noma: To unmake a system you are shaped by

Lately I have been sitting with a question that does not lift.

 

What does it mean to try to change a system you are still inside of. What does it mean to attempt repair while still being shaped by the very thing you are trying to repair. What do we owe the ones who try, imperfectly, in public, over years, and what do we owe ourselves when we recognize that we are often in the same predicament.

 

The question came to me through the recent coverage of noma. Those of you who have been reading along at Welcome Home know I have shared moments from there over the years.

 

I am aware of the harm caused. Abuse is abuse, and there is no posture that softens or justifies this.

 

And yet there is something the coverage has rarely turned toward. The inquiry into toxic kitchen culture at noma did not begin in 2026. It began in 2011, and arguably before, when René Redzepi founded MAD. It continued in 2015, when he wrote an essay naming, in his own voice, the violence of the system he had been trained inside. It deepened in 2017, when noma closed and reopened with a restructured model. Better pay. More sustainable hours. A different relationship between the kitchen and the people inside it — a practice that has been in place now for nearly ten years.

 

My first encounter with the organization was in 2017. What I met there were people sincerely devoted to their craft, professionals who love what they do at the deepest level. Hundreds of people have worked here, and thousands more have dined. Cooking and eating is an inherently reciprocal act, and what I received as a diner here wasn't a collective hallucination.

 

So why was I so shaken by what came forward?

After months of sitting with this, one thought keeps surfacing.
 

René and Noma as an organization are trying to shift a system they are also still inside of, still shaped by, still learning to unmake in himself, in themselves.
 

Toxic kitchen culture is not over, and the institution is trying to figure out how to co-create a more sustainable version of itself.

 

This is the predicament most of us are living through. Anyone who has ever tried to undo something in whatever system they are ingrained in. As parents, as founders, as designers, as people in hospitality. We carry the gap between the language we use and the lives we have so far been able to build. We build with what we have, and in all honesty we are sometimes the gap. The question of how we are treated, and how we treat others, when we name our own failures, when we attempt repair from inside, when we fall short of the words we ourselves have spoken, is something worth sitting with. We should at least hold space for the ones who truly reckon with that reality and are trying to create a new path forward.
 

I have walked into many spaces that named themselves as conscious, vanguard, reformed, and discovered the foundation beneath them was the same architecture, dressed in newer clothes and a more fashionable narrative. This wasn't the case with noma. They actually embodied the narrative, and the foundation coherent.
 

Yet there is a sobering recognition that systems are deeper than narratives, and that the work of repair is rarely clean, linear, or straightforward. And it rarely relies on a single person.
 

I have personally spent years in therapy doing the healing work of who I think I am and who I am in reality. Mending the gap of the mind.

 

Real change is slower than we want it to be. It does not announce itself in a single gesture. It moves through small experiments, course corrections, conversations that take years to ripen, decisions that look minor from outside and feel monumental from within. It is grassroots, often invisible, sometimes contradictory. It tries something, watches what happens, and tries something else. It builds with time like a practice. By hand. In iterations. With the willingness to begin again, and again, and again.

This is the part of repair that is hardest to see from the outside. Because what it looks like, in any given week, is just people working. People showing up. People making one decision differently than they would have ten years ago. The cumulative effect, over years, is a culture that has shifted. But the shifting itself happens too quiet to make headlines. I have witnessed this in almost a decade of interactions with noma. Focused. Tangible. Year after year. 

 

It is in a way, the work that lives ahead of us. The work of the collective, across the systems we are embedded in. Only if we are willing to recognize that we are sometimes the gap ourselves.

 

I do not know what the right way to hold all of this is. I am not certain anyone does.

 

So I hope that we can walk through our anger and arrive somewhere closer to restoration than to retribution. That when we are confronted with someone who has both caused harm and tried, however imperfectly, to undo the conditions that produced it, we are able to hold the whole of them without flattening either truth. That we do not become, in pursuit of accountability, the very thing we are seeking to bring to account.

 

This is the work. For the kitchens. For the studios. For the homes. For me as much as for anyone I have written about here.

 

It is, in the deepest sense, a work in progress.