Photos by Martin Kaufmann. La Grande Bouffe is the greatest movie ever made about food. Nowhere else has food looked so glorious as in this bacchanal orgy of gastronomy, sex, bourgeois angst, and gluttony. I, however, normally find the relationship between food and sex a turn-off. We are sold the idea that ingredients such as chocolate are conducive to romance and boosting our sexual urges, but there is nothing more distressing than the sight of an awkward Valentine's couple sitting in a sea of tacky red balloons and losing their dignity and libido over a plate of oysters with champagne.
An oozing chocolate fondant is not a fountain of lustβit's a catalyst for bloated regret. And watching Nigella Lawson licking a custard spoon clean is about as arousing as a PBS documentary on famine. Festival guests do their own cooking at the FoodJam stall by the camp site.
So it was with some trepidation that I went to this year's Roskilde music festival in Denmark and signed up for a dinner called "Potent Pop-Up. Roskilde is Denmark's biggest music festival and has been a fixture on the European scene for more than 40 years. This year's headliners included the Rolling Stones and Outkast. But the festival has started to take its food offerings as seriously as its music programming.
While many festivals happily flog conveyor-belt junk to indiscriminate revelers, Roskilde has set ambitious organic targets for its food stalls. It recycles excess ingredients and turns this into meals for local shelters, and it hosts a series of dining events that bring culinary relief to a urine-soaked festival site. It all sounds unbearably civilized, but the food events at Roskilde was brilliant tasty fun.
And it's not that all Danish youth are saintly goody two-shoes who are more into shucking oysters than popping mollyβthey are as debauched as the next lotβbut when you have lived on tinned tuna and lukewarm vodka for five days, a cooked meal made from decent produce is like a juice cleanse for the soul. But back to the aphrodisiacs: The odd people with tickets for the event gathered at a long table in an old stable in the middle of the festival site.
