You’ve heard ‘you are what you eat.’ In Dan Barber’s The Third Plate, he wants you to consider ‘you are what you eat eats.’ The book is not just about the farm-to-table movement, which he believes has fallen short. It’s about ensuring agricultural methods can replenish the earth and be maintained for generations.
Dan Barber has received several James Beard Awards and is recognized as one of the country’s best chefs. His flagship restaurant is Blue Hill at Stone Barns, where the food is grown on-site and grilled over wood from nearby forests.
There’s a trickle-down effect of food trends. They begin in the country’s top restaurants, other restaurants follow suit, and eventually everyone’s eating food first introduced by a chef like Barber. For the farm-to-table movement, this places the responsibility of sustainable food squarely on the nation’s top chefs. But Barber wants chefs to understand more about agriculture, not just the food that it produces. A chef should know that tomatoes deplete the soil tremendously, while crops like mustard can replenish it.
Other books of the genre, like Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma or Paul Greenberg’s American Catch, are geared toward the home cook or gardener or fisherman. To get through The Third Plate, you have to be very passionate about where your food comes from. There are entire chapters about natural foie gras and iberico ham, which was tedious for me since I don’t eat either of them.
But I do love fish, and the most fascinating part of the book for me was about the Veta La Palma aquaculture farm in Spain. It’s an area of wetlands that was once drained for cattle pasture. The new owners re-flooded the land with a nearby river. It’s now a self-sustained ecosystem that not only supports the 1200 tons of seafood it produces each year, but it has also become a habitat for huge flocks of endangered birds. The water that flows back to the sea from this farm is cleaner than when it entered. Check out Barber’s TED talk about Veta La Palma called ‘How I fell in love with a fish.’ And if you want to dig deep, pick up The Third Plate.
I loved that TED talk, so this book sounds like just the thing!
I loved that TED talk, too, and it was nice to see photos of that beautiful place. The book also inspired me to try some fresh-milled ancient grains, so I’ll be blogging about those soon.
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