The Third Plate
Field Notes on the Future of Food
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4.5 • 39 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
“Not since Michael Pollan has such a powerful storyteller emerged to reform American food.” —The Washington Post
“Dan Barber's tales are engaging, funny and delicious . . . The Third Plate serves as a brilliant culinary manifesto with a message as obvious as it is overlooked. . . . It's an inspiring message that could truly help save our water, air and land before it's too late.” —The Chicago Tribune
“Barber writes a food manifesto for the ages.” —Pittsburgh-Post Gazette
Today’s optimistic farm-to-table food culture has a dark secret: the local food movement has failed to change how we eat. It has also offered a false promise for the future of food. In his visionary New York Times–bestselling book, chef Dan Barber, recently showcased on Netflix’s Chef’s Table, offers a radical new way of thinking about food that will heal the land and taste good, too. Looking to the detrimental cooking of our past, and the misguided dining of our present, Barber points to a future “third plate”: a new form of American eating where good farming and good food intersect. Barber’s The Third Plate charts a bright path forward for eaters and chefs alike, daring everyone to imagine a future for our national cuisine that is as sustainable as it is delicious.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The chef of the trailblazing farm-to-table restaurant Blue Hill at the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, in Pocantico Hills, New York, Barber is also a journalist crusading to help change the culture of American cooking. Blue Hill was the name of his family farm in Massachusetts, informing his early impressions while growing up, and in this multilayered work he aims to address the intrinsics of where food comes from that is, from "soil," "land," "sea," "seed," as he divides his chapters. Barber harkens back to the stringent "land ethic" advocated by the American environmentalist Aldo Moro. There was no golden age of American agriculture, Barber asserts, because taming the land both North and South grew into an "exploitative relationship," involving higher and higher yields and less vigilance to healthy soil management climaxing horrendously during the so-called dirty '30s. The value of establishing a viable interconnectedness between technology and ecology ensures that organic farmers are the heroes of this work, people like specialty-grains purveyor Glenn Roberts, who encouraged the author to plant a marvelous ancient Native American corn, Eight Row Flint, that had been farmed to near exhaustion in the early 19th century; New York state planters Klaus and Mary-Howell Martens, who had to cease using pesticides because Klaus was literally being paralyzed, and rediscovered the civilizing and sociable wonders of growing wheat; and a Spanish geese raiser, Eduardo Sousa, who produces foie gras without force feeding. Barber's work is a deeply thoughtful and offering a "menu for 2050" even visionary work for a sustainable food chain.
Customer Reviews
Amazing
A really Fantastic read for the home cook, home gardener or wannabe farmer. Barber brings you along on an informative journey through both the history and current trends in growing and caring for food. Loved every chapter!
Interesting read but inaccuracies make me question the author
This book is an incredibly fascinating read and I highly recommend it for anyone interested in our current food culture. I gave it 3 stars because I'm not a huge fan of his writing style (it's a little ADHD for me) and also for some inaccuracies that make me question the truth in some of his statements.
Most notably among the inaccuracies (so far, I'm still reading), he claims that because of the monoculture farming practices in the Plains states and the increase in average farm size plus the decrease in total farms, the U.S. census shows these factors contributing to a decrease in population in said states. Being from Oklahoma, comfortably situated in the Southern Plains, and watching the dramatic growth of Oklahoma City in the last decade, I wondered if the state as a whole was decreasing in population in the more rural areas. I checked a few separate reports and just as I imagined, Oklahoma has encountered a growth rate of 8.7% in the last fifteen years (the national average was -0.7% in the same time period). Extending my curiosity, I checked the growth rates for all the Plains states for the last three years, from Texas up to North Dakota, and they've all experienced growth above the national average.
If the author can be so far off on hard facts, why should I believe anything else he has to say? And do publishers not fact-check high profile books anymore?