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.