On Preservation: Reflections from Iceland

“Is all of the land in Iceland owned by someone?” I ask. “Like, in the US, pretty much every square inch of every piece of land is owned, either by the government or privately. Is it like that here?”

I am sitting with my friend Lisa, a Swiss woman who married an Icelandic farmer. We have driven a few miles into the fjord where they live, called Hvalfjördur, or “whale fjord”. It is one of the deepest fjords in Iceland, and as we drive along she tells me all of the things I am missing by not staying a few more days. Waterfalls that can be found deep in the fjord, and a whale processing facility, for example. This seems to be the case with everything in Iceland: stay a little longer, look a little closer, and you will find more.

“I have never thought of this,” she says to me. “I have no idea if all the land is owned.”

“Right, I get that,” I say. “It’s unnatural to think about, to be fair. I mean, it’s difficult to think that anyone could ever think they own _that_” I add, pointing to the vast, inexplicable mountain which juts abruptly out of the water below us, just one elbow of the earth’s restlessness here, the heaving and shifting that makes Iceland what it is.

We laugh. Yes. It seems absurd anywhere, the prospect of private property. I continue,

“It’s just that there’s so MUCH land in Iceland. It seems inconceivable that it isn’t considered land in common.”

“I agree,” Lisa says. “But I think I must be living in a dream world, here with you, and probably someone does own _that_,” she says, gesturing toward the mountain again.

“Right. Well, let’s stay here in the dream then. Tell me about the seaweed again.”

I am fixated on the local seaweed. Nearby there is a place where you can learn to harvest seaweed, and cook with the various types. There is a type with little bubbles in it that you can make into caper-like delicacies. And dulse, of course, which is quite common here. A chef I meet later teaches me to ferment it with whey to produce an almost licorice-like delight. I make a mental note to buy some Icelandic dulse later, then I forget it until I am standing in a sea of weary people in US Customs at JFK International airport, and it is too late.

There is a hairy seaweed that grows abundantly on rocks and shorelines that they call ‘sea truffle,’ which tastes eerily of actual truffle and sells for high prices at export. The only problem is cleaning it, especially for Lisa, because so many little sea animals live inside of the sea truffle, and she insists on returning them to the fjord where they belong. Still, we scheme on a new marinade for Lisa’s beef jerky. Instead of importing tamari, she can make her own marinade with koji fermented sea truffle. It will be unique to Kjos, where she and her husband farm and raise beef, in a country where eating beef is still not well understood.

We spend hours sitting at the table in their farmhouse, talking of farming: of animal breeds and grazing, of using trees for fence lines to graze through the windy Icelandic winter, of using seaweed as a protein supplement, of the consolidation of processing in Iceland (just like in the US), of the isolation of small scale agriculture. Lisa’s husband, Doddi, is charming and curious. Like many Icelanders, he is open and conversational. We trade ideas, and he readily shares his challenges. We laugh at the idiosyncrasies of human beings.

I’m struck by how many barriers facing Doddi here are not so wildly different than those facing farmers in the US. When I first traveled here, Iceland seemed a place held somehow in time, beautifully undisturbed and quietly content with the way things are. Not resistant to change, but careful to guard a sameness that has enduring value. I know now that this perception is in many ways correct. However, I see another side of it. In many ways, Iceland is a place of rapid change, and so there lies in every crevice of the land a kind of tension between change and staying the same that is particularly visible, especially in our world as it is right now.

My friend Bjarki puts it succinctly. “Icelanders are very quick to change and adapt,” he says. “When COVID came and everyone in the world got hooked on sourdough, as soon as Iceland picked it up, the few bakeries in Reykjavík that didn’t change to sourdough were like, finished. Superfast.” I recognize what he is describing. When I teach in Iceland, I am amazed at how attentive, sharp, and efficient the Icelanders are. They get to work, with so much less languishing or doubting themselves than my US students. But Bjarki feels that his country isn’t harnessing this adaptability. “There is so much potential here. I want to see it realized.”

Kari, a chef from the eastern region of the country, agrees. “I remember when I was like 18 or something I came around and all these Icelanders were just standing in a group staring at something. Nobody was talking or anything they were all just staring. I went up to see what they were staring at, and it was a pineapple.” He barely gets the last bit out, because he breaks into jolly laughter at the memory. Bjarki and I join in, laughing about the Icelanders, carefully observing the pineapple.

“Did anyone ever eat it?” I ask.

This sparks a new round of laughter. “I don’t think so,” Kari says. We laugh and laugh.

“I think I was 22 or 23 when I had my first tomato grown from the soil,” Kari says. This amazes me. Most produce grown in Iceland is grown hydroponically, and there is limited variety. In winter it is cucumbers, lettuce, and pale tomatoes. From the soil, there are cabbages and carrots. And tons of rutabagas. I assumed, I suppose, that it was because there is so much rock. Not a lot of tillable soil. But now, listening to Kari and Bjarki, I realize this can’t be the case everywhere. Volcanic soils are some of the most productive farm soils in the world. Surely there are soils here that can produce in-ground crops, and Bjarki confirms this, telling me that a greenhouse nearby is growing in-ground tomatoes, and they are the best he’s ever had. Regardless, it’s not the norm.

“This is what I mean,” Bjarki emphasizes. “There is so much that Icelanders can do but we are just ok to keep it as it is. And what, import tons of things?” Hence, bringing me here to teach charcuterie. We go and visit Petrína, a farmer who took my course three years ago, at the processing facility where she has scaled up to develop value-added hams and other products. “And now she is doing too much,” Bjarki tells me with eyebrows raised, climbing back into the car.

In an attempt to scratch the itch he has for Icelandic innovation, Bjarki spends his time consulting with farmers and business owners, helping them develop products and add value to local goods. For now, he has taken over a small hotel and restaurant with his cousin Gunnhildur and is putting all of his energy and resources into success there. The hotel is affiliated with a historic church in Skálholt, an iconic place in Iceland that is considered energetically sacred. Skál means bowl or basin, and that is exactly what the land does in Skálholt. You are surrounded by distant mountains, in a low-lying and undulating landscape, and the church and hotel sit on a hill overlooking it all.

I tell Bjarki about Doddi’s need for protein supplementation for his cows. I tell him I suggested seaweed.

“It’s a good idea. Also lupine. Lupine is everywhere in Iceland,” he says.

“But isn’t it poisonous? Can you ferment it?”

“People are working on it in Reykjavik,” he assures me. “If they figure it out, this will make a huge difference in Iceland being self-sufficient.”

We drive around, the landscape abruptly morphing as we make our way. Bjarki tells me that Icelanders have a specific word for the body of water that runs through this land. I can’t remember what it is, but essentially it describes a river that is moving so slowly that it looks like a lake. Moving, with the illusion of standing still.

—

This is preservation, this changing in order to keep. I specialize in this. I know it well. I think in the US, it is associated with holding something in perpetuity, but it isn’t. It’s changing it to guard it. It is both intervention and heedfulness. In Iceland, the traditional way of preserving meat is to boil it and then bury it in whey. There is abundant whey in Iceland because it is a byproduct of making skyr (pronounced _skeer_), the fermented milk product that most US citizens associate with Greek-style yogurt, though it might be more related to cheese. Sausages and even whole muscles are put into whey strained from skyr, and then eaten cold. There are also horse sausages made with large chunks of horse fat in them and then heavily smoked with dung. Their flavor is so intense I am still training myself to eat them. Then there is fermented skate, which is cooked at the holiday, stinking up all the houses. My new friend Dagny, who owns a fermented vegetable company in Hafnarfjördur (near Reykjavík), says that younger city folk complain about the skate smell, but Icelandic people love it, and so continue to make it. Kari agrees, telling me that he doesn’t always eat the traditional foods, but at holidays and special times they are essential.

I find this throughout my travels abroad. Countries with traditional food identities that are still alive and well within the culture, embraced by both young and old, are less likely to have prohibitive food regulations that limit food freedom. Of course, regulations do exist and are challenging for small-scale business owners, but they don’t pose the barrier to entry that they do in the US. I point this out to the group, to make sure they are aware of it, emphasizing that there is only one way to keep it this way: eat the foods. Eat them and make them. Icelanders, with their profoundly sharp logic, heartily agree with me. Kari is using a very traditional, almost hard skyr from the east region at his restaurant. It is aged longer, favoring more yeast in the fermentation, thereby altering the texture and flavor. His restaurant Nielsen is in Egilsstadir, and opened just before COVID, so he has considered the last two years an extended dry run. (Here is another thing for me to come back and experience.) He shows me photos of his young son helping him collect wild goose eggs in eastern Iceland for the menu, and I am enchanted at the sight of giant blue eggs in pale straw nests which dot the landscape. It looks like a scene from the Neverending Story, though to Kari it is as common as dandelion. His restaurant only sources from Iceland, and he is rigid about serving only Icelandic food, which he embellishes with culinary innovation.

Doddi, Lisa, and I had a similar but winding conversation about preserving (their farm) while innovating just enough to stand out amidst the business consolidation of dairy and meat processing, the modernization of food in Iceland, and the commanding hand of climate instability. We talked about the controversy surrounding filling in drainage ditches around the fjords in order to sequester carbon. We talked about the seaweed and the lupine. We talked about planting trees. To outsiders, Iceland may seem untouched and protected, but it is not. Lisa told me that there are plentiful mussels on the shores of the Hvalfjördur, and locals have always harvested them in their season, as part of a traditional diet. But an aluminum smelting facility, visible across the fjörd from the farmhouse, has had questionable impacts on the water, and Lisa has stopped harvesting mussels.

“Iceland is easily about twenty years behind everyone else,” Bjarki tells me. “But if we catch something, we will be the quickest to make it work.”

I believe him, walking out into the bowl and hill that is Skalholt in the cold morning, listening to the water cut through the land, listening to the drumming song of Hrossagaukur (common snipe) which has returned to Iceland to mark the impending onset of summer. The bridge I stand on is overrun with lichen in tantalizing colors: neon orange, seafoam green, grey, brown, and black. The tunnels and pipes for the water are covered in shaggy, abundant moss. It has not gotten dark at night since I have been here, even though the sun does still rise and set every day. But each day, it rises a full 30 minutes earlier and sets a full 30 minutes later. Soon enough, it won’t set at all.

Of course, I understand it. Icelanders are adaptable and quick to change because all people are a reflection of the land that holds them, and this land is maybe the most dynamic in the northern hemisphere. It looks majestically still to visitors, but the glaciers are moving and melting, the fast trickle over the cliff will someday be a powerful waterfall, the fungi and plants and microbes are hard at work, and on the first day of my workshop, a 4.8 earthquake rumbled in Selfoss, just 30 km away. One can drive for just three hours from the west to the south and experience utterly mind-blowing changes in the landscape outside the window. Thinking of Bjarki, Kari, Petrina, Dagny, Doddi, and Lisa— my friends who are innovating and ever-developing- I just hope they aren’t in too much of a hurry. If Iceland has anything, it is that steady dance of both shifting and balance. The river that looks like a lake.

I tell them about this, and share the similarities where I am from in the eastern US. Perhaps a cautionary tale? I tell them that in the eastern US we have abundant water and plant life, and resources remain, so people tend to be less cautious, perhaps. But we also lack a deep culture that urges us to preserve. Why are people so good at visualizing the potentials that might come from resource conversion, but so bad at visualizing the potential (parallel) resource depletion? As if to confirm my frustration, on the day I return, someone tells me in a meeting that “nobody cares about creating carbon management plans in North Carolina, right now.” I think, why not? Why. The. Hell. Not. I am groggy and swollen from 30 hours of travel, and I almost argue with him. But I know that my argument isn’t with him, it’s with the people he is right about. Next week I leave for central Mexico, where the land is so stripped and water so scarce that farmers are in crisis. But of course, the land there was not always that way. And so, it will be the opposite of Iceland, and I tell my Scandinavian students about it. I tell them about the arsenic and cyanide coming out of the desert wells. Do they understand? They do. They are listening. They are so quietly and attentively listening that I feel I can almost hear the geese going by outside as I am talking, the hoof steps of Icelandic horses, and the long notes of wind coming over the bare hills of Skálholt.