REVIEW: The Third Plate by Dan Barber

I haven't felt compelled to properly review a book in some time, but I had a strong reaction to Dan Barber's The Third Plate. On one hand, Barber has written an entertaining and compelling book about his imitable farm-to-table restaurants and the farmers with whom they partner.  But on the other hand, his book represents a world that is completely foreign to the one in which I live. I found large swaths of his book to be un-relatable at best and off-putting at worst. A lot of books have similar problems, but the problems in this book demonstrate just how far apart the cutting edge of the sustainable food movement is from the diets' of many Americans.

The point Barber makes throughout is that is that eaters and consumers need to look past local, organic, or sustainable.  Those movements are not enough unless we begin to eat everything that grows on farm and completely flip what is expected in a meal.  Risotto made out of traditional cover crops like rye, plankton sauce, and carrot steaks are just a few of the novel ideas Barber employs at his restaurants.  This is all admirable, but he assumes the local and sustainable food battles are already won, but here in the rural midwest, what he takes for granted is seen as naive at best and heretical at worst.

Even when Barber is championing a worthy cause like the elevation of lesser cuts of meat in haute cuisine, he seems completely detached from the meals most Americans are eating outside his five-star restaurants.  For all of its faults, the one thing the industrial food system does well is make use of lesser cuts of meats.  It's not like those chicken nuggets and compressed deli slices are the choices cuts.  Barber's aristocratic tone is not helped by the considerable amount of space he allots to foie gras, and his championing of celebrity chefs as the gatekeepers for sustainability in a very top-down model.  Five-star chefs have their place in the food movement along with farmers, writers, filmmakers and other. But anyone who claims that something as complicated as a social movement works in a linear fashion is oversimplifying.

If the reader is able to look past Barber's chef-centric view, The Third Plate is a nice new addition to the sustainable food literature.

The Third Plate: Field Notes On The Future of Food by Dan Barber © Penguin Press 2014