30 DAYS OPEN PURCHASEThe Third Plate does not contain a single recipe. It is an argument, and one of the most influential arguments about food to emerge in recent decades.
Dan Barber runs Blue Hill in New York and Blue Hill at Stone Barns, a restaurant set in the middle of a working farm. His thesis is that so far we have eaten from two plates, and that both are dead ends. The first was the industrial plate, a large piece of protein with small accompaniments on the side. The second is farm to table, the same plate but with better ingredients. The problem is that the structure has not changed. The chef cherry picks the best bits of agriculture and ignores the rest.
The third plate reverses the order. The menu is dictated by what the land needs to grow in order to thrive, meaning crop rotation, green manure, pulses and less glamorous grains. They move to the centre of the plate and meat becomes the seasoning.
The book is divided into four parts on soil, land, sea and seed, and it is driven forward by people rather than theory. Klaas Martens, who grows grain in New York State and forced Barber to understand crop rotation. Eduardo Sousa in Extremadura, who produces foie gras without force feeding, from geese that voluntarily fatten themselves. Veta la Palma in Andalusia, a fish farm that is also a bird sanctuary, where success is measured by how many flamingos eat the fish.
It should be said plainly that the book is long and that plenty of people buy it without finishing it. It requires an interest in agriculture, not just food.
For anyone who has that interest, it is difficult to avoid. What Barber describes is the intellectual foundation beneath much of what Nordic restaurants have done over the past 20 years, articulated before most of them had managed to articulate it themselves.
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Little Brown
ISBN: 9780349141701
Language: English
First published: 2014
