Chef Dan Barber sounds uncomfortable when I suggest the farm-to-table philosophy is an out-and-out failure.
Barber is in a New York radio studio literally a six-minute drive from his award-winning Manhattan restaurant Blue Hill.
I was the emperor without any clothes, because I was waving the farm-to-table flag ... saying everyone needs to buy local wheat ... until I went [to a farm] and realised everything that was needed to support the wheat I was not supporting!
It’s 3:00 pm his time and after our conversation he will head to work, where tonight’s menu contains a ‘carrot steak’ topped with a sauce of slow simmered beef stock.
It’s a dish that goes to the heart of Barber’s acclaimed book, a decade in the writing, called The Third Plate—Field Notes on the Future of Food.
But right now he’s reluctantly addressing my impertinence over farm-to-table failures.
‘The reason I’m so sensitive is only because you’re pointing the finger at me, because I’m a card carrying member of the farm-to-table movement,’ he says.
Barber was raised on a farm. His second eatery, Blue Hill on Stone Farm, is surrounded by a food producing landscape on the outskirts of New York.
‘If I’m going to indict the movement, I’m indicting myself, and that’s exactly what happened when I set out to write this book,’ Barber says.
‘After 10 years of writing I realised I was coming up short; that I was not looking at it in a way that was truly sustainable, or delicious, for the future of food.’
What Barber postulates is that after the traditional ‘first plate’, a large hunk of meat surrounded by small servings of nondescript vegetables, came the ‘second plate’—grass-fed protein and wild caught fish that still used a lot of natural resources, paired with locally sourced organic vegetables that still played second fiddle to the flesh.
According to Barber, the second plate represents all that’s wrong with the farm-to-table movement, because it fails to comprehensively transform our approach to size and origin of protein versus fruit and plant, and the corresponding pressure that puts on our already depleted farmlands and marine ecosystems.
‘Most importantly, from a chef’s perspective, it’s also not the most delicious way to eat,’ he says. ‘Those prime cuts of meat tend to not be the most delicious cuts to use.’
So Barber started to form the concept of the ‘third plate’, whose architecture is driven by land and water depletion and that ever-present quest for quintessential deliciousness.
He found the embodiment of that concept in an old variety of US wheat called Emmer; when he baked it into bread for his restaurants, Barber had diners 'willing to sell their first born' for another slice.
‘I thought it'd be a good way to kick off the book with a recipe for bread starting with the recipe for growing the wheat,’ Barber says.
To accomplish this, he decided to visit the modest New York State grain farm where Klaas Martens had been growing Emmer wheat. However, when he entered Martens’ fields he had a moment of pivotal shock—he was standing in a wheat field where there was no wheat to be seen.
‘What I saw instead is the less coveted, lowly grains like millet and barley and buckwheat and flaxseed. I saw leguminous crops like kidney beans, black winter peas, and soybeans and cover crops like vetch and clover. A suite of diversity, but I didn’t see wheat.
‘The point, when I got to talking to Klaas about this very important day in my gastronomical life, was what I was looking at were the crops that were needed to be rotated throughout his farm, in a very ordered and timely manner, to get the fertility into the soil to enable the wheat to grow so well and so deliciously.’
What Barber had stumbled on was the key that had been missing from his approach to food and sustainability.
‘I was the emperor without any clothes, because I was waving the farm-to-table flag ... saying everyone needs to buy local wheat ... until I went there and realised everything that was needed to support the wheat I was not supporting!’
It was a eureka moment for Barber. The complex relationships between soil fertility, crop rotation and flavour were laid bare. Now he incorporates the supposed lowly grains, legumes and cover crops into his restaurant and home menus because to do so supports the farmer that curates the land to produce the deliciousness all chefs desire.
Other elements of The Third Plate draw on Barber’s discoveries in Spain where a fish farm, Veta la Palma, harnesses the natural rhythms of a marshland ecosystem and its biota to produce delicious farmed product without damaging other species.
When he asked the farm’s manager Miguel how he became such a fish expert, he looked puzzled.
‘Fish?’ asked Miguel. ‘When I came here I didn’t know anything about fish. I was hired because I’m an expert in relationships.’
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As we talk Barber’s passion for his subject spills out in spite of the many times he’s delivered his thoughts, and I counter with something to the effect of, ‘Well that’s all very well but how does this third plate climb down from its fine dining pedestal and walk freely amongst the common folk?’.
Barber has considered this too.
‘The end of the story is that story is that Klaas (the grain farmer) harvests all those lowly crops at a loss to go into animal feed, but what if we did cook more of them, and to cook millet or to cook buckwheat is the same time it takes to cook rice or wheat actually ... and [if] we were to give a value to the whole farm system, it’s really a democratisation of food in the end. If we are able to provide an economy for the crops that do well for a farm and for soil health they end up lowering the price for the coveted crops (rice and wheat). It’s the same way with meat because at the moment, for example, all the lamb necks end up in dog food.’
Barber reminds us that all of the world’s great cuisines practice that kind of democratisation, originally out of hardship and necessity. So while Barber’s Blue Hill restaurants will charge you highly for that ‘third plate’ of a delicious home-grown carrot steak, squashed and grilled at the table, and then topped with a deep stock made from beef bones, don’t look at the bill. Rather, examine the thinking behind it.
Take your place at the table and enjoy a First Bite of the cultural, social, scientific, historical and sensual world of food.