The Bittersweet Bounty Of Greenland's First Spring

On a recent trip to Greenland, just before the island went up “for sale,” I was served—and ate—whale, polar bear, walrus, and seal. I ate narwhal and musk ox and caribou. The dishes were served in various incarnations (from stews and soups to sculptural tapas) on various occasions (from celebrations called kaffemiks to community gatherings to formal meals in finer restaurants) by people from all walks of life, including the country's former prime minister. And every time I turned around, there was mattak, an Inuit favorite, consumed like candy, of chewy narwhal skin with blubber.

This was harpoon-to-table, and hatchet-to-table, and rusted-rifle-to-table. And in the case of caribou, which by Greenlandic tradition must be carried out of the wilderness by the hunter's own hands, it was shoulder-and-back-to-table. This was extreme food served in a highly dramatic, weirdly bountiful environment. It made the American movement feel quaint and prissy. Like people in Wellington boots playacting for some sort of reality-television series. But it was more than that too: With global warming, the whole fundamental idea of Greenlandic cuisine was in the throes of reconsideration and change, at the same rapid pace that the island itself seemed to be shifting politically and socially. If food is identity, one of the urgent questions in Greenland these days seemed to be, how, exactly, are you supposed to approach and create and ingest that identity as it melts into some new form?

I'm guessing history may one day show that no Viking expedition—or whaling voyage—took as long as my attempt to get to Greenland, sparked three years ago by a chance encounter with an enigmatic Greenlandic chef in my hometown of Portland, Maine. His name was Inunnguaq Hegelund. Inu, as he asked to be called, spoke with the whispery rolling r's and th's of someone operating their third language. He came trailing his island behind, or embodied it—vowels of rock, ocean, and ice on his tongue. He'd made his reputation back home by reimagining traditional dishes in surprising, sometimes bombastic ways, prompting some to glimpse in him the future of Greenlandic restaurant cuisine. As part of the festivities surrounding a meeting of the Arctic Council—the eight-member forum of countries with sovereignty claims within the Arctic Circle—he was cooking at a local Portland restaurant, Vinland, named for the windswept spot where Leif Eriksson landed in North America.

My hometown newspaper had billed Inu as Greenland's top chef, but Portland has a larger population than all of Greenland (67,000 versus 58,000 people) and probably has more restaurants too (according to TripAdvisor at the time of this writing, almost seven times more, in fact: 384 to 57). One had to be honest: It wasn't quite like José Andrés or Massimo Bottura swooping in, but still, to me it seemed exotic, in part because I didn't know there were exportable Greenlandic chefs, as I'd never thought of Greenlandic food as being particularly exportable. What was Greenlandic cuisine, anyway? As Inu was excited to point out, the answer to that question was in the midst of revision. As the ice sheet that covers 80 percent of the island had begun to melt, tubers had begun to appear again from the dirt of old Norse farms. There were more potatoes and a celery-like herb called angelica. There were turnips, carrots, and even juicy strawberries. (In fact, vegetable production has more than doubled since 2008.) As part of the relative abundance—“relative” because this was still the Arctic, after all—more sprouting herbs had appeared, and while it wasn't exactly Chez Panisse, Greenland was witnessing the beginning of a movement whereby a new generation of homegrown chefs—a number coming up in restaurants with Danish head chefs, some having trained at Greenland's only culinary school, in the south—were considering ways to repurpose the ingredients the island gave, to modernize, intensify, or reinvent the dishes of yore.

All over Greenland, change had come at the pace of global warming itself. During 2019 alone, 329 billion tons of ice would melt, grazing grounds for wild and domesticated animals increased, and the south popped with flora not seen since Viking days and Erik the Red. Heating bills were down, supply ships arrived more often, tourists flocked (up from roughly 4,000 in 1993 to about 100,000 in 2018), leaving their huge carbon footprints but supporting a burgeoning hospitality industry replete with new restaurants.

For many scientists, Greenland is ground zero for global warming; projections suggest that as the island's ice sheet melts to nothing, seas will rise up to 24 feet, swamping New York City.

The rush of cultural change was exacerbating old anxieties too—reviving questions about the island's identity and raising new calls for greater sovereignty. While Greenland's head of state is the Danish monarch, currently Margrethe II, and Denmark technically controls the territory—in particular its external policies and security—Greenland was granted home rule in 1979. Today the Danish government pumps more than $500 million in annual subsidies into Greenland, a fact that most Greenlanders acknowledge as key to their survival. The history between the island and Denmark is complicated and blurry, and the social scars run deep. For years, too, the Danes have stocked Greenlandic markets with Danish food, changing the eating habits of Greenlanders, separating them—sometimes alienating them, as Inu said—from their local cornucopia.

Where other national cuisines had taken centuries to form, Greenland's, it seemed, was open to sudden evolution—and perhaps, too, debate about how a place goes from subsisting on meat and fat in order to survive the long, cold winters to the higher levels of year-round gastronomy. What fused in my imagination, then, was a lone whale and a table set with linen cloth on its back, a melting iceberg with a cherry on top.

If global warming was set to reshape the planet in profound, irreversible ways, Greenland seemed to be one of the most obvious places on earth already affected. And one could read some of the tea leaves—the weird, sometimes counterintuitive harbingers of our future writ large—if one were to look closely for a moment at Greenland's food and culinary scene. Inu said I should come, as if inviting me to a poker game around the corner. Or a rave with northern-lights lasers. He said the easiest way to understand Greenland was to eat her food. It seemed a polite and, with later hindsight, feckless toss-off—the thing you say to placate the overeager guy with the tweaky quasar gleam in his eye, the one who's asking one too many questions. The problem was, I took the invite seriously. As if it had been issued by Greenland herself. I kept thinking: Seal steak and seaweed? What am I missing?

I arrived in June, in cool rain, in what would be among the warmer summers in Greenland's history, including one 70-plus-degree July day (the 31st, to be exact) during which 11 billion tons of ice melted from the ice sheet. There was no ticker-tape parade. Inu did not meet me at the airport, nor did he return my texts. If I was befuddled by his absence, it added an air of mystery. I was being ghosted by a guy I barely knew, who may or may not have been serious about hanging out, in a country where I knew zilch other humans.

Meanwhile, Greenland went about her business. Projections suggest that as the island's ice sheet melts to nothing, seas will rise up to 24 feet, swamping New York City, among other metropoles. But planet Earth is, by many estimates, already on the verge of large-scale migrations, virulent disease outbreaks, and border stresses that will rearrange the chess pieces of our world. The New York Times figures that 800 million people in South Asia alone will be affected.

If we're all living under the big guillotine, that first morning the capital of Nuuk—like all capitals of the world, one must imagine—still bustled with oblivious, whistling people heading to work, grocery shopping, visiting friends. In a study from the University of Copenhagen, most Greenlanders who were sampled acknowledged global warming was real and impacting their land and their lives, but a majority also saw global warming as a boon to farming, tourism, mining, and shipping. To commerce, that is. And with the loss of Greenland's heavy coat of ice—the ice sheet reaches two miles deep in some spots—the oddest effect of all was that the island was actually rising due to a phenomenon called “post-glacial rebound” whereby, with the melting of the ice cap atop the earth's solid crust, the surface would spring upward, elevator-like. The more swamped and submerged that water-level cities become in the future, the higher and higher a place like Nuuk might rise, in increasingly more temperate weather. It's not a metaphor but a geological and meteorological fact. Greenland, it seems, is one of the few spots on earth that might one day provide refuge from the new ravages.

That first night, at the hotel restaurant sans Inu, I'd had a mouthwatering fillet of musk ox steak, unexpected, for in my mind's eye I had equated the musk ox, sporting its distinctive heavy coat and long, curved horns, with one of God's ugliest beasts, one named for its own stink, no less. But the grilled steak had been so tender and buttery, so lean and sweet. It was more closely related to goat and sheep than to cow. And, as I soon found, better—and more juicy—than all three. The other thing about it was that it had been hunted just up the fjord.

On the second night, by a serendipitous turn of events (well, the pity and connections of a Stateside friend), I had been invited to eat at the home of Aleqa Hammond, the first female prime minister of Greenland. When I'd mentioned that fact to another Greenlander, I was met with a raised eyebrow. “Oh, that'll be interesting,” she said. Aleqa was as well known for her cooking as for her outspokenness, she said, and predicted we'd be eating whale.

Sure enough, steak number two was minke whale, taken from the nearby waters of the Arctic Ocean. At Aleqa's cozy, thoroughly modern three-story house with a killer view of the mountains, a sweet scent wafted past me at the front door. Pans sat simmering on the stove, and upstairs, where we were to dine, there were lit candles and narwhal tusks that hung from the ceiling. With her hair sheared short, at 55, Aleqa was warm and charismatic, with a quick intelligence and unapologetic steeliness. She had been raised above the Arctic Circle, in a place called Uummannaq, having lost her father, a hunter, at age seven, when he'd fallen through the ice.

Greenland had its own complicated history, she said, defined by the collision of Inuit culture with that of, at first, the Danes and then, during the 1940s, the Americans. Her political renown came partly from the stridency of her desire to see Greenland separate from Denmark—in her lifetime, she hoped—and partly from the 2014 allegations of misused funds that drove her from office. Regardless, the accusations hadn't exactly derailed her political career, as she still held a seat in the Greenlandic legislature and had recently run, without success, for one of two seats Greenland holds in the Danish Parliament.

Aleqa could be counted as one of the leaders of a vanguard in Greenland, a new generation more than willing to strike back at what she saw as Greenland's colonial oppressors. When our U.S. president made noise about purchasing Greenland from the Danes this past summer, she appeared on the BBC, calling him “very arrogant,” reminding the world that Greenland belonged to the Inuits, not to the Danes or to anyone else, for that matter. Apparently she didn't mince her words about local politicians, either. Wandering Nuuk earlier that day, I'd found an election poster with her face on it by the side of the road, a hole punched through the middle.

It was hard not to notice a certain amount of this strife in the air, to be honest. From the radio in a cab, I was introduced to the Greenlandic rapper Tarrak, whose protest song “Tupilak” touches on the tension between the Danes and the Greenlanders, and on the fate of Greenlanders who are shut out of their own society for not speaking Danish. “They'll label us as drunks and nobodies. Are we still a colonized people?” rapped Tarrak. “We come home broken. See ourselves as nothing. And feel like nobodies.” The driver, an exuberant young West Greenlander, cranked it for me, bobbing his head, and said, with a huge smile, “I need to contact this guy and give him a big shoulder clap.”

This vociferation aimed again and again at Denmark caught me by surprise, particularly because we tend to idealize the Danes as being somewhat enlightened and progressive. As one Dane in Greenland told me, yes, if you had to be colonized by anyone, the Danes certainly weren't the worst. And yet the country had been a domineering, schismatic presence in Greenland: For instance, Greenlandic hadn't even been instituted as the official language of Greenland until 2009, while for many years islanders had been sent to Denmark for “proper” secondary schooling. “We've fucked up a lot of shit here,” said my Danish friend.

Another woman I met, Maya Sialuk Jacobsen, born of a Danish father and a Greenlandic mother, said she'd grown up disconnected from some of the rituals of her Inuit past, more fully reconnecting only in adulthood, partly by allowing herself to get traditional face tattoos, five straight lines drawn from her bottom lip down her chin and a V on her forehead, similar to designs found on 500-year-old Inuit female mummies. (The Danes had banned the tattoos 300 years ago, but now there is a small but passionate movement of women getting these face tattoos, thanks in large part to Jacobsen herself, who had learned the art of application.)

On the plate before me sat Aleqa's whale: pan-fried in butter, then dished up with a sauce of shallots and angelica, an old staple with a new jus. I had eaten whale once before, in the most northerly part of Norway, where it was served as a peppered steak, pan-seared and rare—almost like sushi—feeling a little like forbidden fruit. But on this evening at Aleqa's house, the whale was just…dinner. Simple, on the well-done side: dense, tasty, and rich (more meaty than fishy, with a faint aftertaste of the sea). There was hardly any ado about it. The whale, in this setting, was absolutely normal. But normal had a different connotation here.

Savoring the meat, I was made to understand that the whale before me now was multiple, that one could, in their imagination, hold the whale up and rotate it 360 degrees to gain a sense of Greenland itself. It represented Aleqa's own past: her father, the hunter, and the ancestors too. It represented part of the reason the Danes had come in the first place, how they'd arrived in the 1700s to this Inuit homeland obsessed with their religion and their need for whale blubber to light Europe. And the whale was a symbol, too, of Greenland's formerly pristine biome—which held, within its DNA, its future, both its purity and the heavy metals contaminating its marine life. Worse, as the ice disappeared—and with it ice algae, which is eaten by plankton, which in turn is eaten by whales—the chain effect eventually spelled disaster for much of the whale population. Finally, too, it represented a sort of political errancy in the eyes of Western activists, for to eat whale was to commit an almost criminal act.

This idea, that there's a rightness and wrongness to food, and that someone acts as arbiter—and usually that someone is a conqueror, in one guise or another—seemed particularly dangerous, if depressing. The supply ships came here each year from Denmark when the ice melted, packed with Danish products to restock the settlements of Greenland. The supermarkets carried something that sort of translated as “the One-Week Food Packet.” It was food for a week, but as one Greenlander described it to me, it was also a dependency, just “pork, pork, pork. Pork from Denmark. And people buy it because it's cheap.”

If the food of Greenland had indeed been criminalized to some extent by outsiders, the residents of Greenland had been partially infantilized by outside food, too. For people like Aleqa and Inu, there was a battle for the hearts and minds—and stomachs—of their compatriots. There was the Danish language and then there was the Greenlandic language; there was Danish food and then Greenlandic food. Though the early European trading companies frowned upon miscegenation with the Inuit, Greenlanders today are a mix, some bearing Danish-Inuit names. But still the two cultures remained separate, signifying very different things—the island self-identifies as 80 percent Inuit and 11 percent Danish—and the line between them remains fraught and supercharged.

For Aleqa, though, it wasn't just the Danes. She seemed equally vexed by the Americans. The U.S. had come to Greenland during the Second World War and built military bases—sharing everything from the latest dances to American food with the Greenlanders. We'd also devised a covert underground Cold War missile launch site. Known as Project Iceworm, it was meant to house medium-range missiles aimed at Soviet targets. The program was kept secret at the time, even from the Danish government, and was decommissioned in 1967, leaving behind radioactive waste and PCBs, as well as over 50,000 gallons of diesel embedded in the ice sheet that was now melting. While the Pentagon has acknowledged discussing the matter with the Danish government, I later met an American contractor in Greenland who hinted at cleanup work being done sooner rather than later—their security clearance prohibited them from saying more—but who knew?

Inu jumped out of the car, huddled himself, and lit a cigarette. He started talking then, about Greenlandic cuisine and the urgency he felt to release it from the chains of the island's Danish overlords, partly as an important political act.

“Our nature—the environment—is everything to us,” Aleqa said. It was Greenland's dowry; no wonder polluters were the enemy. The Inuits believed the ancestors would come back to feed their brethren if that environment was protected. And there was that $500 million in annual subsidies from the Danish government, which to Aleqa's mind spelled the difference between home rule and complete independence. The island possesses some 10 percent of the world's rare-earth elements, while the government has already leased blocks of land to mining and oil companies for exploration of untapped but one day potentially lucrative reserves, ones that have proven too difficult to access as yet.

As I sliced, swabbed, and ate that juicy whale meat, my first epiphany was this: The past and the present were compressed here—maybe more closely than in other places—and as much as it was renowned for ice and glacier, Greenland was equally about its meat and blood.

So yes, optimist that I am, I'd planned my Greenland trip around Inu, who had kindly offered to help me navigate the island's enormity while leading me on a bit of a culinary tour. But there was a catch: Greenland's top chef didn't have a restaurant of his own; instead he did freelance gigs and pop-ups, ones that took him all over the island—and the world—and his schedule seemed to change so often I'd hesitated before buying plane tickets. He had parried my needy emails with breezy ones that read “I'm excited” (was he? No exclamation point) and “Should we do some great things for some magazines?” When at last I bought tickets for hard-chiseled dates, his plans changed again. At least between his various gigs, we would overlap for two nights in Nuuk. Or would we? I'd sent more texts from the hotel—to no avail. It dawned on me that Inu might be one of the few chefs in the world who genuinely didn't seem to give a damn about being profiled in a glossy magazine. That, or he was an epic flake.

I started to think of him as part of the fauna here, evanescent. Like the threatened narwhal and polar bear. Everything in Greenland seemed on the move as well, new patterns asserting themselves: The minke whales had drifted farther offshore, scores of halibut had pushed farther north for colder water, the polar bears kept searching for the ice that kept disappearing (sometimes now they floated south on icebergs, completely dislocating themselves from their habitat). I learned that traveling by sled dog was becoming less practical and more dangerous, because even when frozen the ice was increasingly untrustworthy and therefore deadly. There are roughly half the number of Greenlandic sled dogs as there were in 2000. (Increased snowmobile use and disease have contributed to the decline as well.) Meanwhile the most famous glacier in Greenland, Sermeq Kujalleq, a World Heritage site at Ilulissat, lost more ice than any other glacier in the country from 2000 to 2010.

Sometime around 4 p.m. on one of those days in Nuuk, my phone rang. The White Rabbit. Inu. He was very sorry, something about having fallen asleep for a while, packing his bags, sick kid, very busy blah blah, then sleeping again. Though he was leaving Nuuk the next morning in the wee hours, he said he would pick me up so we could go for a little ride. He said he wanted to show me something, a surprise. I waited on the allotted curb, losing confidence as the minutes ticked by. A wind picked up, the clouds bruised overhead.

All of a sudden came a tin-can car barreling down into the old harbor, a rented beater of unknown make with Inu behind the wheel. He smiled sheepishly through the windshield. And apologized again when I got in. Dissipation of bad blood, I felt a sudden surge of gratitude. He possessed the skittish, impulsive energy of a teenager, though he was 32, his thin face and ovoid eyes topped with black hair. We started driving, past the cranes and new construction of Nuuk, a city that was smack in the middle of a growth spurt, with plans to add 2,500 new houses, three new schools, an art gallery, an indoor stadium, and a new airport with an expanded runway that would contribute to forecasts of a rapidly increasing population, some coming from the hinterlands, some coming for the business opportunities. We passed an office for Deloitte, the multinational financial-services network. Inu wanted to take me out to where the road ended, so we looped up and down the mountains of the fjord as the pavement turned to dirt, where more of the new Nuuk was to be built in the near future, a neighborhood that would one day house 5,000 new residents. We came to a stop on a promontory looking back on the rising city itself, at the cranes and bright-colored buildings. It was moody out there, windy and gray, and Inu jumped out, huddled himself, and lit a cigarette.

He started talking then, about Greenlandic cuisine and the urgency he felt to release it from the chains of the island's Danish overlords, partly as an important political act. It wasn't a country that ate out much, really; it was more the tourists that sustained the restaurant industry. Which was one challenge. He himself had recently run a pop-up restaurant, one that lasted seven months, offering lunch and dinner with paper napkins in a pub—serving polar bear stew and fried reindeer and raw whale skin with seaweed—but the finances had become too complicated. Meanwhile the idea of eating local has always been tricky in Greenland, in part because of the harsh weather and extremity—by November the sun would set and not rise again until March—but in part, too, because the population has been acculturated to eat imported food, including those ubiquitous pork packs.

Over the years, Inu's feelings about this kind of transactional interference had taken the form of proselytizing. “When I come to restaurants in Nuuk—or anywhere in Greenland,” he said, “I go back in the kitchens and have a coffee, and I ask, ‘Why are you serving chicken instead of fish?’ Once, people ate local every day here. Then came pasta and pork, and the rest.” Inu said it got so bad that up until about 10 years ago restaurants used few local ingredients, bypassing everything in Greenland's natural icebox, all the whale, seal, halibut, lumpfish, narwhal, cod, reindeer, musk ox, angelica, lamb, seaweed, and tubers, flowers, and veggies on offer.

The other challenge was dispositional. Inu said he taught each year at a vocational culinary school, in a town called Narsaq, where a new crop of enthusiastic chefs-in-training were learning the most modern techniques; in one case, he'd even paid for a young chef to go to Italy, to cook in kitchens there. But according to Inu, the Inuit temperament wasn't suited to hierarchical kitchens run by protean autocrats, the oft-mercurial kind who'd flipped the script on their own national cuisine.

“You can't be a king like that in Greenland. Maybe because we're humbled by nature,” Inu said. “If I'm cooking in the U.S. or Europe or Canada, I can be more aggressive in the kitchen. But Greenlanders, no, they don't yell like this. They cower when you get angry.”

Innovation, then, was less a question of wildly concocted whale foams and iceberg soups than the intensification of traditional dishes, a baby-step progression toward the new. Remember, this was the very beginning of something, the birth of a more haute cuisine that could be considered uniquely Greenlandic. In fact, some of Inu's greatest pleasures as a chef seemed to come from confounding social and generational expectations. “I made a traditional dish, a stew, a suaasat”—often made from seal or whale—“for an old hunter,” he said. “The elders say, ‘You're young, you can't cook like we cook.’ But the old hunter tried it and said, ‘This is freaking good!’ ” In Greenland it was the ultimate French kiss of satisfaction.

Inu allowed that his own perfect meal was sea urchins and mussels served with seaweed on rocks by the ocean because, in a strange way, maybe it captured the ethos of Greenlandic cooking right now. “The perfect taste over performance,” he said.

Now, as the wind picked up, he'd locked himself out of his running car. “Shit, shit, shit,” he said, tugging on the doors. Soon he jimmied his way back in, and we were driving again, up a dirt road, in an industrial quarter of town. We pulled up to a blank warehouse with a barking husky straining on a taut chain, and two men stepped out of a disco-lit doorway. They were wearing hairnets and introduced themselves as Rasmus and Nicklas—a tall blond Viking-like fellow and his opposite, a smaller, charming dark-haired motormouth. Leading us through the door, they offered us hairnets and shoe cozies and then, passing through another entryway with plastic strips, we found ourselves bathed in warm ultraviolet light, as if in someone's heaven.

It turned out, I think, to have been Inu's, for he instantly seemed to levitate. Unlike, say, the San Joaquin Valley, Greenland today still possesses an extremely short growing season, on very limited arable land, mostly in the south. Even if there were new abundances of an herb like angelica to be found, there was still much that couldn't grow here, or hadn't yet, herbs we might otherwise take for granted in our supermarkets and kitchens. For Inu, part of building a new creative cuisine—as well as food independence—meant growing herbs of all sorts on the island itself, either indoors or outside, most of them not necessarily indigenous to Greenland.

In new Greenland, the latest trend, I was told, was to mix the traditional food with some foreign inflection, whether it be tapas or sushi, like seal nigiri or walrus curry.

The “vertical farm,” as Nicklas dubbed it, was Nuuk's only industrial greenhouse, a computerized micro-environment with a hand-built irrigation system. In the large hangar-like space were rows of metal platform-like shelving, bearing non-native plants and herbs and vegetables of all kinds, and Nicklas repeated what Inu had been saying, in essence: The future was right here, within these four walls, a yearlong supply of veggies and herbs, if only the future could find clients to buy—and cook with—purple basil and turnips, celery and peppers. You'd have to retrain an entire populace how to augment their meat and fish, to make their sauces and stews, to use a cookbook, even. At the moment, Rasmus and Nicklas were building their client list, selling to high-end restaurants in town, as well as peopling a table outside the downtown supermarket, as a kind of street-vendor/info post.

“We spend six hours out there at a clip,” said Nicklas. “They can't tell the difference between basil and thyme and parsley. We have to tell every person we meet that dill would be good for the fish or reindeer; thyme is best for Greenlandic lamb; sage is great for seal soup. Turnips—they don't know what those are good for.”

Those who actually bought their produce were Danes living in Nuuk, the ones comprising a fifth of the population in the capital. It would take time, said Nicklas. It was an untapped market, but what Inu seemed to be seeing in all of the leaves and flowering vegetables were not dollars but the beginning of a movement. He kept pacing up and down the glowing aisles, beaming, checking the health of the oregano and chives. In that greenhouse moment, all Inu saw was possibility.

“I'm so happy,” said Inu, smiling in the ultraviolet, gazing on the plants, just before he disappeared again to another country, or sleep, or wherever. What he saw was freedom, too. “We're looking at a new world,” he said.

If Greenland was a test-tube baby for global warming, then what could one deduce? That there might be some net short-term positives balanced by some much darker future unknowns? Right now, you could say that molecules were shifting and reshaping. The ice sheet kept melting, the glaciers, mile-deep ecosystems unto themselves, kept calving, the water kept rising, the fish and animals kept reorienting in new patterns, chased by the hunters reorienting. Where this would end was anyone's guess.

If it felt like everything was in flux, the human beings themselves seemed to hearken back to some age-old hospitality. People invited me into their homes to eat their suaasat. They wanted to share their dried cod. Again and again, they offered mattak, the narwhal blubber that was to be treated in one's mouth like a tobacco chaw, to be suctioned and salivated over, then spit out or swallowed whole. And there was kiviak: little birds named auks stuffed and fermented in seal skin, consumed on the most special occasions like a smelly French cheese.

In Inuit, it turns out the word for food is kalaalimineq, which means “a piece of a Greenlander.” Which suggests some sort of weird cannibalism, but isn't that exactly—or kind of maybe it is. I'd been told this when I'd gone to visit Natuk Lund Olsen, who is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Greenland, completing her dissertation on Greenlandic food and Inuit culture.

“When a hunter goes hunting in Greenland,” she said, “they go hunting for their ancestors, the ones who sacrificed themselves. So hunting is seen as digging into your self, digging into your soul. The Inuit believe your soul has been various kinds of animals and people and plants.”

Natuk, in turn, invited me to attend her daughter's confirmation party, what was called a kaffemik, which would include anyone who wanted to come and a smorgasbord of food, from polar bear to ptarmigan to the tail of a whale. In new Greenland, the latest trend, she said, was to mix the traditional food with some foreign inflection, whether it be tapas or sushi, like seal nigiri or walrus curry. Natuk said her specialty was minced-reindeer spring rolls, and sure enough, by the time I arrived, they were long gone. But the spread was incredible, the old and new, in bowls and platters on a white linen table, with a polar bear skin including head affixed to the wall, watchful brown eyes still open and sharp yellow teeth ready to make amends.

On Greenland's National Day—June 21—I ate a communal meal with the 620 residents of Qaanaaq, among the most northerly permanently populated places in the world, a village with no restaurant. As July Fourth patriotism would require hamburgers, hot dogs, corn on the cob, and watermelon, theirs inspired, besides mattak and seal stew, walrus served out of huge metal vats. In fact, I'd been present on the ice when they killed that particular walrus with a bullet through the brain, and it tasted no better than it looked, frankly—but then how much did my experience of that taste matter when we shared the walrus communally and it connected us all in that one moment to a past that was theirs? And more to the point, it really didn't matter at all what an American made of this food: It was given by their land and sea, imbued with their spirit system.

Wherever I traveled, wherever I found actual restaurants, I met the newer chefs trying to assert themselves. One, Salik Parbst Frederiksen, cooked a lovely meal for me, in a house at the heights of the postcard town of Qaqortoq (scallops, musk ox, and a rhubarb pie, all with a view of candy-colored homes spiraling down to the harbor). He was collaborating now with Inu on a Declaration of Food Independence, with hopes of getting it signed by as many Greenlandic chefs as possible. Another chef in Nuuk, Jens Jørgen Schmidt, spent all of his free time hunting, to bring the freshest game back to his kitchen, where he spun it with New Nordic techniques. And another, Laasi Biilmann, who worked in a hotel restaurant in Ilulissat, told me he'd come from a family of five chefs (Biilmann, his parents, and two siblings), but now only he and his sister were left. His lesson? “You have to be cold if you want to be a real head chef,” he said. Was he the one who would reach that yet inchoate place where Greenland itself, and alone, left its original signature on cuisine? Was that even the point?

“ ‘Taste the nature you are surrounded by,’ ” Natuk said her mother always told her. Eat it cooked or raw. Respect the ancestors who've done the same and bequeathed a clean world in which the cycle repeats. Way back when Hans Egede, the Danish-Norwegian missionary, arrived and began to convert the Inuits, in the 1700s, he had to retrofit the Lord's Prayer to a culture that had never tasted bread, or seen it, changing the line to read “Give us this day our daily seal.” Food both as identity and spiritual sustenance. “If a culture's intact,” another Greenlandic researcher told me, “food isn't politicized. But if a culture's been fully torn apart, it really is.”

As it was, the culture here went hand in hand with the environment too. The locals in Qaanaaq pointed out that the ice in the fjord was now melting two to three weeks earlier than it had in the past. (A photo taken there just before I'd arrived showing a sled-dog team seemingly running on water had gone viral around the world as a symbol of our imperilment.) In the south there was less rain and sometimes more ferocious storms. And the heat kept rising. When all the ice melted, too, perhaps the whales would move on in search of plankton elsewhere—and the polar bears would become a figment of our imagination. What new animals would replace them, and what new forms of food?

At the end, just before I left Greenland, he popped up on TV. The White Rabbit, Inu, one last time. He shared the screen with Jaime Lannister from Game of Thrones—or, rather, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, the Danish actor who plays him. Coster-Waldau is married to a Greenlander, an actress and artist named Nukâka, and the two have a second home in the south here. He was hosting a travel show, narrated in Danish, that seemed both a little fascinating and a little boring. Greenland itself, however—its ridiculous natural bombast, its kingdoms of ice and its glacial rivers rushing, heightened by swooping drone footage and awesome vistas—did not disappoint.

There was Inu and Coster-Waldau on TV, a Greenlander and a Dane, in a brightly lit cafeteria of some sort, a room defined, I'd say, by anti-ambience, the pale light making pale people more pale. They were eating buffet-style, moving down a line of prepared dishes, sitting at long unadorned tables, as if in a school cafeteria. The pièce de résistance, at least for Inu, was the whale heart.

Back when we'd spent our time together in Nuuk, Inu had told me about it. “I grilled a whale heart because—why not?” he said. “I took out the muscle and filled it with mushrooms and herbs. Forty-five pounds. I thought I'd be the first in the world to grill one.”

Traditionally the heart of an animal, as a source of rich protein, was either eaten immediately on the ice for survival or saved to be consumed later, when food caches had been depleted. But here Inu had made it the centerpiece, a provocation, and he'd added something to it as well, something that didn't fit in the frame: mushrooms and his beloved herbs. Inu's idea, or gesture, or vision, then, was this more subtle reframing, even as the food carried the bombast of the landscape or the volume of Aleqa's political voice.

There was almost a meta quality to the simplicity of it. Broadcast on TV as it was, the two of them eating whale heart seemed part of a public service announcement—a sort of fully updated This is how we roll now—for a dish served by a Greenlandic chef back to Denmark, rather than the other way around, was making its political point too. Here it was, then, the literal heart and the figurative soul sliced and tasted and savored, before the chef went his own stubborn, enigmatic way again, searching up the fjord for the next first, and the next one after that too.

We eat our past, even as we find new forms for it in the present. But it was a different hunger now—Greenland's—and it kept growing. It didn't seem as if it would be satiated again until that day it was fed by its own hand alone, food that would adapt to the future but remain as old as that moment the first glacier calved and the first whale was drawn from the sea by the hunter's harpoon.

Michael Paterniti is a GQ correspondent.

A version of this story originally appeared in the February 2020 issue with the title "The Bittersweet Bounty Of Greenland's First Spring."

Originally Appeared on GQ