Meet Dan Barber: America’s next foodie-in-chief

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http://www.salon.com/2014/05/24/meet_dan_barber_americas_next_foodie_in_chief/



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Salon caught up with Barber to discuss our unsustainable, uniquely American way of eating and his prescription for meaningful change. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

I was struck by this statistic in your New York Times piece: that 80 percent of Americans say sustainability is a priority for them when purchasing food. What do you think people mean when they say that, and how would you definite sustainable food? It seems like a very vague term, in this context.

I mean, it’s very vague, and it’s getting more and more vague. We tend to reduce the idea of sustainable food choices down to labels. Is it organic? Is it local? Is it biodynamic? Is it grass-fed? Is it line-caught? And yet we still haven’t come to a full understanding of what any of those mean. And look, the “third plate” is another label, I guess. But really, it’s an attempt to bring all of these things together and to complicate the picture of it. I’m hoping that it will also get us closer to understanding a real recipe for good food. If you have that, then ultimately sustainability is in the mix, because you can’t have really good food without a sustainable system that’s producing it.

That sounds axiomatic, like you can’t have a good carrot without good soil and good farming — we know that intuitively to be true. But when you back up and study the recipe of the carrot, from the seed to the sauté pan, it’s very clear that there is a real recipe involved. That was the initial search in the book. I taste something really delicious — like jaw-droppingly delicious — and now I’m on a search for it: to figure out why this is so delicious, which is another way of saying, why is this sustainable? I think those two things are one in the same, and what I discovered is important for your question: that in asking, “how is that carrot grown?” I was asking a little bit of the wrong question, because what I kept getting pointed to is the larger mechanism at work that produced the carrot. It was a landscape, a whole farm and, ultimately, a whole community.

You also say that we shouldn’t imagine the food chain as a “chain,” with fields on one end, and a plate on the other. I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about what that image leaves out, and what a better visual might be — in the book you mention Olympic rings.

I look at Olympic rings and I think you can’t find a place where it starts or ends. It’s a loop, and not to get too philosophical about it, but it’s ever-expanding. As you start to look more and more at a carrot, for example: if you really study the seed, you can ask, are we supporting older varieties of carrots, or is it their newer varieties, that are bred for particular localities and regions, that make them super delicious? Then we get to soil: do we have the right fertility to activate all the flavonoids and make this carrot taste good? And then you keep going: the farmer is rotating in other crops to prep the soil for the carrot. What are those crops, and are we eating them? And is he cover cropping and resting the soil? And are there animals that are a part of that rotation, because manure is another amendment of that soil? And you get into the whole area of, at what point are they picking it, is it after a freeze, so the sugar content is really high, and the nutrition and flavor levels are off the charts?

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1. Barber gets his beef from a place down the road from me-

http://www.hardwickbeef.com/restaurants.html

and he serves cheese from this place down the road.

http://www.jasperhillfarm.com/

I'm really proud of what an incubator for local foods and local food products my little town has become.

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2. +1