How to Say ‘Stop Invading Greenland’ With Reindeer Sausage

Food is like dance: a language, but not one you’d want to use in an emergency.

Food can say I love you or Congratulations (it helps if you are able to use icing on top of the food to make its message clearer) or even something slightly more subtle: I am proud of the seafood offerings of my region.

It cannot say Look out! There is a projectile flying at your head! or Please stop trying to invade Greenland.

Or can it? I went to “Taste of the Arctic” last week at the Danish ambassador’s residence to find out.

The evening, billed as a celebration of “the culinary heritage and enduring cultural ties connecting Alaska, Greenland, and Denmark across the Arctic and North Atlantic,” came the week before the signing of an agreement about the U.S.’s presence in Greenland, though I am not sure I would have been able to tell you any details of the agreement being hashed out based on the available cuisine.

The food was made by two chefs, Miki Siegsted and Joaquin Guzmán, representing Greenland and Denmark respectively.

Guzmán, from Argentina, is the head chef of a Danish restaurant that cooks exclusively with Danish ingredients, meaning that if he wants chocolate, he cannot have chocolate.

He has to engineer something like chocolate himself by using the by-products of beer brewing, which he reports have a delicious, chocolate-like flavor.

Siegsted makes a point of introducing Greenlandic cuisine to a wider world, and is serving us reindeer sausage! (“Poor Rudolph,” says the waiter passing it around.) Fortunately, speeches let us know what the food is trying to tell us.

“Food is one of the most honest languages we have,” Danish Ambassador Jesper Møller Sørensen says.

“It tells you about a place, its water, its weather, and its people better than any briefing note could do.” He adds that “we have a very constructive dialogue with our American friends to achieve a framework that addresses the real security concerns that the United States has, that we share.

These are serious conversations.