Dan Barber Quotations

For the past 50 years, we've been fishing the seas like we clear-cut forests. It's hard to overstate the destruction. Ninety percent of large fish, the ones we love - the tunas, the halibuts, the salmons, swordfish - they've collapsed.

I said, 'Don, what's sustainable about feeding chicken to fish?'

I'm not an environmentalist, or a doctor, or a nutritionist.

In food, issues that surround purchasing and that whole realm have a very political component and they branch into stories that can be really compelling. Just being on the farm, interacting with all these people in the industry, leads to personal narratives that can be used to make a larger point.

The history of food has never had a better biographer. Required reading for anyone who eats.

Vegetables deplete soil. They're extractive. If soil has a bank account, vegetables make the largest withdrawals.

It's a fallen world. We eat and sacrifice in the process.

It takes fifteen pounds of wild fish to get you one pound of farm tuna. Not very sustainable. It doesn't taste very good either.

At the end of the day, yes. It's all about the marbling and maybe a few other things along the way. But intramuscular fat, that's where you get a lot of flavor. Fat carries the flavor but in the last 50 years it's been bred out of pigs. When American chicken exploded in the 70's and became such a huge commodity, it took away pork sales. The pork industry suffered and had to change.

Clean plates don't lie.

Conventional agriculture has never succeeded in feeding the world, and it's never produced anything good to eat. For the future, we need to look toward alternatives.

If you look at the carrying capacity of agricultural areas throughout the world, their ecological habitats are changing. So I think we're looking at - in our lifetime - great collapses of food services.

The greenhouse is driven by three things: economy, flavor, ecology. Where ecology is what's being grown in this micro-ecology that can simultaneously thrive and better the soil/rotation, not just the flavor.

I think all chefs who pursue great flavor have good ethics.

If you just think exclusively about what would be the best tasting or the most profitable, you're just not seeing the big picture.

I'm not here to say I don't eat vegetables - I do, a lot of them - but, from a soil perspective, they're actually more costly than a cow grazing on grass.

We're achieving better marbling and better flavor with old world wisdom that's been passed down for generations but we're still using technology.

In the rush to industrialize farming, we've lost the understanding, implicit since the beginning of agriculture, that food is a process, a web of relationships, not an individual ingredient or commodity.

The greatest lesson came with the realization that good food cannot be reduced to single ingredients. It requires a web of relationships to support it.

When you pursue great flavor, you also pursue great ecology.

We need the humbleness and clarity to see that our food, while benefitting from technological advances, has benefitted even more from free ecological resources: Cheap energy, lots of water everywhere, and a stable climate.

There is no such thing as guilt-free eating.

People complain that cities don't have fresh, sustainable food, but it's just not true.