The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food
A groundbreaking chef at one of Manhattan’s first farm-to-table restaurants, Barber shares his vision of good food’s future. Cooking per se doesn’t constitute this chef’s passion. He cares about where foods come from, how they’re grown, and whether they can be harvested into the future. To learn about soil’s role, he visits an organic farm in upstate New York, where an insightful, dedicated farmer diversifies crops and grows for quality and not solely for quantity. A Spanish farmer teaches Barber about producing foie gras without force-feeding. He investigates fisheries. All this leaves Barber with some innovative ideas about how people ought to be eating—a third plate of grains, vegetables, and some meat or fish, all grown with ecological awareness and commitment to sustainability. Such a change from current ideas about dining fast and cheap calls for retraining the public palate away from blandness and uniformity and encouraging eaters to demand unique and distinctive flavors. --Mark Knoblauch