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- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Hello and welcome to Sleep Money Food. And this week, the greatest monologist of the chef world, Mr. Dan Barber. Dan, welcome.
- [00:24]
B
I think my wife once said I was the greatest monologist too, but she wasn't saying it as a compliment, so I hope you are.
- [00:29]
A
Well, I don't know how often when one can ingest a Dan Barber monologue. I think one should ingest a Dan Barber monologue about as frequently as one should ingest a Dan Barber meal. It's magnificent when it happens, but like, no one does it too often. We are going to give you two magnificent Dan Barber monologues in this show. They're quite spectacular. We're going to talk about obviously locovoreanism because it's Dan Barber and we're going to talk about where food is going and how everything has changed in the COVID crisis. But, but Dan, before we do that, introduce yourself. Who are you?
- [01:05]
B
My name is Dan Barber. I am the chef and co owner of a currently shuttered Blue Hill, New York City and Blue Hill at Stone Barnes.
- [01:12]
A
When they reopen, go check them out. But in the meantime, coming up on sleeped money food, Mr. Dan Barber, why don't we start by talking a little bit about what a farm slash restaurant looks like and how it's going in the age of the plague when you don't have any customers.
- [01:32]
B
This is what the kitchen looks like behind me. It's an empty space, actually. You know what's funny is three, four weeks ago you would have said that's an empty kitchen. Today this is a kitchen in the world of COVID because it says that it's appropriately spaced and we are working at full gas here, at full steam in the sense that we're producing quite a bit of food and but we're doing it in this environment of social distancing and gastronomic distancing as I've come to learn it.
- [02:05]
A
So you're cooking for people, but the people just aren't coming to you. You're sending stuff to them.
- [02:11]
B
Yeah. We've created these food boxes that we are now offering to people who are at Stone Barnes and people who come to Stone Barnes, people come to Blue Hill, New York City.
- [02:20]
A
So one of the questions which a lot of people have is this idea that maybe as we start exiting this crisis, restaurants will be able to reopen with lower density of seating. Although you are a very high end restaurant and you had pretty low density of seating to begin with. But you raise an interesting question that it's not just about the density of seating. It's also about the density of workers in the kitchen. Is it possible to cook meals in a restaurant kitchen with people being spaced ap?
- [02:55]
B
It's probably possible. I wouldn't say I'm the go to expert on that. Although two weeks ago if you said is it possible to produce several hundred boxes of to go food with very rarefied ingredients, ingredients from farmers that we've been working with for 20 years, I would have said that's impossible. And we figured out a way and reinvented ourselves here. So maybe there is a way to do that and in the kitchen for dinner service, but it's not something that I would look forward to doing. And I wonder, is it the right use of resources coming out of here? That's a question. I don't have the answer for it. But is that what we should be doing? Even if we could figure out how to do it, is that the right thing for a restaurant? Restaurants are. The original restaurant was actually a thing to eat before it was a place to go. You ate a restaurant. It was a bowl of soup. A restorative restaurant was literally a broth with some vegetables. And it was part of the enlightenment to cure those with today we would probably call depression and malaise. And back then you had a pick me up of a restaurant at a place called the Restaurant and that was in Paris in the 1700s. I would like to think that we come out of this, whatever this is, that we're in that, that, that we come out of it with a different perspective of what, what food and, and restoration and community and, and deliciousness can entail. And I don't know what that looks like, but I don't think it's going back to the, to the paradigm that we had four weeks ago.
- [04:30]
A
That's super interesting. I have been. One of the things I've been asking pretty much everyone I've been talking to over the past couple of weeks is how have you changed your mind? What has this crisis, how has it changed the way that you view the world? Do you now look back on your restaurant circa February 2020 and think to yourself, that was a very strange operation that I was running there and it doesn't seem to make sense to me anymore.
- [05:00]
B
I think what ends up happening to us, I'll speak personally, but I think this is probably universal human condition is that you recognize things about your life that aren't right or that you want to change and make right. And then there's a moment where that opportunity exists to act on it or at least it becomes Easier to act on it. And maybe I think that's what's going on. You know, I recognized in February of 2020 that we were in a rarefied little world, and. And charging $400 for a meal was something that I justified and I could still justify because of the importance of the suppliers, the importance of the kind of culture we were creating around good food, which I think tends to trickle down. And I don't mean that in the Republican sense. I mean it in the cultural sense. Ideas start from rarefied places, usually, and they tend to become everyday habits. And that's especially true in the world of food. And that was one justification, But I don't know that that's the way to soldier on into the future. And that is the kind of questions that I'm starting to think about now, but I haven't come to any conclusions on. We're in the midst of it at the moment. But yes, the idea that we will head back to a world where it's as rarefied, and I will indulge in that at least, and excuse it or make justifications for it. I don't think so.
- [06:34]
A
Interesting. When you first moved upstate to set up this huge project that you have up there, the restaurant was. Explain how the restaurant fits in, or fit in version 1.0 to. To the bigger project that you have up at Stone Barns.
- [06:55]
B
Yeah, I mean, the Stone Barns, we launched it 20 years ago, was a farm to table restaurant, or sort of the epitome of it, where. Yeah, where the table is actually in the middle of a farm. So we have a big stake in that idea. But what came out of the work that we did together, the farm and the restaurant, was that farm to table actually doesn't really work. I mean, I wrote a book about it called the Third Plate. That was my. I started out at a very different place to write a book about the farm to table movement in a modern context. And what I came away with after 10 years of research was that the direct connection with a farmer is actually not a sustainable relationship for the future. And that it was allowing for a supermarket mentality where you and I and anyone else who cooked would go to the farmer's market and treat it a little bit like a supermarket. Some onions here, some tomatoes there, some zucchini here, and you would go home and cook the recipe you wanted to cook. And that ended up treating farmers and regional. A regional food system like a supermarket, which, as we know, is very unsustainable and farm to table in that sense. I didn't see as being the answer to what we need for the right kind of food for the future. At any rate, those questions were percolating in my mind very much so before this crisis, obviously. And the answer we were starting to form in the sense of the work that we were doing at the restaurant and thinking about a food economy that creates a different culture for how we eat, which is to say a grass fed steak, six or seven ounce piece of steak with a smattering of local organic vegetables is better than the a grain fed steak with vegetables from Mexico and California. But that is not the answer to the food system. What we tried to create at Blue Hill was a pattern of eating that reflected our landscape in our region and actually took proteins and flipped them on its head so that vegetables and grains took center stage and proteins were more of supporting actors on the plate. And that's about changing our cultural expectations for a plate of food. Unfortunately, American expectation for a plate of food is really protein centric. And the carrying capacity of our ecosystem, our environment, is such that that just won't last. And so those kinds of ideas were things that we were excited to and we're promoting through our food. This crisis, I think it, you know, like, like any crisis, but this crisis in particular exposes weaknesses in any system. And it didn't spare farm to table. I mean, it exposed what's wrong with farm to table and that the direct connection between a farmer and the person who's eating the food, or a chef is a chef, which was the hanging calling card of this movement for 30 years, is exposed as being exquisitely vulnerable. Especially when you can't shake the hand of the farmer that produced your food and the restaurant environment is not available and the farmer's market is essentially shut down. You all of a sudden get a food paradigm that was called the answer or the future of good food and really called into question. So like I said, we were thinking about these ideas before the crisis and now that we see them laid bare, it's a real moment to reconceptualize how we eat in the future. Wow.
- [10:28]
A
So be a little bit more specific here first about the weaknesses of the farm to table model. Is it basically just that if a bunch of people can't congregate in a restaurant to eat at a table, then you can't have a table and you can't have a farm to table, or is it a bit more complicated than that?
- [10:48]
B
Well, a bit more complicated just in a sense of transaction costs. I mean, just the transaction cost of a farmer delivering to hundreds of customers is expensive, which is why we have Amazon dominating the marketplace, because they figured out a way to do it as cheaply as possible. And that's not something that farmers do well. And that's not a way to think about a food system. Restaurants was a great example of a community around a table supporting the kind of food and the kind of farmers they want in their region and producing the kind of deliciousness and healthfulness that we all want for our food system. So there's. I'm an evangelist for the right kind of food system. I'm not a downer for direct connections with farmers. I'm only saying that we could make this more interesting as we move forward and more resilient. Because what. What Covid lays bare is that direct connections are not enough. And actually, what we need is a few more middlemen. It turns out we've been saying all along that the middleman and the agribusiness processor is the evil in the system and creates complexities and weakness. But actually, what a regional food economy needs, what we all need in our regions is. Is a lot more food processing. And if we had that today in our area, where I'm sitting in the Hudson Valley, we would have farmers going into a very busy spring season and a place or places to allow that food to be processed and be processed. I say that without the negative connotations. I say that in the most positive way. Processing means fermenting, and processing means pickling, and processing means malting, and processing means in terms of milk fermenting for cheese, and on and on. We're talking about processes that not only preserve the integrity of a system, meaning that they make it stronger, but they also make it more delicious and more nutritious. And that we tend to think of purity in the Chez Panisse or Alice Waters sense of it, which is the direct vegetable from the soil to the plate. And you glorify that. And there's something there that is very attractive. But a food system that is built to last is one that has processing going on in and around it all the time. Anyway, that's an awkward way of saying that we have a lot of work to do.
- [13:11]
A
So if I'm getting you right, what I'm hearing is that you would, up until now, be buying basically raw materials from the farmers. They would grow their vegetables, you would buy their vegetables, and then all of the next stages of the pickling and the fermenting and the processing you would do yourself. And you're saying, no, I want to be like the end of the chain. And I want other people to be doing that middle step.
- [13:38]
B
Yeah, I think that's a good way to say it. I think what's happening behind me right now is exactly what you described. I'm no longer a restaurant. I'm a processing center. So we've closed Blue Hill because we've been forced to shutter, and we have turned the restaurant into a place where farmers, most of whom we have worked with for 15 or 20 years, have a place to deliver their goods that have been promised to us and that we have promised to pay. And we are now processing that food into food boxes, which people are picking up. But it is a food processing center. There's no mistake about it. We are getting, for example, tons of storage carrots, thousands of pounds of storage carrots that we have promised to take from certain farmers. This was negotiated back in the fall. And we are taking those carrots, and we're serving them fresh, but we're also fermenting them and pickling them and drying them into powders and taking the excess from this regional farming system and creating a way to process it into highly nutritious and very delicious food over the course of the next few months. And that's what we need. We shouldn't be in the food processing business, but there is no other outlets for these farmers, and that's why we've created this, which is a revenue stream for farmers. We just did a survey of farmers. We were up now to 110 farmers in the Hudson Valley, and we asked a very simple question to all of them. Question was, if this Covid crisis means that come July and August, the restaurant business is at 50% of what it was a year ago, and the farmers markets are at 50% of what it was a year ago, which I don't think is over the top. I think what I just said is actually very realistic and maybe even conservative. The farmers we spoke to, 9 out of 10, 9 out of 10 said bankruptcy. Now, that says to you something that's really wrong with the food system before COVID because these were farmers that were actually blessed. They're amazing farmers. They're mostly organic. They're highly diverse. They have great soil practices. They provide ecosystem services to our environment that are hard even to calculate. They trap carbon from the air and put it back in the soil where it belongs. They do everything we want. These are the people on the front lines of our ecosystem degradation that you want as spiders and. And they produce the most nutritious food in the region, and they are Saying that if restaurants are half and markets are at half of what they were, we're doomed, we're out. That is not a resilient food system. That's a food system that's very fragile. And so that's what we're trying to look at now and create consciousness around before the tsunami hits, I guess is one way to say it.
- [16:30]
A
So there are two bits of this supply chain question I want to pick up on. The first one is what you just said. Basically, it seems to me that what we're seeing right now in food and also in things like toilet paper is that there are parallel supply chains. There's supply chain that goes to individuals for consumption within the household, and then there's a very parallel and completely separate supply chain which goes to, you know, restaurants and markets and places like that. And what you're saying is that the farmers that you deal with and the farmers across the Hudson Valley who are creating this incredibly delicious food seem to have really just been set up for one of those chains and not the other. And they don't really have any mechanism for getting that food into the hands of folks who are now overwhelmingly cooking at home.
- [17:25]
B
That's exactly right. The processing centers, the mill. I mean, just look at the mill for wheat. We eat more wheat than anything else. We eat more wheat than meat. We eat more wheat than fish and vegetables combined. The only thing we don't eat more wheat of is dairy. And just barely. So we're a wheat eating culture. But to mill wheat, which is to say to take the wheat seed itself and to mill it into flour, is almost non existent on the entire East Coast. You have mills that are in the Midwest that take whatever grain is grown from where whatever wheat is grown wherever it's grown, and it's shipped to giant mills that produce our flourish. And that is an extremely efficient system. If you want white flour and you don't mind where your wheat is coming from, because that wheat is mixed from all over the country and increasingly all over the world into flour that is sold at supermarkets as all purpose flour. But that has taken out of the hands the regional wealth of a food economy, because without the mill, you lose all the control. So the farmer that's growing the wheat to 300 miles from here, if you don't have a mill like I have next door to where I'm sitting, then you lose all control. What do you do with the wheat? And that's where our food system, that's a good encapsulation or illustration of how our food System is broken, we have lost regional control. And with losing regional control, we are at the mercy of big agriculture. And small independent agriculture doesn't have those processing facilities, whether it's a mill or a bakery or a malting house or a fermenting laboratory or a storage bin or whatever it is. They do not have that as levers to pull both all through the year and also especially now in times of crisis. And that's why we're exquisitely vulnerable.
- [19:15]
A
And that was the other question I wanted to ask because it kind of shocked me a little bit when you started glorifying these wonderful things called supply chains. Because on some level, supply chains are the first things that broke in this crisis. The supply chain is only as strong as its weak at slink. And you would, you know, if a supply chain included, say Shenzhen or Barcelona, you know, suddenly like that, that chain breaks and then suddenly you're left with nothing. But what you're talking about is not these globalization supply chains which cross the world and are incredibly efficient and just in time. You're talking about networks within a region. And they're much more local. And I guess they're more networked. And so because they're more networked, they're more robust.
- [20:03]
B
Right, and robust is the key phrase because as I said, we tended to glorify the direct connection between a farmer that grows your food and gets it to your plate with. With no intermediary action. Because the middleman is where the farmer loses all the money and where the inefficiencies happen and where the health degradation of the product occurs. And the truth is, it's just that the processing that we have in our country, embedded in the culture, but also in the mechanics of processing, is degrading food. But what if we thought of those middlemen and those processes that network as bolstering both the deliciousness and the nutrition and the food economy of a region? Well, that's a very strong idea, I think, for the future of food, because I think that's where we're headed. And one thing about restaurants, where we started this conversation, is what is the value of restaurants? The value of restaurants is that it sets a certain kind of culture. And one culture that has emerged out of restaurants and out of restaurant chefs, besides the farm to table movement of the last 30 years, is this regional glorification. I mean, you go now around the world, or you did pre Covid and you went to certain restaurants to appreciate and understand and celebrate a region. That's what if you look at the best restaurants in the world, anywhere in the world. That's what defines them all. That's the through line, is that you go to that restaurant and you can't have certain ingredients at any other of the best restaurants in the world because those restaurants are taking advantage of and celebrating what sings regionally. And so people went to, started to go to restaurants in the last 10 and 20 years because they want an experience they couldn't have elsewhere. It was the opposite of the Gap and of the 80s where one size fits all. It flipped on its head. And almost overnight you had restaurants that up until a month ago, if I had lobster, caviar and foie gras on my menu, the very ingredients that defined a high end restaurant just a decade ago or two decades ago, when I opened up Blue Hill, if I didn't have those ingredients on my menu, I wasn't considered a serious restaurant. Today, you have those ingredients on your menu and you're considered archaic. That in fact, what is celebrated and what is admired in the best restaurants are the humbleness and locality of the ingredients and the history of the processes that you're using, which is harking back to ideas that people worked out thousands of years ago with cuisine. That was where we were headed with the food movement. I don't think Covid's gonna kill that. I think Covid's gonna only exacerbate that in the best possible way. I think that ultimately we're going to see the fallacy of a large scale food system feeding a lot of people. And that is highly inefficient. And that the regionality of food, not to mention the environmental benefits of that and the nutrition and health benefits far outweigh the supposed efficiencies that a large scale, big agribusiness network embodies.
- [23:04]
A
So I guess this is something which you find in China a lot older. China is incredibly regional in terms of its cuisines, as is Italy, as is France, to a certain level. Like, that's the. That's where we're moving, right? It's where people cook and eat the local food, which is grown locally and also processed locally and then bought locally at local markets. And that happens in restaurants, but it also happens at home. That's. That's where you see this crisis kind of kicking us in that direction, maybe.
- [23:35]
B
I think so. You know what hobbles us though, is that we just, we don't come from a culture that has a cuisine. I mean, you can cook all you want at home, but if you're not putting the pieces together, which is what cuisine is. I mean, again, cooking at home means you can go to the farmer's market this summer and grab that zucchini and that onion and that tomato and call yourself, you know, a responsible farm to table ecological home cook. But that doesn't really mean anything if you're not putting the pieces together of what makes a farm truly healthy and sustainable. Which is to say that Japan may be a rice culture, but to grow rice for thousands of years, you needed buckwheat because buckwheat broke up disease cycles. And the only way to get a rice crop was to plant buckwheat and barley, but mainly buckwheat. So what did the Japanese do? Well, they didn't have Dan Barbara wagging their finger and saying, you better eat buckwheat. They created soba noodles. And so part of the Japanese cuisine is that you eat rice twice a day, but you also eat your buckwheat and soba noodles once or twice a week because it's delicious and it's part of what it means to be Japanese. But it also has it started with an agricultural dictate, which was that you had to. Now, that example, which I sort of took more or less off the cuff, you could replicate that example. Just name the country. I mean, look at Mexico. Mexico may be a corn or global Sal, maybe corn as its major crop, in the way that wheat is the crop for the Western hemisphere and rice is for Asia. But in the southern hemisphere, while corn was king crop, you couldn't get corn without beans. You needed the nitrogen to grow that corn stock. So beans are just as important to southern food ways. And I'm saying that very broadly speaking as corn is in the same way that wheat is the western king crop. But you couldn't grow wheat without barley. I mean, barley was as important, if not more so, to wheat than buckwheat was to rice or beans are to corn. And so barley is. Barley became beer. Barley is beer. I mean, another way to look at the bread and beer connection is that you can't have your bread without drinking your beer. And the same with rye in Eastern Europe, or the same with lentils in India, or the same with millet in North Africa. It goes on and on. There are all these crops that are absolutely essential basically to soil health, but really, to get you the crop that is your king crop, that is your identifiable cultural crop, often there's a slew of crops that you need because you need diversity. And that's where cuisine comes in. And so cuisine looks so different in these different areas, because the environment, the ecological dictates, is dictating what to grow, when to get a certain crop, which is figured out over thousands of years. And that's why cuisine is so beautiful, because it doesn't make demands of you. It inculcates itself into the everyday norms and mores of a culture, and that becomes who you are as a person. Actually, it's totally identifiable with who you are. In America, we never had any of that. Nothing. Zero. We came here and we threw a seed into the ground, and it was the garden of Eden. It was like a fucking miracle. And when the soils on the east coast collapse, which they did in this great soil crisis of the 1800s, the early 1818s, with soils, absolutely, almost overnight collapse, what happened? Farmers dropped their plows, and they moved to the Midwest, and with the help of the government and the homestead act, they plow up the prairie and they plant what, wheat. And then when that, you know, when that crisis hits next and the wind blows the soil all around, they keep moving west. And we call it manifest destiny, but it was chasing healthy soil. But what's interesting about that is what happened to those that were left behind on the east coast? Well, they were largely slave owners and slaves. And what happened on the great southern food economy, which was the greatest in the world? It was an export food economy. We were exporting rice to Indonesia and China in the early 1800s. And then the soil collapsed. The great soil crisis happened. And the ones who were left behind, slave owners and slaves themselves, had to figure out, because they couldn't go to the Midwest. They had to figure out, how do we return soil fertility to a land and to a culture that never knew anything about fertility? Well, North Africans and West Africans certainly did. And so slaves bought their rotation crops and their farming practices to the culture of southern farming. And that's how you got collard greens, for example, because collard greens thrive in salinic soils, where the soils were so degraded and. And so filled with salt that you had to rotate in crops like collard greens, but also sweet potatoes, which broke up disease cycles. And so you got this unbelievable introduction of variety and very importantly, this meticulously timed way to rotate these crops that were called rotations. And that became a mirror image in the cuisine, which is southern cuisine, the great California rice kitchen, Creole kitchens, Everything that came out of that came from a desperation to return fertility soil. So you had dishes like hoppin John's. Hoppin John's is not a bowl of rice, which it was before 1820, it became 50% rice, but 50% cow peas. Cow peas was an inedible pea, supposedly before 1820. Well, then they realized that cow peas give the best nitrogen fixation in the soil. And you need to eat cow peas actually, if we're going to have a rice crop, just like you need to eat buckwheat for rice. So cow peas and rice became the fundamental. Peas and rice became the fundamentals of Southern cuisine. You had hoppin John's 50% cow peas, 50% rice, and you didn't have a big loin of pork. You had some pork fat back because you could produce that much pig. And you stretch the pig and let that infuse into this dish and on and on. The dishes of Southern, by the way, the only cuisine we call American food, Southern food. And that's because it arose out of this calculation between how do you survive calorically and how do you improve the soil beneath your feet to give you another crop. That's the only example we have in this country of a cuisine. And that's why Southern food has lasted forever, because it's so delicious, but it makes so much ecological and cultural sense. Okay, I'll stop there.
- [29:53]
A
Glorious. That's the best monologue we've ever had on Slate Money.
- [29:57]
B
Yeah. That's the history of food in our country. When people talk about California cuisine, it drives me nuts. What the hell is California cuisine? It's a bunch of products, and that's what Hudson Valley cuisine is. They sell high. It's not cuisine. Cuisine is you take the crops you actually don't want to use and you make them beautiful. And that's the history of every culture that at least lasted until today. Look at French culture. You think of French as high end food. It's crazy. It's peasantry everywhere. Bouillabaisse. What is bouillabaiss? It's damaged, smelly fish on the dock that the wives had to cook for the fishermen while they were out selling the beautiful loins. And bouillabaiss became the trash fish. It was a wasted fish dish. It's coq au vin. What's coq au vin? Coqq au vin is a rooster. It's a male bird that is about as easy to eat as the wood on the table that I just tapped. But you take that and you marinate it in white wine and you cook it very gently with the acid of white wine, and you get one of the most delicious flavors imaginable. And that is what coq au ben is Every example that we think of today with cuisine comes from the relationship between good agriculture and good farming. Good agriculture, good farming and good food. And that's what we need. And getting back to your question, that's the Herculean task for Americans because we do not have that as a backdrop in our DNA. We never had that. We arrived at the Garden of Eden and we have been up until this day, one of the more wasteful food cultures in the history of the world.
- [31:32]
A
So I make you the food king of New York State tomorrow and you're going to start building this kind of a culture that we see in the rest of the world, but we don't see here of being able to be much more self sufficient and growing everything ourselves and making use of the less tasty necessities as well as the wonderful bits that we all love. Where do we start? What's the natural place?
- [31:59]
B
I'll tell you where we start. We start with delicious. That's the problem. Because if you don't start with delicious and you start with a dictate or a lecture, it lasts about as long as this conversation.
- [32:09]
A
So what's the most delicious thing which we're going to start with in New York State?
- [32:13]
B
Oh, my God. I mean, the most delicious thing. First of all, one would argue that the bouillabaisse that I just described was not called wasted fish dish, it was called a bouillabaisse. So you don't start with saying how much waste and tidbits and bits of things you're going to soak up. You talk about how delicious and over time, the cultural imprint of the dish. But here's where I would start. In the Hudson Valley, I would start with two things. I would start with grains and dairy because that's what built the Hudson Valley. We talk about vegetables so much with the farm to table movement and where we're sitting. I don't know where you're sitting.
- [32:46]
A
I'm not sitting.
- [32:48]
B
Okay. In the Hudson Valley, it's like, look outside, man. It's like vegetables. This is not vegetable. If you're in Southern California, build a cuisine around vegetables. If you're in Hudson Valley, build a cuisine around. Around what? They built the cuisine around what they sculpted the Hudson Valley around, which was animal agriculture in dairy and grain. I'm sitting in Tarrytown. Tare is wheat. For Dutch, it was wheat town. There were thousands of varieties of wheat grown just outside the door where I'm talking to you, just outside the window. And they were diverse. And there was mills, there were Thousands of mills up and down the Hudson Valley for where you could once a week get your wheat milled. And you had full control, full control of the wheat economy in the way that we do not have today, as I described before. But I would start with standing on the hilltop that I stood on 12 years ago almost to the day, and look out on a farmer by the name of Klaus Martins, who's a farmer in upstate New York, a grain farmer on 2,500 days, 2,500 acres of organic grains. And I went there to research the wheat that he was delivering to me. This was 2008. So I was young and I thought I knew everything. And I was writing a farm to table book. And I stood in his field. I overlooked 2,500 acres. And I was expecting to see all these beautiful wheat fields, the amber ways of grain that we always sing and talk about. And instead, what I saw was that I saw a tiny sliver of wheat, but I almost saw no wheat. I saw instead cover crops. I saw leguminous crops like beans. I saw rye. I saw tons of barley. I saw buckwheat. I saw millet. I saw this incredible diversity of grains that this farmer, Klaus, meticulously timed in his rotations to allow soil health to sing. And he wanted soil health to sing, in part because he wanted the wheat that he delivered to me, to my restaurant, to the bread I was making, to be the best wheat in the world. And it was. But what I was doing was ignoring everything else in the pie of his farm because I was celebrating the wheat. And I was known as one of the great local advocates for delicious and organic food. And it was. I was an emperor with no clothes. I was standing there looking out and seeing that I wasn't supporting 90% of the grain pie, of the agricultural pie, and instead, I was celebrating just the 1%. And that's how I was treating his farm, like a grocery store. It was idiotic. He had to plant all those other grains, the rye, the millet, the beans, because he needed the diversity to lock and load his soil, to grow a plant like wheat, which takes a tremendous amount of fertility in your soil. But what did he do with all the other crops? All those other crops were either plowed under into the ground, literally, or most of them were fed to pigs. And he made pennies on the dollar, and he made his money on the organic wheat. And what I recognized in that moment was, this is bananas. I'm here celebrating as a farm to table chef, and I'm only celebrating one aspect of the farm. And it's the least interesting, the most interesting is what does it take to get you the wheat? That's where the money is. And so I went back home, I changed my whole restaurant, I changed my book I was writing, and it became about all the other crops that I was ignoring, that we in the farm to table movement ignore because we think that we, the direct connection, the ability to choose whatever we want for our dinner is a sustainable way to think about food for the future. It's not. And we need to think about great diversity. So if I was a food czar in New York State, I would look to that farmer, and farmers like him say, what are the rotations that, you know, you need for your soil health and your ecological health? And then I would champion chefs and food processors, by the way, to champion those ingredients. How to make those ingredients, like the rye and the millet and the barley sing. That creates in the barley a beer economy, a local craft, not only breweries, but malting houses, that creates jobs, that creates deliciousness and distinct regional flavors that people will come from all over the world to experience. If you do it right. We see that in Europe, we see that in the Midwest, we see that in California. That's not a pipe dream. We could do that here if we put money to it. And deliciousness will attract tourism. So there you go. There's the malting and, by the way, the distilling for liquor in some of those same grains. And I would take the millet and the rye and apply those to bakeries and give tax credits to bakers to utilize these lowly, undiscovered, for the most part, grains that Americans should celebrate. And that's how we would, over time, and it's the long game. We would create traditions and a familiarity with ingredients that we have yet to be encouraged to appreciate. And that's why I think chefs are the best leaders of this movement, ultimately, because we are the merchants of happiness and we lead with pleasure and hedonism. And that is one thing that Americans are good at going after. Okay, that's not a short answer, but.
- [37:49]
A
That'S a glorious answer, though. Thank you, Dan. That was absolutely brilliant. And I will immediately go off and try and make you the food server of New York State.
- [37:58]
B
Just to distill all of this, it's really about a plate of food, if it came down to it, because our expectation for a plate of food is the seven ounce piece of protein, and that's where everything is wrong. And that's what I was saying. The cultures and the cuisines. Name a culture and a cuisine that allows you to eat a seven ounce piece of protein more than like once or twice a year, like on Christmas and on a certain religious holiday. For the most part, all these proteins are, are smattering. And what centers the plate are the things that end up making an environment healthy. And what's all wrong with us is that our expectation, you and me and western civilization is that protein should center our meals and center our plates of food? I'm not a vegetarian, actually I love meat. But the amounts that we eat and the proportion that we eat it in is an example of a privileged westernized conception of not only plan of food, but of a diet. And the carrying capacity of our world won't withstand it. I'm hoping this Covid crisis allows us to rethink that relationship with food. That to me would be the most inspiring thing to come out of.
- [39:02]
A
Well, let me ask you the economic question then because that's the. I mean, that's laziness, right? Is that it's a lot easier to turn a steak into a meal than it is to turn a bunch of grains into a meal.
- [39:14]
B
Exactly right. That might be further distillation of what I said. It's a home run point because we never had a culture of cooking in this country. Never ever. That's where France and Italy and India and China and Japan, it's all cultures. That is the relationship between the agriculture and the gastronomy or the culinary part in America never happened. And in part that never happened because we were such a rich country with a Garden of Eden. So you weren't forced to cook lowly stuff because we had virgin soil. We're a young country. And so anything you put into the ground made tons tonnage of food that we were exporting. You never were forced into creating meals and a culture, a food culture that was like a French peasant culture, an Italian peasant culture, or any of the others, never forced into it. And so part of our lack of food culture today, our sick food culture, really stems from that. It's historic back to the first seeds that were planted here and thrived. And unlike the rest of the world that was struggling, negotiating how to eke out a harvest from exhausted soils. And that's where they came up with rotations. And that's where these diversity of foods played such a big part in the ecological health of a place, but also the health of a culture.
- [40:29]
A
So what this crisis is doing is maybe going to start giving us some of those constraints that ultimately create the.
- [40:36]
B
Cuisine, or I think more so, it creates a consciousness about food in. In a different way and starts a different kind of conversation.
- [40:44]
A
Dan Baba, thank you very much.
- [40:46]
B
Thank you, Philip.