Guiding Principle Number One: “To base our cooking on ingredients and produce whose characteristics are unique to our climates, landscapes, and waters and to reflect seasonality in the meals we make.”

When I first encounter René Redzepi, he is cutting a live elk in half with a chainsaw. Noma’s unwavering commitment to native, hyper-local Nordic foods requires its kitchen staff to spend hours every morning foraging the neighboring woodlands and shorelines for wild ingredients, and Redzepi has a gift for sensing gastronomic potential in everything around him.

“A lot of times you can find these lovely little rose hip flowers pickling in the stomach fluids of the larger field mammals that live around here,” Redzepi says, his arm elbow-deep in the abdominal cavity of the freshly bisected animal, its viscera still twitching and gurgling as he fishes out two small, pink, slimy flower petals from within. “Sometimes you have to saw through 20 or so elk before you find any, but it’s always worth the effort. They’re absolutely perfect with caramelized sweetbreads.”

Redzepi collects some of the bile-drenched petals in a jar, sets the elk carcass ablaze, and wanders off to continue foraging. He leads me down to a gray, windblown beach, where, to the untrained eye, there seems to be nothing growing but weeds and scraggly grass. But Redzepi, using hand grenades to displace large mounds of sand, almost immediately uncovers a veritable buffet of herbs and produce sticking out every which way from the soil. There’s wild parsnip, beach peas, sea lettuce, spicy lilac, Osama bin Laden’s beached corpse, horseradish, mustard flowers, and verdant goosefoot—all growing within the same 4-foot radius.

“We’ll use the horseradish in a sea urchin dish, the lettuce with salted cod roe, and the corpse leg to make a nice broth with ash-roasted beets,” he explains while severing the bloated terrorist leader’s cadaver at the pelvis with his chainsaw, filling the air with a pungent, almost curry-like bouquet of hot postmortem gases. “These flavors are wholly unique to this area. You will not find them anywhere else in the world.”

He offers me a bit of the wild parsnip dressed with some of the sulfurous froth leaking from the 9/11 perpetrator. The flavor is indeed like nothing I’ve ever tasted, sort of like a savory, yeasty vanilla that leaves a creamy film over your tongue. It’s the kind of flavor balance that other chefs spend years in the kitchen trying to master, and yet here Redzepi finds it naturally occurring in the wild.

While I’m still savoring the parsnip, Redzepi heads off on a determined search for a king musk carrot, a vegetable that is only mature and in season for eight seconds each year. If he can find one at peak ripeness, he hopes to pickle it before the eight seconds of edibility expire so that he can use it for a later occasion.

Over the course of several hours, he stumbles upon a handful of the carrots, but they’re all too young and bitter for harvest. Then, just as he’s getting ready to call it quits, he finally sees what he is looking for: a king musk carrot violently convulsing and emitting a soft red glow—the telltale sign that it is ready for harvest.

Redzepi yanks the carrot out of the ground and quickly rifles through his bag for some sort of vinegar he can use to preserve it, while the carrot flops panickedly atop the soil like a caught swordfish. Unfortunately, right as Redzepi manages to wrest the vinegar from his bag, the carrot’s eight-second season expires, and it explodes into a mushroom cloud of maggots and nine-volt batteries. The explosion leaves us both with severe burns over large portions of our bodies, but Redzepi does not seem fazed.

“To be a good chef, you must respect the ingredients,” he muses. “You don’t go into this profession unless you’re willing to be blown up by root vegetables from time to time.”

As I’m trying to process this nugget of wisdom, I’m distracted by the sound of rustling and grunting coming from a shadowy cluster of nearby trees.

“Grebble, grebble,” a strange voice growls.

I look over and see about a dozen sets of unblinking eyes staring at me through the leaves, sending a chill down my spine. Redzepi shoots an angry glare in their general direction and puts his finger to his lips to shush them.

“Return to your cupboards at once!” he barks through clenched teeth.

At his command, the lurkers immediately disperse and scurry off into the forest, grebbling hysterically as they go. I look to Redzepi for an explanation, but it doesn’t appear he’s in the mood to provide one.

“I think that’s enough foraging for today,” he snarls before collecting his belongings and storming away.