How to Make Farm-to-Table a Truly Sustainable Movement

Renowned chef Dan Barber is synonymous with the farm-to-table movement. His two New York restaurants feature organic ingredients grown or raised on nearby farms, including the one that surrounds his Hudson Valley restaurant.

September 15, 2014 | Source: Yale Environment 360 | by Diane Toomey

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Renowned chef Dan Barber is synonymous with the farm-to-table movement. His two New York restaurants feature organic ingredients grown or raised on nearby farms, including the one that surrounds his Hudson Valley restaurant.

So it’s striking that in his new book,
The Third Plate, Barber mantains that the movement he has championed hasn’t gone far enough. It has failed, he says, to create markets for the diverse crops that a sustainable farm needs to maintain a rich, healthy soil.

In an interview with
Yale Environment 360, Barber, who has won numerous awards for his cuisine, says that if the farm-to-table movement is to truly support sustainability, end the rise of monocultures, and produce delicious food, it’s the table that must support the farm, not the other way around. And that, he says, calls for a new way of cooking and eating.

Yale Environment 360: There’s a moment you describe in your book when you ask yourself, Is a restaurant menu sustainable? And at the time, your restaurants were certainly practicing farm-to-table. So what led you to ask that question of yourself?

Dan Barber: I was pushed into questioning how sustainable my menus were based on some experiences I was having writing the book. I set about writing the book based on these farm-to-table ingredients that I was especially excited about — wheat was one. So I found a farmer [Klaas Martens] who was growing incredible wheat called emmer wheat, and my goal at that point—this is dialing back about ten years ago — was to take an ingredient, like wheat, that had this sort of jaw-droppingly delicious flavor and figure out how it was grown, or in the case of a ham, how it was raised, and write about that recipe — the recipe
before it hits the kitchen — and by way of that recipe, talk about sustainability and all the principles of farm-to-table and how to follow through on that in the context of a restaurant menu.