Dan Barber Quotes

When you pursue great flavor, you also pursue great ecology.

The greatest lesson came with the realization that good food cannot be reduced to single ingredients. It requires a web of relationships to support it.

In the rush to industrialize farming, we've lost the understanding, implicit since the beginning of agriculture, that food is a process, a web of relationships, not an individual ingredient or commodity.

Conventional agriculture has never succeeded in feeding the world, and it's never produced anything good to eat. For the future, we need to look toward alternatives.

Clean plates don't lie.

I think all chefs who pursue great flavor have good ethics.

If you just think exclusively about what would be the best tasting or the most profitable, you're just not seeing the big picture.

I'm not here to say I don't eat vegetables - I do, a lot of them - but, from a soil perspective, they're actually more costly than a cow grazing on grass.

Vegetables deplete soil. They're extractive. If soil has a bank account, vegetables make the largest withdrawals.

We're achieving better marbling and better flavor with old world wisdom that's been passed down for generations but we're still using technology.

It takes fifteen pounds of wild fish to get you one pound of farm tuna. Not very sustainable. It doesn't taste very good either.

I said, 'Don, what's sustainable about feeding chicken to fish?'

It's a fallen world. We eat and sacrifice in the process.

In food, issues that surround purchasing and that whole realm have a very political component and they branch into stories that can be really compelling. Just being on the farm, interacting with all these people in the industry, leads to personal narratives that can be used to make a larger point.

The greenhouse is driven by three things: economy, flavor, ecology. Where ecology is what's being grown in this micro-ecology that can simultaneously thrive and better the soil/rotation, not just the flavor.

The history of food has never had a better biographer. Required reading for anyone who eats.

For the past 50 years, we've been fishing the seas like we clear-cut forests. It's hard to overstate the destruction. Ninety percent of large fish, the ones we love - the tunas, the halibuts, the salmons, swordfish - they've collapsed.

At the end of the day, yes. It's all about the marbling and maybe a few other things along the way. But intramuscular fat, that's where you get a lot of flavor. Fat carries the flavor but in the last 50 years it's been bred out of pigs. When American chicken exploded in the 70's and became such a huge commodity, it took away pork sales. The pork industry suffered and had to change.

If you look at the carrying capacity of agricultural areas throughout the world, their ecological habitats are changing. So I think we're looking at - in our lifetime - great collapses of food services.

I'm not an environmentalist, or a doctor, or a nutritionist.