The Third Plate

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&

. . . an important and exciting addition to the sustainability discussion.   The Wall Street Journal

When The Omnivore s Dilemma, Michael Pollan s now-classic 2006 work, questioned the logic of our nation s food system, 'local' and 'organic' weren t ubiquitous the way they are today. Embracing Pollan s iconoclasm, but applying it to the updated food landscape of 2014, The Third Plate reconsiders fundamental assumptions of the movement Pollan s book helped to spark. In four sections 'Soil,' 'Land,' 'Sea,' and 'Seed' The Third Plate outlines how his pursuit of intense flavor repeatedly forced him to look beyond individual ingredients at a region s broader story and demonstrates how land, communities, and taste benefit when ecology informs the way we source, cook, and eat.   The Atlantic

Each grain represents an agricultural virtue: Rye, for example, builds carbon in the soil. Taken together, they argue for a new way of thinking about the production and consumption of food, a 'whole farm' approach that Mr. Barber explores, eloquently and zestfully, in The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food . . . Mr. Barber s subjects tend to be colorfully eccentric and good talkers, capable of philosophizing by the yard. To put their efforts in context, Mr. Barber unobtrusively weaves in a hefty amount of science and food history. Readers will put the book down having learned quite a bit . . . Mr. Barber is a stylish writer and a funny one, too."  The New York Times

Barber s work is a deeply thoughtful and offering a menu for 2050 even visionary work for a sustainable food chain.   Publishers Weekly 

Dan Barber s new book, The Third Plate, is an eloquent and thoughtful look at the current state of our nation s food system and how it must evolve. Barber s wide range of experiences, both in and out of the kitchen, provide him with a rare perspective on this pressing issue. A must read.   Vice President Al Gore

In this compelling read Dan Barber asks questions that nobody else has raised about what it means to be a chef, the nature of taste, and what 'sustainable' really means. He challenges everything you think you know about food; it will change the way you eat. If I could give every cook just one book, this would be the one.   Ruth Reichl, author of Garlic and Sapphires and Tender at the Bone

Dan Barber is not only a great chef, he's also a fine writer. His vision of a new food system based on diversity, complexity, and a reverence for nature isn't utopian. It's essential.   Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation and Command and Control

I thought it would be impossible for Dan Barber to be as interesting on the page as he is on the plate. I was wrong.   Malcolm Gladwell, author of David and Goliath and The Tipping Point

The Third Plate is one of those rare books that's at once deft and searching deeply serious and equally entertaining. Dan Barber will change the way you look at food.   Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction and Field Notes from a Catastrophe

After my first meal at Blue Hill, I paid Dan the ultimate farmer compliment. I told him that he made vegetables taste almost fresher after he had prepared them than when the farmer harvested them. Now I am equally impressed with his writing. Food has stories and Dan tells the stories as well as he cooks. If you want to know about food, read this book.   Eliot Coleman, author of The New Organic Grower and The Four Season Farm Gardener s Cookbook

Dan Barber writes with the restrained lushness with which he cooks. In elegant prose, he argues persuasively that eating is our most profound engagement with the non-human world. How we eat makes us who we are and makes the environment what it is. It all needs to change, and Barber has written a provocative manifesto that balances brave originality and meticulous research. His food is farm-to-table; his eloquent, impassioned book is farm-to-heart.   Andrew Solomon, author of Far from the Tree and The Noonday Demon

Dan Barber is as fine a thinker and writer as he is a chef which is saying a great deal. This book uses its ingredients the insights of some of the finest farmers on the planet to fashion something entirely new: a recipe for the future.   Bill McKibben, author of Wandering Home