The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food

Dan Barber brings practical economics to a future where agriculture more closely resembles the natural environment form which it sprang. He asks, "what conditions would need to be present to radically change how we produce what we eat?" It is the fundamental question of our future.

The book explains in great detail why we should eat locally grown organic food grown in a sustainable way. The anecdotes are both entertaining and informative. This was one of those books that is hard to put down once I began reading it.

A combination of science, ecology and food.
The people in the book are intriguing folks driven by what makes food good food.
Makes me reconsider and refine my food choices and gardening practices.

I am only about halfway through this book but have really been enjoying it. It is so interesting to read about how the way we take care of the earth, plants and animals can have such a profound effect on taste. It is very sad what we are doing to our planet earth. I hope many farmers will take the time to read this book. Also the Chefs who can have influence on the farmers they purchase from.

It was so interesting and informative. You'll learn a lot, and it's a good read.
Engrossing, and the anecdotal stories relative to the "behind the scenes" of famous chefs and restaurants
were quite amusing at times, and Dan's personal stories were quite touching. Read it, you'll like it! :)

This book is both brilliant and a huge disappointment at the same time and here's why. Dan Barber is an amazing chef and discusses food production at the highest levels. He deals with a very specific, high end clientele as do most of the chef's and food producers featured in this book. The food professionals, and the people they market/cater to are the socioeconomic elite. And that's all well and good, BUT, change in eating habits doesn't start at the top. The trickle down theory doesn't work when it comes to every day people and the food they eat. Why? Money. Everyday people are not eating amazing foie gras or baking with grain they have milled in their own kitchens. And they likely never will. Everyday people are looking for chicken, beef, pork and eggs that are not loaded with antibiotics and chemicals for the best possible price. If they are baking their own breads they are looking for a consistent flour that makes a consistent, decent loaf of bread or cake or batch of cookies.

Changing attitudes around buying and eating habits needs to be fostered in the home kitchen. For people to make better and healthier choices they need to know have practical choices available in their own stores and markets. Preaching to a choir of elite food enthusiasts is a lovely academic exercise, but beyond that, it's worthless.

I never would have expected a professional chef to write as well as the leading food writers. But this book is as well written as the other leading books on the subject of food ethics.

Another surprise was how much of the book was set in Spain. I would say about half is set in the eastern US and half in Spain, where I learned a great deal about various food customs and innovations.

I grade the book at less than 5 stars because one aspect of the author's perspective troubles me. The author runs two restaurants. He goes into great detail about his personal encounters with people who grow food and supply it. He also describes in detail his own experiences as a diner. He recounts his own experiences working in kitchens. But he has little to say about his own restaurants' customers. The only encounters with customers that he recounts are those with food writers. The rest of his customers (of which I have been one several times) are just faceless, generic eaters and bill payers. And when you go to his more famous restaurant at Stone Barns these days, there is no menu, no choice; as he says in the book, the server judges your tolerance for food adventures on a 1 to 3 scale and then the kitchen supposedly delivers plates that correspond to the score the waiter gives you. I suppose this is fine if you are dining there for the first time in your life and just want to have the experience. But I find it very top-down and hegemonic and ultimately grating and dislikable on repeat visits, and this book 's general disregard of the customer experience, except as a faceless lump that have to be herded into eating the right way, is consistent with this impression. I also think the author's moral approach to providing a dining experience, while obviously highly commendable, overlooks the reality that, often when one goes to an establishment where the charge is over $200 / person, one is doing so to splurge on a special occasion and not always to minimize one's agricultural impact.

That said, I think the book is well done. If you have already read other books in this genre, depending how passionate you are about the topic, you may find it a bit repetitive and dull. In my case, as I know the restaurants, the ethos behind them, and am interested enough in what goes on in Spain, I found it a worthwhile experience.

I thought Michael Pollan’s "The Omnivore’s Dilemma" was pretty much the last word about the food we eat, why we eat it, its cost to our health and the planet’s health, and how we can do better.

I wasn’t alone in that view. But the gold standard is now Dan Barber’s “The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food.”

Dan Barber is the chef at Blue Hill at the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture in Pocantico Hills, New York and at Blue Hill New York. At those restaurants, as the foodies among you know, Barber has taken farm-to-table dining to its logical extreme — he grows much of the food he cooks. The difference between his meals and the organic cooking of other chefs begins and ends with that fact. His carrots seem to be from a different, finer planet. Ditto his lamb. The wonder is that the source of his otherworldly food is this planet — Barber has found a way to tastes that most of us have never experienced.

“Perhaps no other chef in New York City does as enthusiastic an impersonation of the farmer in the dell as Mr. Barber, and perhaps no other restaurant makes as serious and showy an effort to connect diners to the origins of their food as Blue Hill,” Frank Bruni wrote in the New York Times, awarding Blue Hill three stars. “Here the meals have back stories, lovingly rendered by servers who announce where the chanterelles were foraged and how the veal was fed. It’s an exercise in bucolic gastronomy, and it might be slightly cloying if it weren’t so intensely pleasurable.”

Sorry, but it is cloying.

There is something borderline obscene about weeping over roasted asparagus with beet yogurt and stinging nettles or swooning over purple potato gnocchi with green garlic, ramp shoots and hon shimeji mushrooms while, not far away, children go hungry. But as I understand it, Dan Barber isn’t serving this food only because he’s gunning to unseat whatever restaurant is regarded as the world’s best. He’s doing it to explore the concept of “delicious.”

The story of this book is how the meaning of “delicious” changed for him and how he came to a fresh, larger definition: bringing that level of satisfaction and nutrition to people who will never know his name or eat in his restaurant.

Here’s his understanding of the way food works in our country:

The “first plate” is a hulking, corn-fed steak with a few vegetables on the side.

The “second plate” is a smaller, grass-fed steak, no bigger than your fist, with vegetables that come from farmers who get name-checked by the waiters. This was what his restaurants served. As he writes, “It’s better tasting, and better for the planet, but the second plate’s architecture is identical to the first. It, too, is damaging — disrupting the ecological balances of the planet, causing soil depletion and nutrient loss — and in the end it isn’t a sustainable way to farm or eat.”

The “third plate” represents a non-violent revolution. The steak looks like an afterthought. The carrots rule.

Despite the book’s title, the plate — the food prepared by a chef and served in a restaurant — is not the real subject of this book.

“The Third Plate” is about farming.

With that sentence, I’m in danger of losing half of you here, maybe more, so let’s go to the video of Dan Barber, at TED, talking about an astonishingly delicious fish and the man who figured out a way to farm it. It’s a great story. A deeply entertaining, even thrilling story, completely worth your time. But if you want just the punch line, start around 14:45, because at that point this amusing observer ignites and breathes fire. His love story about a chef and a fish, he says, is also instructive: “You might say it’s a recipe for the future of good food… What we need is a radically new conception of agriculture, one in which the food actually tastes good.”

This is not a small point. You can make a good case for America’s weight problem on the idea that our food does not supply us with the nutrition we need, so we eat more to get it. The way out? The merger of pre-industrial agriculture with great cooking. Or, to put it more elegantly: “The ecological choice for food is also the most ethical choice. And, generally, the most delicious choice.”

Hold this thought. Underline it. It is on the final exam — no, it is the final exam. I mean: for us, for the planet.

I’m making the book sound somber. In truth, it’s mostly a collection of stories. Brilliant stories, mostly. (The ones you want to skip are in the first section of the book, where you can learn more about soil than you’ll ever want to know.) Barber is as gifted a writer as he is a chef; he tells these stories largely in dialogue, as in a novel. Were they all taped? Did Barber rush home to scribble them down? There is no note about the accuracy of these conversations. That may not trouble most readers; it troubles me.

I know I bang on about the length of books. “The Third Plate” fills 447 pages. That is — the metaphor is wrong, I know — a very rich meal. I grasp that foodies will devour every word, but this book deserves the widest possible audience, and its completeness works against that. I wish worthy but overstuffed books like this were like DVDs: a studio version and a director’s cut that includes scenes that had to be deleted for the sake of a crisp viewer experience. A chef’s cut, if you will.

Still, give “The Third Plate” four stars. Call it “delicious.” Then join a CSA and start doing your part to save the planet — and your life.

The difference between an organic tomato fresh off the vine and the supermarket variety makes one wonder whether they are eating the same fruit. As an accomplished chef, the author posses an intimate knowledge of what works on the plate. Acknowledging the silliness and obsession of the restaurant business, he examines the importance of sourcing foods without abandoning environmentally sound values and practices. Advocating a return to respecting the land and the food, he looks to the past to better the future. His perspective is interesting and inspiring.

The food revolution has to start somewhere and it is with the people who can both appreciate and afford quality ingredients that it has begun. Eschewing artificial ingredients and rejecting overly sugared and salted products is a start. Encouraging home food production and urban community gardens are positive. Respecting and protecting small family farms is essential. But sustainability on a large scale will require both a major adjustment in attitude and a commitment from consumers, producers, purveyors and governments. Still a thought provoking and nicely written book. Recommended