Farm-to-table doesn't work

Friday, December 5, 2014

That's according to chef and slow-food advocate Dan Barber of New York's Blue Hill restaurants. He told CityLab, a digital venture of The Atlantic magazine, that using locally sourced ingredients doesn't go far enough to protect farmers or the planet.

When chefs focus on only certain ingredients, they undervalue the importance of crop rotation. Barber uses his own experience as an example, remembering that when he was using farms "like a grocery store, cherry-picking the ingredient I most wanted for my menu . . . I was doing nothing to support the entirety of the system." Now, while promoting his book The Third Plate, Barber advocates what he described to Eater online magazine as "nose-to-tail eating of the whole farm." This would involve making rotational and cover crops, so essential to soil health, work in a menu – "not celebrating individual products but celebrating how they all fit together."

Call it "full-farm-to-table." BF