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"About two weeks ago, I landed in Reykjavik for what has become one of Iceland\u2019s biggest culinary to-dos: the rather directly named &lt;a href=\"http://www.foodandfun.is\" target=\"_blank\"&gt;Food &amp;amp; Fun Festival&lt;/a&gt;. Now in its\u00A013th year, the five-day event matched 31 chefs from around the world with 17 local restaurants to collaborate on three-course menus featuring Icelandic ingredients. Seafood figured prominently, of course: delicate arctic char, cod a hundred different ways, and langoustines as pillowy-soft as cotton candy. Lamb was also a hit. At &lt;a href=\"http://www.sjavargrillid.com/\" target=\"_blank\"&gt;Sj\u00E1vargrillid&lt;/a&gt;, for instance, guest chef &lt;strong&gt;Hamilton Johnson&lt;/strong&gt; of Washington, D.C., served a lamb filet rubbed with anise alongside a sort of chewy, gamey, sausage-y cut of lamb heart. It was delicious. An oddball mix of tomatoes, potatoes, white chocolate, rhubarb, seaweed powder, skyr, and licorice in every imaginable iteration also turned up.\r\n\r\nWhile the chefs worked out their menu plans (and, let\u2019s be real, partied in the bars with Iceland\u2019s famously good-looking locals), I set out with a group of journos to peek behind the agricultural curtain of this sustainability-obsessed country of 300,000. If you can catch it, grow it, or make it locally, Icelanders are all over it.\r\n\r\nClick ahead for a look inside an eco-friendly fishing operation in Grindavik, a geothermal farm in Selfoss, a farm-to-table dairy/restaurant in Bl\u00E1sk\u00F3gabyggd, and\u2014just for fun\u2014the President of Iceland\u2019s house. The winter sun is slow to rise in Southwest Iceland. This shot was taken at 9:36 a.m. onboard the\u00A0&lt;i&gt;Ag\u00FAst&lt;/i&gt;, one of four long-liners belonging to &lt;a href=\"http://thorfish.is/\" target=\"_blank\"&gt;Thorbjorn&lt;/a&gt;, the country\u2019s fourth or fifth largest sustainable fishery. &lt;i&gt;Ag\u00FAst&lt;/i&gt;\u00A0is a long-liner, meaning it uses long lines (not nets) to catch. In the bowels of the ship is an area containing 42,000 hooks. The hooks are laid out daily with herring or squid for bait. The typical fishing trip lasts four to five days, requires a crew of 14 sailors, and pulls in an average catch between 50 and 80 tons. You\u2019d wear heavy-duty gloves, too, if you handled fish all day. The\u00A0&lt;i&gt;Ag\u00FAst&lt;/i&gt;\u2019s typical catch comprises cod, haddock, tusk, and ling. Three separate factory trawlers pick up halibut, pollock, silversmith, shrimp, and lobster. Inside the control room onboard the\u00A0&lt;em&gt;Ag\u00FAst&lt;/em&gt;. It's like a Nordic&lt;em&gt; Star Trek&lt;/em&gt;! Well, in water. This is what the\u00A0&lt;i&gt;Ag\u00FAst&lt;/i&gt;\u00A0crew lovingly refers to as the \u201Cfish hole.\u201D Soon as a fresh catch comes out of the water, its first stop is a trip down the fish hole. After disembarking the\u00A0&lt;i&gt;Ag\u00FAst&lt;/i&gt;, the cod move en icy masse to the Thorbjorn factory in Grindavik. This is where the real journey\u2014sorting, cleaning, beheading, gutting, salting, packing\u2014begins. Thorbjorn owner Gunnar T\u00F3masson proudly displays one of the day\u2019s biggest catches. His father founded the factory in 1953. One thing a fish factory won\u2019t make you: hungry. Here, we have the results of the beheading station. While most of Thorbjorn\u2019s bacalao exports go on to Spain, Italy, Greece, and Portugal, T\u00F3masson says the heads are usually cut off, dried, and sold to Nigeria, where they\u2019re used in soup. Fish that are too large to pass through Thorbjorn's automated machinery must be dissected by hand. The factory employs about 350 workers; of those on the floor, roughly half are Polish and half are Asian. T\u00F3masson says the Thais have the fastest, most refined knife skills and are often tapped to train new workers. Into the salt bins the cod fillets go. Once a full row of fish is laid, an overhead machine rains salt atop the spread. Then the worker can start laying another row. So essential is cod to the Icelandic diet that it was featured in the country\u2019s coat of arms for centuries. Today it accounts for 31 percent of Iceland\u2019s total seafood exports, and 1.2 percent of the world's total catch. Every box of bacalao tells a story. The label reveals not only when the fish were caught and by whom, but where exactly within Iceland\u2019s 200 nautical miles of exclusive fishing zone. Thorbjorn supplies fresh fish to &lt;a href=\"http://www.bluelagoon.com/food-and-drink/lava-restaurant/\" target=\"_blank\"&gt;LAVA&lt;/a&gt;, the main restaurant at Iceland\u2019s beloved Blue Lagoon. For a lunchtime challenge, Food &amp;amp; Fun guest chef Mikaela Poblaci\u00F3n of &lt;a href=\"http://en.etxanobe.com/\" target=\"_blank\"&gt;Extanobe&lt;/a&gt; in Bilbao, Spain, turned the cod into a deep-fried fritter. It was served with a dab of avocado on a pumice stone\u2014a not uncommon plating method in Iceland. All those tomatoes the Food &amp;amp; Fun chefs are playing with? They\u2019re grown right here in Iceland, many of them at\u00A0&lt;a href=\"http://www.fridheimar.is/\" target=\"_blank\"&gt;Fridheimar&lt;/a&gt;, a geothermally powered, zero-pesticide greenhouse in Selfoss. Fridheimar is run by the agronomist-horticultralist (and husband-wife) team of &lt;strong&gt;Kn\u00FAtur Rafn \u00C1rmann&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;Helena Hermundard\u00F3ttir&lt;/strong&gt;. \u00C1rmann likes to greet guests with an Icelandic speciality: &lt;em&gt;Birkir&lt;/em&gt; (birch schnapps) served in hollowed-out greenhouse tomatoes. The &lt;em&gt;birkir&lt;/em&gt; itself could peel paint; the tomatoes are juicy and ripe. Eating one, you\u2019d never know it was February in Iceland.\u00A0&lt;em&gt;Photo by\u00A0Sigurj\u00F3n Ragnar&lt;/em&gt; A worker twists the tomato vines. Fridheimar grows tomatoes year round; in the long, dark winter months, that means wiring in 17 hours of artificial light. All told, \u00C1rmann says his greenhouse uses roughly the same amount of electricity as a town of 3,000\u2014every last bit of it powered by geothermal energy.\u00A0Photo by\u00A0Sigurj\u00F3n Ragnar Cucumbers are another staple at Fridheimar, served here with green tomato jam. Geothermal greenhouses in Iceland also grow strawberries and paprika. Common outdoor crops include rhubarb, rutabaga, leeks, potatoes, cauliflower, kale, and organic barley. Fridheimar relies on some 600 bumble bees to pollinate its tomato flowers. The awesome byproduct: tomato honey. Tomato soup, tomato sauces, and tomato ice cream all factor in to the menu at Fridheimar, which houses a small caf\u00E9 in the middle of the greenhouse. On the day we visited, the chef had also prepared Icelandic \u201Cblack bread,\u201D a dense loaf made with just five ingredients: oatmeal, rye, Greek yogurt, water, and sugar. The mixture is put into a bucket and then baked 24 hours overnight in\u2014get this\u2014a\u00A0&lt;i&gt;geyser&lt;/i&gt;. Geyser bread! He served it with salmon he caught and smoked himself. &lt;a href=\"http://efstidalur.is/\" target=\"_blank\"&gt;Efsti-Dalur II&lt;/a&gt; is a family-owned farm in Bl\u00E1sk\u00F3gabyggd, an hour or so east of Reykjavik. It is home to about 45 dairy cows, which produce up to 250,000 liters of milk a year. Guests can see how the milk, cream, cheese, and skyr all get made, then sit down and eat it at the on-site restaurant.\u00A0&lt;em&gt;Photo by\u00A0Sigurj\u00F3n Ragnar&lt;/em&gt; The specialities at Efsti-Dalur are the matriarch\u2019s homemade ice cream and skyr, a yogurt-like Icelandic soft cheese. Daughter-in-law D\u00EDa serves.\u00A0&lt;em&gt;Photo by\u00A0Sigurj\u00F3n Ragnar&lt;/em&gt; It\u2019s not every day you get invited to the president\u2019s house. And yet here we were, all of the Food &amp;amp; Fun crew, standing before the president of Iceland at his house in Bessastadir. &lt;strong&gt;\u00D3lafur Ragnar Gr\u00EDmsson&lt;/strong&gt;\u00A0was laid-back and personable. Funny even. But the best part was when he sent around a silver platter of Icelandic greenhouse tomatoes, followed by what can only be described as an Icelandic twist on deviled eggs.\u00A0&lt;em&gt;Photo by\u00A0Sigurj\u00F3n Ragnar&lt;/em&gt; And by deviled eggs, we mean eggs hatched from purebred Viking hens (a real thing\u2014they\u2019re small and colorful and seriously tolerant of frigid weather), topped with roe and parked on a bed of Nordic sea salt.\u00A0&lt;em&gt;Photo by\u00A0Sigurj\u00F3n Ragnar&lt;/em&gt;"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.bonappetit.com/restaurants-travel/slideshow/iceland-sustainable-food>