Lotta and Per-Anders Jörgensen run FOOL from Malmö, Sweden, forty minutes from Copenhagen and René Redzepi’s Noma. But where Noma is Nordic in terms of produce, FOOL is open to every influence from around the globe. Founded in 2012 as a limited-edition print magazine — roughly three thousand copies per issue, no advertising, no recipes — the publication treats gastronomy as a cultural, artistic, and political subject rather than a practical one. Lotta is the art director and designer; Per-Anders is the photographer and editor. Together they have built what the Gourmand Cookbook Awards named the best food magazine in the world in 2013, and what the US Library Journal recognised as one of the ten best magazines of that year in any category.
Each issue is produced with the obsessive care of a fine-dining tasting menu. The first featured Magnus Nilsson of Fäviken on the cover, shot by Per-Anders in the snow-buried Swedish countryside. The fourth was devoted entirely to Italy, with the brigade of Massimo Bottura’s Osteria Francescana in Modena posed on the cover as if in a scene from Fellini’s 8½. The seventh, themed Food=Politics, wove together a twenty-year history of the food circus by Lisa Abend, a graphic novel about stem-cell burgers, a devastating portrait of Venezuela’s food crisis, and stories of angry, enlightened chefs from Bangkok to Bali to rural Australia. The writing is long-form, translated into English from contributors’ native languages, and edited with an intensity that most food publications reserve for their photography.
From the magazine grew Fool Agency, a creative consultancy working with restaurants, hotels, and food brands across Scandinavia and beyond. But the magazine remains the heartbeat: a publication that insists gastronomy deserves the same intellectual seriousness as literature or cinema, and that the most interesting things happening in food have nothing to do with what you can reproduce at home.
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