Dan Barber (born October 2, 1969) is the chef and co-owner of Blue Hill in Manhattan and Blue Hill at Stone Barns in Pocantico Hills, New York, United States. He is the author of The Third Plate. (wikipedia)
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.
People complain that cities don't have fresh, sustainable food, but it's just not true.
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.