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.