Food Without Fear By Dan Barber Published: November 23, 2004, NYT Pocantico Hills, N.Y.

Now that the bloom is finally off the Atkins diet rose, now that the instinct to, say, make a pure of potatoes feels slightly less suicidal, let us take a moment to realize that, when it comes to food, Americans have the tendency to lose all reason. With the same collective head-scratching that goes on when we look back at the big hair and shoulder pads of the 80's, we would do well to ask: What were we thinking? This question, of course, applies not just to the Atkins diet but to pretty much every diet fad Americans have followed over the last 30 years. In addition to catchy names, these diets tend to have one thing in common: they focus on what we eat not on where what we eat comes from or how it was grown. Good nutrition has been conveniently, and profitably, reduced to an ingredient list. (Remember the grapefruit diet?) That's a shame - and there's no better time to explore the ways in which we've been led astray than during Thanksgiving week, a time when Americans are particularly focused on food. (And, coincidentally, a time when we are blessedly between diet fads.) With a little scrutiny, we can see that our reductionist diet logic dissolves like a lump of sugar. Just consider the traditional Thanksgiving spread: it may appear to represent the American pastoral, but looks can be deceiving. Start with the turkey. If your image of a turkey's life is one of green grass and rolling hills, look more closely. Nearly 300 million turkeys are raised today on factory farms where they live in windowless buildings illuminated by bright lights 24 hours a day. (This keeps the turkeys awake and eating.) The birds stand wing to wing on wood shavings and eat an overly fortified diet that enables them to reach an ideal dressed weight of 15 pounds in 12 to 14 weeks. The most popular breed is the Broad Breasted White, aptly named because these turkeys develop disproportionately large breasts, which makes it difficult for the birds to walk (if they had room to do so) and procreate (assuming they'd want to) without artificial insemination. So what kind of bird would fit more accurately with our agrarian fantasies? Well, how about one that spends most of its life outdoors? Such birds - called pastured birds - are able to move around freely. Instead of having to be injected with antibiotics to stay healthy, they doctor themselves, seeking out certain plants at certain times of the year for pharmacological reasons. Because they expend so much energy moving around, they also grow more slowly: it takes them a month longer to reach slaughter weight than factory birds, which is one of the reasons pasturing is less attractive to industrial farmers. Scientific research comparing the health benefits of conventionally raised turkey to pastured turkey is scarce, but some work has been done on chickens. A study sponsored by the Department of Agriculture in 1999, for example, found that pastured chickens have 21 percent less fat, 30 percent less saturated fat, 50 percent more vitamin A and 400 percent more omega-3 fatty acids than factory-raised birds. They also have 34 percent less cholesterol. The pasture principle isn't limited to fowl. Compared to most American beef, which is raised on a grain-intensive diet, pasture-fed beef offers 400 percent more

vitamin A and E. It is also much richer in beta-carotene and conjugated linoleic acids, all of which inhibit cancer. It's also higher in omega-3 fatty acids, which are a major inhibitor of heart disease. These benefits don't exist at these levels in animal that are fed an unvaried and unnatural diet. The pasture principle can be applied to vegetables as well. We don't live off the food we eat - we live off the energy in the food we eat. So while Mom asked us, "Did you eat your fruits and vegetables?" today we might well ask: "What are our vegetables eating?" It seems axiomatic but it's worth remembering that in order to experience the health benefits of the roasted broccoli at the Thanksgiving table, that broccoli needs to have been healthy too. We can be forgiven for ignoring the obvious because most every diet I've seen treats a head of broccoli the way Gertrude Stein talked about a rose - but a broccoli is not a broccoli is not a broccoli, especially if you consider how and from where its grown. adly, the broccoli and the other brassicas on your holiday table (brussels sprouts, cabbage, turnips, kale, mustard greens) were most likely grown in a monoculture a place where, with the help of large amounts of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, nothing but the crop is allowed to grow. Fertilizers are as pervasive in these large farms as tractors, especially synthetic nitrogen. And you can understand why: the chemicals bulk up vegetables beautifully and quickly, enabling them to withstand the rigors of long-distance travel so that they can arrive at your supermarket unbruised and brightly colored. But it's a little like dating someone on steroids: the look and feel may be an initially appealing, but in the end it's all kind of disconcerting. And think what gets lost. A serving of broccoli is naturally rich in vitamins A and B, and has more vitamin C than citrus fruit. But raised in an industrial farm monoculture, shipped over a long distance and stored before and after being delivered to your supermarket, it loses up to 80 percent of its vitamin C and 95 percent of its calcium, iron and potassium. Fruits and vegetables grown organically, however, have higher levels of antioxidants. That's largely because a plant's natural defense system produces phenolic compounds, chemicals that act as a plant's defense against pests and bugs. These compounds are beneficial to our health, too. When plants are grown with herbicides and pesticides, they slow down their production of these compounds. (Even more important, from a cook's point of view, organically grown fruits and vegetables taste better - their flavors practically burst from the ground and demand to be expressed, and we chefs merely comply.) The same rules apply to the root vegetables, whether potatoes, sunchokes, beets, parsnips or carrots. Seek out ones grown in nutrient-rich soil for the greatest flavor and benefit. You can't buy good quality soil in a bag any more than you can buy good nutrition in a pill. Most organic farmers encourage complex relationships between crop roots, soil microbes and minerals - relationships that become wholly disrupted by chemical additives. What about the milk and eggs that go into Thanksgiving pies and tarts? The industrialization of our food supply did not spare the dairy industry. Not surprisingly, pastured dairy cattle and laying hens produce more nutritious milk and cheese - pastured eggs in particular, with their glowing yellow yolks, have up to three times the amount of cancer-fighting omega-3's of eggs that come from factory hens.

As a chef, I am often mystified as I hear diners, rooting around for a nutrition and dietary cure, ask for this steamed and that on the side, and in the process deny themselves pleasure. Choosing what dietary advice of the moment to follow by putting a wet finger up to the wind, our patrons decide, or succumb, en masse, to a pummeling of such wearisome regularity that it begins to resemble the "rosebud'' of "Citizen Kane": the clue that solves everything but means nothing. There is an ecology of eating. Like any good ecosystem, our diet should be diverse, dynamic and interrelated. In 1984 Americans were spending roughly 8 percent of their disposable income on health care and about 15 percent on food. Today, those numbers are essentially reversed. An ever-more reductionist diet - protein this year, carbohydrates next year - ignores plant and animal systems loaded with genetic complexity, and the benefits that complexity passes down to us. So as you're getting ready for Thanksgiving, think of yourself less as a consumer of the harvest bounty and more, in the words of Carlo Petrini of the Slow Foods movement, as a co-producer. Try to remember what you know intuitively: that we can't be healthy unless our farms are healthy; that the end of the food chain is connected to the beginning of the food chain; that we can't lose touch with the culture in agriculture (it dates back to before Dr. Atkins). To the extent possible, shop at farmers markets for your Thanksgiving foods. Try to choose diversity over the abundance that the big food chains offer. Your food will be tastier, fresher and more nutritious. You'll be able to have your cake (and your bacon and your bread and your potatoes) and eat it too. Dan Barber is the chef of Blue Hill at Stone Barns and creative director of the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture. Change We Can Stomach By Dan Barber Published: May 11, 2008, NYT

COOKING, like farming, for all its down-home community spirit, is essentially a solitary craft. But lately its feeling more like a lonely burden. Finding guilt-free food for our menus food thats clean, green and humane is about as easy as securing a housing loan. And were suddenly paying more 75 percent more in the last six years to stock our pantries. Around the world, from Cairo to Port-auPrince, increases in food prices have governments facing riots born of shortages and hunger. Its enough to make you want to toss in the toque. But heres the good news: if youre a chef, or an eater who cares about where your food comes from (and there are a lot of you out there), we can have a hand in making food for the future downright delicious. Farming has the potential to go through the greatest upheaval since the Green Revolution, bringing harvests that are more healthful, sustainable and, yes, even more flavorful. The change is being pushed along by market forces that influence how our farmers farm. Until now, food production has been controlled by Big Agriculture, with its macho fixation on average tonnage and record harvests. But theres a cost to its breadbasket-to-the-world bragging rights. Like those big Industrial Age factories

that once billowed black smoke, American agriculture is mired in a mind-set that relies on capital, chemistry and machines. Food production is dependent on oil, in the form of fertilizers and pesticides, in the distances produce travels from farm to plate and in the energy it takes to process it. For decades, environmentalists and small farmers have claimed that this is several kinds of madness. But industrial agriculture has simply responded that if were feeding more people more cheaply using less land, how terrible can our food system be? Now that argument no longer holds true. With the price of oil at more than $120 a barrel (up from less than $30 for most of the last 50 years), small and midsize nonpolluting farms, the ones growing the healthiest and best-tasting food, are gaining a competitive advantage. They arent as reliant on oil, because they use fewer large machines and less pesticide and fertilizer. In fact, small farms are the most productive on earth. A four-acre farm in the United States nets, on average, $1,400 per acre; a 1,364-acre farm nets $39 an acre. Big farms have long compensated for the disequilibrium with sheer quantity. But their economies of scale come from mass distribution, and with diesel fuel costing more than $4 per gallon in many locations, its no longer efficient to transport food 1,500 miles from where its grown. The high cost of oil alone will not be enough to reform American agriculture, however. As long as agricultural companies exploit the poor and extract labor from them at slave wages, and as long as they arent required to pay the price for the pollution they so brazenly produce, their system will stay afloat. If financially pinched Americans opt for the cheapest (and the least healthful) foods rather than cook their own, the food industry will continue to reach for the lowest common denominator. But it is possible to nudge the revolution along for instance, by changing how we measure the value of food. If we stop calculating the cost per quantity and begin considering the cost per nutrient value, the demand for higher-quality food would rise. Organic fruits and vegetables contain 40 percent more nutrients than their chemical-fed counterparts. And animals raised on pasture provide us with meat and dairy products containing more beta carotene and at least three times as much C.L.A. (conjugated linoleic acid, shown in animal studies to reduce the risk of cancer) than those raised on grain. Where good nutrition goes, flavor tends to follow. Chefs are the first to admit that an impossibly sweet, flavor-filled carrot has nothing to do with our work. It has to do with growing the right seed in healthy, nutrient-rich soil. Increasingly we can see the wisdom of diversified farming operations, where there are built-in relationships among plants and animals. A dairy farm can provide manure for a neighboring potato farm, for example, which can in turn offer potato scraps as extra feed for the herd. When crops and livestock are judiciously mixed, agriculture wisely mimics nature. To encourage small, diversified farms is not to make a nostalgic bid to revert to the agrarian ways of our ancestors. It is to look toward the future, leapfrogging past the age of heavy machinery and pollution, to farms that take advantage of the suns free energy and use the waste of one species as food for another.

Chefs can help move our food system into the future by continuing to demand the most flavorful food. Our support of the local food movement is an important example of this approach, but its not enough. As demand for fresh, local food rises, we cannot continue to rely entirely on farmers markets. Asking every farmer to plant, harvest, drive his pickup truck to a market and sell his goods there is like asking me to cook, take reservations, serve and wash the dishes. We now need to support a system of well-coordinated regional farm networks, each suited to the food it can best grow. Farmers organized into marketing networks that can promote their common brands (like the Organic Valley Family of Farms in the Midwest) can ease the economic and ecological burden of food production and transportation. They can also distribute their products to new markets, including poor communities that have relied mainly on food from convenience stores. Similar networks could also operate in the countries that are now experiencing food shortages. For years, the United States has flooded the world with food exports, displacing small farmers and disrupting domestic markets. As escalating food prices threaten an additional 100 million people with hunger, a new concept of humanitarian aid is required. Local farming efforts focused on conserving natural resources and biodiversity are essential to improving food security in developing countries, as a report just published by the International Assessment of Agriculture Science and Technology for Development has concluded. We must build on these tenets, providing financial and technical assistance to small farmers across the world. But regional systems will work only if there is enough small-scale farming going on to make them viable. With a less energy-intensive food system in place, we will need more muscle power devoted to food production, and more people on the farm. (The need is especially urgent when you consider that the average age of todays American farmer is over 55.) In order to move gracefully into a postindustrial agriculture economy, we also need to rethink how we educate the people who will grow our food. Land-grant universities and agricultural schools, dependent on financing from agribusiness, focus on maximum extraction from the land take more, sell more, waste more. Leave our agricultural future to chefs and anyone who takes food and cooking seriously. We never bought into the bigger is better mantra, not because it left us too dependent on oil, but because it never produced anything really good to eat. Truly great cooking not faddish 1.5-pound rib-eye steaks with butter sauce, but food that has evolved from the worlds thriving peasant cuisines is based on the correspondence of good farming to a healthy environment and good nutrition. Its never been any other way, and we should be grateful. The future belongs to the gourmet. Why Cooking Matters By Dan Barber Published: September 2, 2009, NYT We need radical thinking, but we don't need a revolution. We don't need an overthrow of capitalism. Nor do we need to become vegetarians. We need not become spartans. We're just going to have to learn how to cook.

It's impossible to overemphasize the importance of good farming for safe and nutritious food. But the campaign for food democracy needs to start with boning knives and cast-iron skillets. A lack of technique behind the stove is, in the end, as complicit in harming human health and the environment as the confinement pig or the corn-fed steer. Yes, that sixteen-ounce rib-eye takes precious resources like water (approximately 2,500 gallons) and grain (about twelve pounds) away from feeding the poor, and the environmental havoc associated with raising beef most often affects the disenfranchised. By 2050, if we continue this gorging, livestock will be consuming as much as 4 billion people do. These horrors of conventional animal husbandry are tied to the amount of meat we eat, which is intimately linked to the parts of the animal we choose to eat. That is, choosing the rib-eye--as opposed to choosing, say, the brisket--determines how many animals are produced. It's the equivalent of eating high on the hog, and it doesn't just mean a lot of wasted meat. It means a lot more animals raised in confinement. How else can farmers afford to increase production when there's increased waste? When suppliers-producers, processors, retailers and, yes, we chefs--throw the bulk of the carcass away, output must go up, leaving farmers little choice but to engage in the massproduction practices that are so morally and environmentally toxic. Supermarkets in the United States stock cutlets and steaks and loins--restaurant chefs, including me, feature them in seven-ounce portions--but unless you venture to an ethnic market (or dine at an ethnic restaurant), you'll have a hard time getting your hands on liver, kidney or tripe. For commerce's sake, it makes more sense to use these odd cuts for dog food, or simply to dump them abroad, in places like Mexico and India. (The only way we've accepted using these less-thandesirables is grinding them up into sausage links and hot dogs--creating dull food products out of disparate and delicious parts.) Paul Roberts, in his book The End of Food, calls this the "protein paradox": meat production has outstripped people production. Through advances in breeding and grain feeding, the cost of one pound of meat is cheaper now than at any time in history. And yet that downswing in cost hasn't led to any kind of meat-eating democracy. If anything, it has enabled--and at this point, even encouraged--a kind of pork chop dictatorship. Not only do we eat too much meat, we also eat too much of the wrong parts. We don't know where our meat comes from, we don't know what the animal we're eating ate, and we sure don't know how to get behind the stove and take control of what we put in our mouths. We ought to start by looking at the great food cultures of the world. The traditional cuisines of Asia and North Africa, not to mention France and Italy, are based on rice, wheat, spices and smatterings of all cuts of meat. In just about every other cuisine, protein plays second fiddle to grains and vegetables. When meat appears, it does so modestly; it takes up less space on the plate, and more often than not it's a piece of the animal--tripe or oxtail--that Americans so willingly discard. American cuisine co-opts other cultures' cuisines with the eye of the entitled: special-occasion foods turn into everyday staples, center cuts take center stage. There's nothing inevitable about that, and very little that's delicious. Good cooking gives a voice to these disenfranchised parts. Democratizing the carcass should be the future of food.