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Publisher's Weekly Review
The chef of the trailblazing farm-to-table restaurant Blue Hill at the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, in Pocantico Hills, New York, Barber is also a journalist crusading to help change the culture of American cooking. Blue Hill was the name of his family farm in Massachusetts, informing his early impressions while growing up, and in this multilayered work he aims to address the intrinsics of where food comes from-that is, from "soil," "land," "sea," "seed," as he divides his chapters. Barber harkens back to the stringent "land ethic" advocated by the American environmentalist Aldo Moro. There was no golden age of American agriculture, Barber asserts, because taming the land both North and South grew into an "exploitative relationship," involving higher and higher yields and less vigilance to healthy soil management-climaxing horrendously during the so-called dirty '30s. The value of establishing a viable interconnectedness between technology and ecology ensures that organic farmers are the heroes of this work, people like specialty-grains purveyor Glenn Roberts, who encouraged the author to plant a marvelous ancient Native American corn, Eight Row Flint, that had been farmed to near exhaustion in the early 19th century; New York state planters Klaus and Mary-Howell Martens, who had to cease using pesticides because Klaus was literally being paralyzed, and rediscovered the civilizing and sociable wonders of growing wheat; and a Spanish geese raiser, Eduardo Sousa, who produces foie gras without force feeding. Barber's work is a deeply thoughtful and-offering a "menu for 2050"-even visionary work for a sustainable food chain. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
A groundbreaking chef at one of Manhattan's first farm-to-table restaurants, Barber shares his vision of good food's future. Cooking per se doesn't constitute this chef's passion. He cares about where foods come from, how they're grown, and whether they can be harvested into the future. To learn about soil's role, he visits an organic farm in upstate New York, where an insightful, dedicated farmer diversifies crops and grows for quality and not solely for quantity. A Spanish farmer teaches Barber about producing foie gras without force-feeding. He investigates fisheries. All this leaves Barber with some innovative ideas about how people ought to be eating a third plate of grains, vegetables, and some meat or fish, all grown with ecological awareness and commitment to sustainability. Such a change from current ideas about dining fast and cheap calls for retraining the public palate away from blandness and uniformity and encouraging eaters to demand unique and distinctive flavors.--Knoblauch, Mark Copyright 2014 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
TO START A FOOD TREND from agriculture is "one of the riskiest" things an entrepreneur can do, David Sax writes in "The Tastemakers," his entertaining new excursion into, as his subtitle has it, "Why We're Crazy for Cupcakes but Fed Up With Fondue." "Yet every day," he adds, "there are countless farmers, scientists and gardening dreamers with a trowel in their hand, digging in the dirt and planting the seed that they hope will one day change the way we eat." Sax could well be describing Dan Barber, the nationally prominent chef whose Blue Hill restaurants, one in Greenwich Village and the other in Westchester County, have knit farming practices into daily menus in a way few other high-profile farm-to-table restaurants have been able to manage. In articles, TED talks and at conferences, Barber has established himself as one of the food world's leading voices on how farm practices influence flavor. And now he establishes himself as one of the food world's leading writers. "The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food" is a combination travel diary, history of farm practice, statement of agricultural and culinary philosophy, and frank, opinionated chef memoir. It also presents a good picture of where what's loosely called "the food movement" is now, and where it might fruitfully be taken in years to come. In his introduction, Barber describes an exercise in which, at the request of a food magazine marking its 35th anniversary, he was asked to imagine the way we'll be eating 35 years from now. If 35 years ago our dining - in what he calls the "first plate" - was meat-centric, he decides that what we're eating now, the "second plate," is vegetableand farm-centric. But what will that future "third plate" look and taste like? Despite the opaque title, Barber's book is really a chronicle of experiments in how to change flavor through planting and harvesting techniques - and only then through cooking. Barber is endlessly in-your-face inquisitive, always looking for something more delicious. And he's generally dissatisfied. (Like pretty much anyone who writes and thinks about food, I've spent hours listening to - and arguing - with him.) The seed Barber hopes will change the way people eat is a cross of wheat varieties that will grow well in the Northeast and offer the kind of flavor long lost to industrialized farming and milling. He comes to see this need in the kitchen of Mary-Howell and Klaas Martens, two farmers in upstate New York whose abandonment of conventional farming and subsequent ability to raise superbly flavorful organic food inspire many of his travels and practices. One day Mary-Howell serves him a rhubarb cake made with whole wheat flour she milled that morning, in which "each bite of cake brought a whiff of wheat, ... and it made a prosaic dessert richly textured and interesting." Barber decides he wants his own wheat, and his search for the right new-old cross frames the rest of his book. Before we can see or taste Barber wheat, though, we follow him on visits to growers, scientists and chefs across the country, and especially across the Atlantic, where his friend and muse, the journalist Lisa Abend (the author of "The Sorcerer's Apprentices," a wickedly well-observed account of a year in the kitchens of Ferran Adrià's El Bulli), leads him to Spanish farmers and cooks whose relationship with the high plains of Extremadura Barber hopes to replicate in New York. Barber has an ear for dialogue and an eye for people's quirks, as well as a quality not always apparent in the heat of the kitchen - a sense of humor about his own impatience and bluntness, which he excuses as a chef's necessary trait. He also reveals an easy erudition, dropping in a reference to Balzac's hand trembling "with pleasure on seeing a pyramid of pears or beautiful peaches" and frequently quoting founding fathers of the organic movement like Rudolf Steiner, William Albrecht and Aldo Leopold. In addition, he introduces his readers to the voices of today's heroes: Joan Dye Gussow, Wes Jackson, Eliot Coleman and Wendell Berry. Since Barber thinks like a chef who wants to keep a jump ahead of his rivals, we also get some inside-chef gossip, like the story of the hot-tempered Frenchman Michel Rostang, brought to bay during a screaming outburst by the appearance of a perfect leg of jamón Ibérico, which he strokes as if it were a newborn. The last section of Barber's book, "Seed," is the most valuable, and gets us back to that wheat. Here he writes about teaching himself the scientific background and gives us easy-to-grasp descriptions of conventional breeding techniques. He writes about growing vegetables and grains for their flavor and utility to cooks as well as for hardiness, and he puts to rest some foodie myths, like the one that only old varieties actually taste good. Heirloom food may be what we think of as the gold standard, grown before the era of industrial farming, but heirlooms are frozen in time and thus frequently unsuited to current soil and climate conditions. The logical next step, in Barber's view, is to change our definition of farm-to-table cooking to mean bringing the whole farm to the table - not just blood pudding and scrapple but the weeds, bones and other byproducts that are the equivalent of a fisherman's bycatch. He ends with a fanciful menu that includes only foods that could be produced on the farm he dreams his own will become, with dishes like milky oat tea, "single udder butter," trout he'll raise and serve with a phytoplankton sauce inspired by one he had at Aponiente, a restaurant on the southern Iberian Peninsula, and a main course of grilled overwintered parsnip steaks with poached marrow and a Bordelaise sauce made with bones. Everything, including beer made from malted Stone Barns barley and wheat, will be part of this "interrelated" farm and growing system. And so, of course, will be the whole wheat brioche like the one his pastry chef has perfected using wheat from the Martens farm. This time the freshly milled flour will be from a cross of a Spanish wheat unearthed by Lisa Abend and a wheat suited to New York state - Barber wheat. By the end of "The Third Plate," Barber recognizes that "my hope that Barber wheat would become the most desired in the world suddenly felt naïve." No such humility troubles most of the dreamers and entrepreneurs in "The Tastemakers," David Sax's romp through the world of chefs, farmers, bloggers, market researchers, television producers and advertisers who drive us to want, need, crave and murderously desire something like a Cronut. After, that is, we've had our fill of cupcakes, which apparently we never will. Sax documents the rise and rise of cupcakes in an opening chapter that traces their evolution - or, perhaps better, devolution - from bit player in a scene in "Sex and the City" to starring role in blogs and cookbooks to object of bakery wars and fixture of national chains to international phenomenon, discussed, Sax is startled to hear, on the streets of Asunción, Paraguay. The cupcake chapter, which Sax uses as a reference point for the other trends he documents, illustrates the strengths and flaws of his book: It's terrifically entertaining, draws on a wide range of characters (most of them self-promoting in the grand American tradition), quotes a variety of people on how and why certain trends took hold and doesn't spend much time sorting through all this information to see which theories might be the most plausible. If victory has a thousand fathers, Sax believes a few too many of them. A Los Angeles chef named Sang Yoon is allowed, with little contradiction, to take credit for the gourmet hamburger and the gastro pub. Frieda Caplan, the popularizer of the kiwi, is also seen as making the country safe for hundreds of millions of dollars in annual sales of brown (versus white) mushrooms. Faith Popcorn, the trend forecaster who practically invented self-promotion, is implicitly given credit for telling Coca-Cola in 1981 to get into bottled water. There's very likely some truth in all these claims, but a few more caveats would have been in order. As would more fact-checking: Little glitches like the implication that epicures in the late 1950s and '60s were called "foodies," a term that came into currency only in the wake of the 1980 "Official Preppy Handbook," make you wonder about other points of accuracy. But these are the hazards of any book of nonfiction in an age of self-service journalism. Sax has seized on a big, juicy topic, and is at his best in on-the-scene reporting, where the brisk, funny, assured voice that earned him many fans for his previous book, "Save the Deli" (which I excerpted for The Atlantic's website), keeps us galloping through the aisles of the gigantic annual Fancy Food Show as he trails a head buyer for Whole Foods, who rightly calls herself the J. Lo of the event. Or through the fields of South Carolina and restaurants of Charleston as he draws a portrait of Glenn Roberts, the founder of Anson Mills (and also a guide to Barber). No matter whom he's describing, Sax is great company, a writer of real and lasting charm. And he's capable of some nice social observation: A chapter on the rise and fall of fondue takes us to Florida, where the original Swiss promoters still try, and fail, to make fondue for the kind of swinging parties that originally helped this fad catch on (confronted with a bowl of melted chocolate, guests pick at the fruit because, of course, they're all on diets), and he's convincingly able to root the rise of fondue in the sexual revolution and the beginnings of what Faith Popcorn would later label cocooning. At the end, Sax surprised me by defending food trends as good for the economy and moving American food forward - a somewhat unsatisfactory conclusion just after he's ably skewered the instantaneous rise of Cronuts. "The Tastemakers" will leave readers wondering about how susceptible we are to the charms of any new food - and how long we're likely to stay captivated. Will parsnip steaks and 'single udder butter' be among the foods of the future? CORBY KUMMER, a senior editor of The Atlantic, is the author of "The Pleasures of Slow Food" and "The Joy of Coffee."
Kirkus Review
A multiple James Beard Award-winning chef proposes a revolutionary change for growing and consuming food.Moving beyond the organic farming and farm-to-table movements, Blue Hill executive chef Barber argues for the importance of the whole farm: an integrated, biodynamic system that sustains the richness and diversity of land and sea. American agriculturewith its large farm holdings, monoculture and unwieldy machineryoften leads to farmers' lack of intimacy with the land. "It's that lack of intimacy," writes the author, "that leads to ignorance, and eventually to loss." What is lost is taste and nutritional quality. Visiting small American and European farms, Barber learned the importance of nurturing soil that contains "a thriving, complex community of organisms." A carrot grown in earth that contains diverse phytonutrients tastes entirely different from one subject to insecticides and fungicides. Even farms that do not use chemical controlsthe so-called "industrial organic" farmsmay grow plants in nutrient-poor sandy soil, enriched by organic fertilizer. Barber interweaves food history, conversations with experts in food preparation, production and nutrition, and colorful anecdotes from his travels to farms, restaurants and markets. He tracked down Spaniard Eduardo Sousa, who raises geese for foie gras by allowing them to graze freely on acorns, getting fatter as they do naturally to prepare for migration. Rather than force-feeding, giving geese what they want, Sousa believes, results in exceptional foie gras. "When we allow nature to work, which means when we farm in a way that promotes all of its frustrating inefficiencieswhen we grow nature," Barber writes, what we harvest is both abundant and flavorful. The same principles that apply to soil are relevant to the sea, as well; agriculture and aquaculture are not separate entities. Barber's menu for 2050 features baby oat tea; blue wheat brioche; pigs' blood sausage; trout in phytoplankton sauce; and beer ice cream.In this bold and impassioned analysis, Barber insists that chefs have the power to transform American cuisine to achieve a sustainable and nutritious future. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Executive chef of farm-to-table restaurants Blue Hill and Blue Hill at Stone Barns, Barber is known for championing sustainability and making responsible decisions about food sourcing. In this revolutionary book, he blows up the idea that locavorism and organic farming are the best ways to ensure the availability of good food for everyone. Dividing his thoughts into sections relating to "Soil," "Land," "Sea," and "Seed," Barber shares the results of his years of investigating integrated food systems, taking listeners to Spain and Washington State and along the Atlantic Coast to visit food producers whose work supports long-term sustainability. With the author narrating, listeners feel as though they are having a conversation with him: one that is groundbreaking, frightening, and hopeful all at once. VERDICT This work challenges listeners to rethink both taste and sustainability with the knowledge that better options are out there and stands next to The Omnivore's Dilemma as an essential book about food.-Donna -Bachowski, Orange Cty. Lib. Syst., Orlando, FL (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
INTRODUCTION A corncob, dried and slightly shriveled, arrived in the mail not long after we opened Blue Hill at Stone Barns. Along with the cob was a check for $1,000. The explanation arrived the same day, in an e-mail I received from Glenn Roberts, a rare-seeds collector and supplier of specialty grains. Since Blue Hill is part of the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, a multipurpose farm and education center, Glenn wanted my help persuading the vegetable farmer to plant the corn in the spring. He said the corn was a variety called New England Eight Row Flint. There is evidence, Glenn told me, that Eight Row Flint corn dates back to the 1600s, when, for a time, it was considered a technical marvel. Not only did it consistently produce eight fat rows of kernels (four or five was the norm back then; modern cobs have eighteen to twenty rows), but it also had been carefully selected by generations of Native Americans for its distinctive flavor. By the late 1700s the corn was widely planted in western New England and the lower Hudson Valley, and later it was found as far as southern Italy. But a brutally cold winter in 1816 wiped out the New England crop. Seed reserves were exhausted to near extinction as most of the stockpiled corn went to feed people and livestock. The cob Glenn had sent was from a line that had survived for two hundred years in Italy under the name Otto File ("eight rows"), which he hoped to restore to its place of origin. By planting the seed, he wrote, we would be growing "an important and threatened historic flavor of Italy while simultaneously repatriating one of New England's extinct foodways. Congratulations on your quest, Dan, and thank you for caring." Glenn added, in case I didn't care, that the Eight Row was "quite possibly the most flavorful polenta corn on the planet, and absolutely unavailable in the U.S." At harvest he promised another $1,000. He wanted nothing in return, other than a few cobs to save for seed. If his offer sounds like a home run for Stone Barns, it was. Here was a chance to recapture a regional variety and to honor a Native American crop with historical significance. For me, it was a chance to cook with an ingredient no other restaurant could offer on its menu (catnip for any chef) and to try the superlative polenta for myself. Yet I carried the corncob over to Jack Algiere, the vegetable farmer, with little enthusiasm. Jack is not a fan of growing corn, and, with only eight acres of field production on the farm, you can't blame him for dismissing a plant that demands so much real estate. Corn is needy in other ways, too. It's gluttonous, requiring, for example, large amounts of nitrogen to grow. From the perspective of a vegetable gardener, it's the biological equivalent of a McMansion. In the early stages of planning Stone Barns Center, I told Jack about a farmer who was harvesting immature corn for our menu. It was a baby cob, just a few inches long, the kernels not yet visible. You ate the whole cob, which brought to mind the canned baby corn one finds in a mediocre vegetable stir-fry. Except these tiny cobs were actually tasty. I wanted to impress Jack with the novelty of the idea. He was not impressed. "You mean your farmer grows the whole stalk and then picks the cobs when they're still little?" he said, his face suddenly scrunched up, as if he were absorbing a blow to the gut. "That's nuts." He bent over and nearly touched the ground with his right hand, then stood up on his toes and, with his left hand, reached up, high above my head, hiking his eyebrows to indicate just how tall a corn's stalk grows. "Only after all that growth will corn even begin to think about producing the cob. That big, thirsty, jolly green giant of a stalk--which even when it produces full-size corn has to be among the plant kingdom's most ridiculous uses of Mother Nature's energy--and what are you getting for all that growth? You're getting this." He flashed his pinky finger. "That's all you're getting." He rotated his hand so I could see his finger from all angles. "One tiny, pretty flavorless bite of corn." One summer when I was fourteen years old, Blue Hill Farm, my family's farm in Massachusetts, grew only corn. No one can remember why. But it was the strangest summer. I think back to it now with the same sense of bewilderment I felt as a child encountering the sea of gold tassels where the grass had always been. Before Blue Hill Farm became a corn farm for a summer, I helped make hay for winter storage from one of the eight pasture fields. We began in early August, loading bales onto a conveyor belt and methodically packing them, Lego-like, into the barn's stadium-size second floor. By Labor Day the room was filled nearly to bursting, its own kind of landscape. Making hay meant first cutting the grass, which--for me, anyway--meant riding shotgun in a very large tractor for hours each day, crouching silently next to one of the farmers and studying the contours of the fields. And so, by way of no special talent, just repetition, I learned to anticipate the dips and curves in the fields, the muddy, washed-out places, the areas of thick shrubbery and thinned grasses--when to brace for a few minutes of a bumpy ride and when to duck under a protruding branch. I internalized those bumps and curves the way my grandmother Ann Strauss internalized the bumps and curves of Blue Hill Road by driving it for thirty years. She always seemed to be going to town (to get her hair done) or coming back (from running errands). Sometimes my brother, David, and I were with her, and we used to laugh in the backseat, because Ann (never "Grandma," never "Grandmother") rounded the corners in her Chevy Impala at incredible speeds, maneuvering with the ease and fluency of a practiced finger moving over braille. Her head was often cranked to the left or to the right, antennae engaged, inspecting a neighbor's garden or a renovated screened-in porch. (She sometimes narrated the intrigue happening inside.) During these moments her body took over, autopiloting around corners without having to slow down, swerving slightly to avoid the ditch just beyond Bill Riegleman's home. Often, on the last leg of the drive, Ann would tell us the story of how she came to buy the farm in the 1960s, a story she had told a thousand times before. Back then, the property was a dairy operation owned by the Hall brothers, whose family had farmed the land since the late 1800s. "You know, I used to walk up this road every week for years; sometimes every day," she would say, as if telling the story for the first time. "I loved Blue Hill Farm more than any place in the world." At the top of Blue Hill Road was four hundred acres of open pasture. "But what a mess! I couldn't believe it, really. They had cows pasturing in the front yard. The house was run-down, and so dirty. They didn't have a front door--climbed in and out through the kitchen window, for heaven's sake. And you know what? I loved it. I loved the fields, I loved the backdrop of blue hills, I loved that I felt like a queen every time I came up here." Whenever Ann saw the Hall brothers, she would let them know she wanted to buy the farm. "But they just laughed. 'Ms. Strauss,' they'd say, 'this farm's been in our family for three generations. We're never selling.' So I'd return the next week, and they'd say the same thing: 'Never selling.' This went on for many years, until one day I arrived at the farm and one of the brothers came running over, out of breath. 'Ms. Strauss, do you want to buy this farm?' Just like that! I couldn't believe it. He didn't even let me answer. 'This morning my brother and I got into the biggest fight. If we don't sell now, we're going to kill each other.' I said I was interested. For sure I would buy a piece of it. 'Ma'am,' he said, 'we're selling it now--the whole thing, or forget it. Right now.' "So I said yes. I hadn't even been inside the farmhouse, and I didn't know where the property began and where it ended. But it didn't matter. What else was I going to say? I just knew this was the place." The dairy part of Blue Hill Farm disappeared with the Hall brothers, but Ann began pasturing beef cattle, because she wanted the fields to remain productive and because she enjoyed showing off the view to her friends; the image of cows dotting the iconic New England landscape is still fit for a coffee table book. At the time, I didn't know about the importance of preserving that kind of view. I just enjoyed the tractor rides, the look back at the field lined with the long, curving windrows of just-cut grass, and then, as I got older, the hard work of baling and storing hay for the winter. Which, as it happened, suddenly came to an end because of the summer of corn. The maize invasion meant the cows grazed at another farm, which meant the hours of fixing fences and lugging salt licks and watching the herd lie and chew cud before a rainstorm came to an end, too. And since you don't tend to a field of corn--in the same way you don't really tend to a houseplant--it meant the baler and the hay wagons, the farm interns, the red Ford F-150 pickup truck, the big iced tea jug, and all the sweaty work went with them. To look out from the front porch at what had always been fields of grass transformed suddenly into amber fields of corn felt not quite right. Same home, new furniture. Endless rows of corn are one of those things that are beautiful to behold at a distance. They tremble in great waves with the slightest breeze, and you think of beauty and abundance. Up close it's a different story. For one thing, the abundance is relative. We can't eat feed corn--I tried to that summer. The enormous cobs line the stalks like loaded missiles, tasting nothing like the sweet stuff we chainsaw through in August. And there's little in the way of beauty. The long, straight rows take on a military-like discipline. They cut across bare soil, hard corners and creased edges replacing the natural contours of the field that I once knew so well. I handed Jack the Eight Row Flint cob from Glenn and explained the situation, fearing that if the idea of growing corn offended him, the check for $1,000 might upset him even more. But I was wrong about both. He loved the idea. "Look," Jack said to me--and in Jack's parlance, "Look" is a happy thing to hear. "Look" says: I know I may have given you some differing opinion in the past, but there are exceptions to my rule, and this is one of them. "This corn is the rare case of flavor driving genetics," he said, reminding me of the generations of farmers who had selected and grown Eight Row Flint for its superior flavor, not solely for its yield, as is the case with most modern varieties. "How often do you get to be a part of that in your lifetime?" So far, so good. But Jack went a step further. He planted the Eight Row Flint like the Iroquois planted most of their corn--alongside dry beans and squash, a companion planting strategy called the Three Sisters. On the continuum of farming practices, Three Sisters is at the opposite end from how corn is typically grown, with its military-row monocultures and chemical-fed soil. The logic is to carefully bundle crops into relationships that benefit each other, the soil, and the farmer. The beans provide the corn with nitrogen (legumes draw nitrogen from the air into the soil); the corn stalk provides a natural trellis for the climbing beans (so Jack wouldn't need to stake the beans); and the squash, planted around the base of the corn and the beans, suppresses weeds and offers an additional vegetable to harvest in the late fall. It was a masterful idea--mimicking the successful Native American strategy while taking out a small insurance policy on the Eight Row Flint. Even if the corn failed to germinate, Jack could still harvest the other crops, and in the meantime he'd show visitors to the Stone Barns Center a valuable historical farming technique. And yet I couldn't help but feel skeptical as I watched him plant the corn kernels and companion seeds into mounds of rich soil. I had nothing against honoring agricultural traditions, but I didn't need a sisterhood of beneficial relationships. I needed a polenta with phenomenal flavor. As luck would have it (or maybe it was the sisterhood, after all), the Eight Row Flint had nearly perfect germination. Following the harvest in late September, Jack hung the corn upside down in a shed and waited for the moisture to evaporate. By late November, just in time for the long winter march of root vegetables, he triumphantly set a dried cob on my desk. It looked nearly too perfect, like a prop for an elementary-school production of the First Thanksgiving. "Voilà!" he said, so pleased with himself he seemed to wriggle with the sheer joy of it. "They're ready to go. Tell me when you want them." "Today!" I was feeding off Jack's energy. "We'll make polenta and then . . ." And then I realized something I hadn't considered: the corn needed to be ground. I didn't have a mill. The truth is that I had never really considered the corncob behind the cornmeal. It hadn't crossed my mind once in twenty years of preparing polenta. Polenta was polenta. Of course I knew it came from corn, just as I knew bread came from wheat. Beyond the obvious, I had never needed to know more. A week later, just before dinner service, our new tabletop grinder arrived. The engine whirred as it pulverized the kernels into a finely milled dust. I toasted the ground maize lightly and cooked it right away in water and salt. I'd like to say I cooked the Eight Row Flint the way Native Americans cooked it, stirring a clay pot all day with a wooden spoon over an open hearth. But the pot was carbonized steel, the spoon metal, and the hearth an induction cooktop that heats by magnetic force. It didn't matter. Before long the polenta was smooth and shiny. I continued stirring, which is when suddenly the pot began smelling like a steaming, well-buttered ear of corn. It wasn't just the best polenta of my life. It was polenta I hadn't imagined possible, so corny that breathing out after swallowing the first bite brought another rich shot of corn flavor. The taste didn't so much disappear as slowly, begrudgingly fade. It was an awakening. But the question for me was: Why? How had I assumed all those years that polenta smelled of nothing more than dried meal? It's really not too much to ask of polenta to actually taste like the corn. But back then, I couldn't have imagined the possibility until it happened. Jack's planting strategy, as artful as a sonnet, combined with the corn's impeccable genetics, changed how I thought about good food, and good cooking. With remarkable, almost ironic regularity, I have found myself repeating this kind of experience. Different farm, different farmer, same narrative arc. I am reminded that truly flavorful food involves a recipe more complex than anything I can conceive in the kitchen. A bowl of polenta that warms your senses and lingers in your memory becomes as straightforward as a mound of corn and as complex as the system that makes it run. It speaks to something beyond the crop, the cook, or the farmer--to the entirety of the landscape, and how it fits together. It can best be expressed in places where good farming and delicious food are inseparable. This book is about these stories. If that sounds like a chronicle of a farm-to-table chef, it is--sort of. Excerpted from The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food by Dan Barber All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
