Inside Iceland’s Hardcore Sustainable-Food Scene
About two weeks ago, I landed in Reykjavik for what has become one of Iceland’s biggest culinary to-dos: the rather directly named Food & Fun Festival. Now in its 13th year, the five-day event matched 31 chefs from around the world with 17 local restaurants to collaborate on three-course menus featuring Icelandic ingredients. Seafood figured prominently, of course: delicate arctic char, cod a hundred different ways, and langoustines as pillowy-soft as cotton candy. Lamb was also a hit. At Sjávargrillid, for instance, guest chef Hamilton Johnson of Washington, D.C., served a lamb filet rubbed with anise alongside a sort of chewy, gamey, sausage-y cut of lamb heart. It was delicious. An oddball mix of tomatoes, potatoes, white chocolate, rhubarb, seaweed powder, skyr, and licorice in every imaginable iteration also turned up.
While the chefs worked out their menu plans (and, let’s be real, partied in the bars with Iceland’s famously good-looking locals), I set out with a group of journos to peek behind the agricultural curtain of this sustainability-obsessed country of 300,000. If you can catch it, grow it, or make it locally, Icelanders are all over it.
Click ahead for a look inside an eco-friendly fishing operation in Grindavik, a geothermal farm in Selfoss, a farm-to-table dairy/restaurant in Bláskógabyggd, and—just for fun—the President of Iceland’s house.
Ashlea Halpern1/24All Aboard!
The winter sun is slow to rise in Southwest Iceland. This shot was taken at 9:36 a.m. onboard the Agúst, one of four long-liners belonging to Thorbjorn, the country’s fourth or fifth largest sustainable fishery.
Ashlea Halpern2/24The Hook Up
Agúst is a long-liner, meaning it uses long lines (not nets) to catch. In the bowels of the ship is an area containing 42,000 hooks. The hooks are laid out daily with herring or squid for bait. The typical fishing trip lasts four to five days, requires a crew of 14 sailors, and pulls in an average catch between 50 and 80 tons.
Ashlea Halpern3/24Hand in Glove, Please
You’d wear heavy-duty gloves, too, if you handled fish all day. The Agúst’s typical catch comprises cod, haddock, tusk, and ling. Three separate factory trawlers pick up halibut, pollock, silversmith, shrimp, and lobster.
Ashlea Halpern4/24The Captain's Chair
Inside the control room onboard the Agúst. It's like a Nordic Star Trek! Well, in water.
Ashlea Halpern5/24Hole Foods
This is what the Agúst crew lovingly refers to as the “fish hole.” Soon as a fresh catch comes out of the water, its first stop is a trip down the fish hole.
Ashlea Halpern6/24Barrel of Fish
After disembarking the Agúst, the cod move en icy masse to the Thorbjorn factory in Grindavik.
Ashlea Halpern7/24The Thorbjorn Factory Floor
This is where the real journey—sorting, cleaning, beheading, gutting, salting, packing—begins.
Ashlea Halpern8/24The Deadest Catch
Thorbjorn owner Gunnar Tómasson proudly displays one of the day’s biggest catches. His father founded the factory in 1953.
Ashlea Halpern9/24Dead Heads
One thing a fish factory won’t make you: hungry. Here, we have the results of the beheading station. While most of Thorbjorn’s bacalao exports go on to Spain, Italy, Greece, and Portugal, Tómasson says the heads are usually cut off, dried, and sold to Nigeria, where they’re used in soup.
Ashlea Halpern10/24Chop Shop
Fish that are too large to pass through Thorbjorn's automated machinery must be dissected by hand. The factory employs about 350 workers; of those on the floor, roughly half are Polish and half are Asian. Tómasson says the Thais have the fastest, most refined knife skills and are often tapped to train new workers.
Ashlea Halpern11/24Getting Salty
Into the salt bins the cod fillets go. Once a full row of fish is laid, an overhead machine rains salt atop the spread. Then the worker can start laying another row.
Ashlea Halpern12/24Passing Through Quality Control
So essential is cod to the Icelandic diet that it was featured in the country’s coat of arms for centuries. Today it accounts for 31 percent of Iceland’s total seafood exports, and 1.2 percent of the world's total catch.
Ashlea Halpern13/24Fishy Locavorism
Every box of bacalao tells a story. The label reveals not only when the fish were caught and by whom, but where exactly within Iceland’s 200 nautical miles of exclusive fishing zone.
Ashlea Halpern14/24Frittering Away
Thorbjorn supplies fresh fish to LAVA, the main restaurant at Iceland’s beloved Blue Lagoon. For a lunchtime challenge, Food & Fun guest chef Mikaela Población of Extanobe in Bilbao, Spain, turned the cod into a deep-fried fritter. It was served with a dab of avocado on a pumice stone—a not uncommon plating method in Iceland.
Ashlea Halpern15/24Tomatoes in Winter?!
All those tomatoes the Food & Fun chefs are playing with? They’re grown right here in Iceland, many of them at Fridheimar, a geothermally powered, zero-pesticide greenhouse in Selfoss.
Sigurjón Ragnar16/24Icelandic Shots
Fridheimar is run by the agronomist-horticultralist (and husband-wife) team of Knútur Rafn Ármann and Helena Hermundardóttir. Ármann likes to greet guests with an Icelandic speciality: Birkir (birch schnapps) served in hollowed-out greenhouse tomatoes. The birkir itself could peel paint; the tomatoes are juicy and ripe. Eating one, you’d never know it was February in Iceland. Photo by Sigurjón Ragnar
Sigurjón Ragnar17/24Vine Time
A worker twists the tomato vines. Fridheimar grows tomatoes year round; in the long, dark winter months, that means wiring in 17 hours of artificial light. All told, Ármann says his greenhouse uses roughly the same amount of electricity as a town of 3,000—every last bit of it powered by geothermal energy. Photo by Sigurjón Ragnar
Ashlea Halpern18/24Kick Out the Jams
Cucumbers are another staple at Fridheimar, served here with green tomato jam. Geothermal greenhouses in Iceland also grow strawberries and paprika. Common outdoor crops include rhubarb, rutabaga, leeks, potatoes, cauliflower, kale, and organic barley.
Ashlea Halpern19/24Buzz Off
Fridheimar relies on some 600 bumble bees to pollinate its tomato flowers. The awesome byproduct: tomato honey.
Ashlea Halpern20/24Bread Cred
Tomato soup, tomato sauces, and tomato ice cream all factor in to the menu at Fridheimar, which houses a small café in the middle of the greenhouse. On the day we visited, the chef had also prepared Icelandic “black bread,” a dense loaf made with just five ingredients: oatmeal, rye, Greek yogurt, water, and sugar. The mixture is put into a bucket and then baked 24 hours overnight in—get this—a geyser. Geyser bread! He served it with salmon he caught and smoked himself.
Sigurjón Ragnar21/24Dairy Queen
Efsti-Dalur II is a family-owned farm in Bláskógabyggd, an hour or so east of Reykjavik. It is home to about 45 dairy cows, which produce up to 250,000 liters of milk a year. Guests can see how the milk, cream, cheese, and skyr all get made, then sit down and eat it at the on-site restaurant. Photo by Sigurjón Ragnar
Sigurjón Ragnar22/24Skyr Nation
The specialities at Efsti-Dalur are the matriarch’s homemade ice cream and skyr, a yogurt-like Icelandic soft cheese. Daughter-in-law Día serves. Photo by Sigurjón Ragnar
Sigurjón Ragnar23/24Hey, Mr. President
It’s not every day you get invited to the president’s house. And yet here we were, all of the Food & Fun crew, standing before the president of Iceland at his house in Bessastadir. Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson was laid-back and personable. Funny even. But the best part was when he sent around a silver platter of Icelandic greenhouse tomatoes, followed by what can only be described as an Icelandic twist on deviled eggs. Photo by Sigurjón Ragnar
Sigurjón Ragnar24/24A Snack Fit for a Viking
And by deviled eggs, we mean eggs hatched from purebred Viking hens (a real thing—they’re small and colorful and seriously tolerant of frigid weather), topped with roe and parked on a bed of Nordic sea salt. Photo by Sigurjón Ragnar
