than 40 years old, it is far from complete. There has been progress, but he believes that few households are bringing love, joy and connection into their everyday lives through home-cooked food. He aims to lead by example, often turning to his daughter to say: “What do we have in the veggie box?” Before long, they are in the kitchen experimenting with something they have never made before.

Through the Melting Pot Foundation Meyer works to create social change through craftsmanship and food. Photo: Claus Meyer

Christmas in the Meyer household

In the Meyer household – with his wife and their three daughters – Christmas remains firmly rooted in tradition, despite his day-to-day focus on innovation and change. “It is almost the only aspect of our family’s food lifestyle that is constant,” he says. “As one of our daughters is vegetarian, we take great care to make her a plant-based meal just as delicious as the one the rest of us enjoy – which, in fact, is not difficult at all.”

“We always bake cookies and æbleskiver (a typical Danish dish of round, panfried cakes) and brew an apple-based mulled wine several times through December.” He also bakes the same bread throughout December every year. A recent newbie is an Eastern European Christmas cake – Kozunak.

Photo: Santiago de la Veg

Christmas in the Meyer household

In the Meyer household – with his wife and their three daughters – Christmas remains firmly rooted in tradition, despite his day-to-day focus on innovation and change. “It is almost the only aspect of our family’s food lifestyle that is constant,” he says. “As one of our daughters is vegetarian, we take great care to make her a plant-based meal just as delicious as the one the rest of us enjoy – which, in fact, is not difficult at all.”

“We always bake cookies and æbleskiver (a typical Danish dish of round, panfried cakes) and brew an apple-based mulled wine several times through December.” He also bakes the same bread through out December every year. A recent new bie is an Eastern European Christmas cake – Kozunak.

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