Could Dan Barber’s Giant Parsnip Steak Save the Planet? It’s a Good Start. | Big Think

Could Dan Barber’s Giant Parsnip Steak Save the Planet? It’s a Good Start.

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Chef Dan Barber, author of The Third Plate, dishes out some keen knowledge about food, culture, and ecological diversity. If you're game on a very natural and non-processed diet, you have to devote yourself to collecting diverse ingredients.

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DAN BARBER:

DAN BARBER is the Chef of Blue Hill, a restaurant in Manhattan's West Village, and Blue Hill at Stone Barns, located within the nonprofit farm and education center, Stone Barns Center for Food & Agriculture. His opinions on food and agricultural policy have appeared in the New York Times, along with many other publications. Barber has received multiple James Beard awards including Best Chef: New York City (2006) and the country's Outstanding Chef (2009). In 2009 he was named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people in the world.

To expand on his philosophy of cooking with sustainably grown, local ingredients, Dan has been working with such organizations as the Kellogg Foundation, Slow Food USA and Earth Pledge to minimize the political and intellectual rhetoric around agricultural policies and to instead maximize the appreciation of eating good food. Focusing on the issues of pleasure, taste and regional bounty-and how these imperatives are threatened-Dan helped create the philosophical and practical framework for Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture and continues to help guide it in its mission to create a consciousness about the effects of everyday food choices.

He is author of the book The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Dan Barber: The Third Plate came off of research about the history of our food culture. And what I came to realize is that we have a pretty bad history when it comes to food culture and really what that means is that we eat off of this — or we have been eating off of what I was calling the first plate which is a protein-centric plate of food. It’s a steak, a seven-ounce steak with a little bit of vegetable, a little bit of grain on the side. But essentially it’s protein; [it] takes center stage. And the second plate, as I describe in my book, is sort of we’ve come out of the first plate and enter the second plate with this farm-to-table movement. The good food movement. It’s really about knowing where your ingredients come from. So the steak is now grass-fed and the vegetables are organic and the grain is, you know, I mean instead of white rice, it’s whole grains.

But the problem with the second plate is that it looks very much like the first plate. The architecture is the same. So while it’s a better plate of food — gastronomically it’s better and from an environmental perspective it’s better. The architecture dictates a kind of caring capacity that the land can’t support; at least in our region it can’t support it for very long. For a growing population, for a cuisine or for a pattern of eating, you know, two times a day, seven days a week, to expect that kind of architecture from our diets is a huge expectation. And to export that diet to the rest of the world, the Western diet. It’s really the American diet is unfortunate and also the true definition of not sustainable. So the third plate is sort of a way to kind of circle out of that and take the progress of knowing where our ingredients come from, but changing the architecture and looking at a plate of food not so much as what we expect from our lunch or dinner, but what is the land telling us it can provide and then figuring out a cuisine, a pattern of eating that responds [to the] landscape and actually improves landscape.

The best farmscapes or the best farmlands in any region are always about an abundance of diversity. Those are the healthiest landscapes because in a natural setting there’s no such thing as a monoculture. There’s no such thing as lack of diversity. In fact the world — a natural environment is defined by its diversity. Even the most severe environments. And so what we need to do as eaters because as eaters we are disrupting a natural food system, a natural system, any natural system. Domestication is about disruption of a natural system. And the art in eating and the art in cooking and the art in farming, all three of the correspondents of all three is really about disrupting that natural landscape thoughtfully and with a thought to the future...............

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