The Third Plate, by Dan Barber

Review by Dave Gamrath

One-liner:  In his book The Third Plate:  Field Notes on the Future of Food, Dan Barber explores how America eats, and asks “what if our ways of eating – not merely a plate of food, but a whole pattern of cooking – were in perfect balance with the land around us?”

Book Review: 

Dan Barber is chef and co-owner of two restaurants, one in Manhattan and one just outside of New York City on a farm where food for both restaurants is grown.  “Farm to table” operations such as this have become popular, but Barber claims this movement “has failed to change how we eat,” and cannot be sustained.  In his book The Third Plate:  Field Notes on the Future of Food, Barber explores how America eats, and asks “what if our ways of eating – not merely a plate of food, but a whole pattern of cooking – were in perfect balance with the land around us?”  Barber uses the term “Third Plate” to describe how what we eat is part of a complex, integrated food production system.

Although America produces an amazing amount of food, Barber claims our system is “unstable, if not broken.”  Barber provides many examples of this, including our “eroding soils, falling water tables for irrigation, collapsing fisheries, shrinking forests, and deteriorating grasslands.”  Climate change will only worsen these problems.  Barber writes that “we eat in a way that undermines health and abuses natural resources.”  America’s agricultural mindset is “extract more, waste more.” 

In doing research for the book, Barber interviews a wide array of people involved with food production, including scientists, fishermen, chefs and many non-traditional farmers who “grow nature by orchestrating a whole system of farming,” as opposed to monocultures that depopulate landscapes.  Barbar organizes his food assessment into four parts:  soil, land, sea and seed.

Barber explains how “soil is literally teeming with life,” and that “the best way to ensure a healthy plant was through healthy soil.”  But efforts to increase food production over the past 150 years have been extensively harmful to the health of our soils.  Food production expanded greatly with the “Green Revolution,” which focused on using petroleum products in fertilizers to dramatically increased food outputs.  But increased production came at a cost.  Gradual resistance to chemicals drives the need to use even more chemicals.  Highly productive monocultures eliminates critical diversity, and puts food production at risk.  It was monoculture farming that led to the dust bowl and the dirty thirties during the Great Depression.  Also, the movement towards a monoculture of crops has led to the reduction of family farms.  “Get big or get out” represents the past sixty years of American agriculture.  Industrial farming drove millions of small farmers to move into urban areas. 

Barber chronicles healthier methods of growing food, such as focusing on strengthening the plant instead of killing weeds, and rotating in different natural plants rather than using chemicals.  Barber calls the creation of nitrogen fertilizer the “smoking gun in the murder of soil.”  Synthetic chemicals have also stripped away taste.  Barber explains the chemical process as to why this is.

In his section on land, Barber describes the harmful impact of monocultures with wheat, soybeans and corn, and diverges into some unexpected tangents, such as a lengthy dive into foie gras, French for “fat liver.”  Fois gras is typically produced when “enormous amounts of grain are funneled down a bird’s esophagus” causing its liver to swell to ten times its normal size.  Barber introduces a farmer that produces a foie gras which is less torturous to the birds, and also describes more humane methods of raising and slaughtering lambs and pigs.  Barber also chronicles the explosion of industrial American chicken farming, where megacompanies like Perdue are making mega-millions while outsourcing risk to small family farms.  Overall, America is addicted to eating only the prime cuts of all meat types.  We throw out more meat than we eat.  Most of chicken is fed to cattle and fish.  We’ve created a cycle of overproduction and waste.

Barber’s tale of destruction continues as he moves to his section on the sea, describing declining estuaries and fish populations.  Wartime technologies changed the way we fish.  We now hunt fish with “seemingly endless number of ways to slice and dice the ocean more efficiently.”  Trawling is “particularly lethal.”  Drag nets scrap the ocean floor clean, leaving mass devastation.  Enormous amounts of unintended “bycatch” is wasted.  We now have more than four hundred ocean “dead zones” worldwide.  Again, climate change is making things worse, with warming waters killing off phytoplankton, “the implications of which are staggering.”  Plankton is at the bottom of the food chain and critical for sea life, and is also “responsible for 50 percent of oxygen production on earth.”  Barber also addresses fish farming, including an examination of a surprisingly sustainable fish farm in Spain. 

Barber’s section on seeds includes details on the company Monsanto and their efforts to create a monoculture of genetically modified food crops, which now dominate food markets.  But he also writes of the growth of organic farms, which have moved away from chemical agriculture, as well as “creating a market for the less desired grains.”  Barber describes “landrace,” which is a kind of farming “that encourages variation in the field, with less distinct and less uniform varieties.”  These farming methods help keep soil healthy, plants and animals healthy.  Bird populations, which are in great decline due to “unrelenting, intensive agriculture,” are in particular need of support.

America needs “hundreds of millions of tons of food every day.”  Unfortunately, local farmers markets can’t meet this need.  Barber stresses that we need “middle agriculture,” I.E., farms with midsized operations that aren’t planting monocultures.  Also, we need a cultural shift on food.  “The true sustainability of a food system is about the strength of its disparate parts.”  The way to measure that strength is “to examine how deeply they penetrate the culture.”

Again, Barbar’s primary job is as a chef, and his chef’s perspective drives much of the book.  He writes extensively about cooking and flavor, and foodies will likely love this book.  The interesting (and eccentric) people he interviews include many other chefs, as well as farmers, scientists and other food experts.  Barber shares what they are doing to create healthier and better tasting food, as well as a healthier environment.

Third Plate is a good read, but for those concerned about poverty and hunger, can seem a bit elitist.  Farm to table systems and exotic healthy recipes are great if you can afford them, but aggravating if you can’t.  I Googled Barber’s restaurant, which doesn’t use menus.  His “chef’s choice” multicourse meal, based on the day’s local harvest, will set you back $385, plus tax and tip, per person.  Clearly, providing everyone healthy meals at affordable prices, without trashing the planet, still has a long way to go. 

Reviewer Opinion: 

Good information and some entertaining stories. 

Reviewer Rating of Book: 

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