Episode #228
Dan Barber: Farming Flavor First

When chefs, farmers, and plant breeders come together to prioritize taste, the results are revolutionary. In this conversation, chef Dan Barber of Blue Hill at Stone Barns and Row 7 Seeds makes the case for farming for flavor, emphasizing that truly great food starts with seeds bred for the plate – not the shipping container. From forgotten grains to vibrant new vegetable varieties, Dan shares how reinvigorating flavor can restore diversity to our farms and resilience to our food system.

Our Dan Barber interview has been edited and condensed for clarity:

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Dave Chapman interviews Dan Barber at Stone Barns, June 1, 2025:

Dave Chapman 0:00
Welcome to the Real Organic Podcast.

Dan Barber 0:02
We are surrounded by real organic… This isn’t just a prop; this is the real thing. I wish your cameras could see the ten acres of spring bounty about to descend on us on the hilltop over there.

Dave Chapman 0:21
Let’s start talking a little bit about Stone Barns. I just was at your amazing…

Dan Barber 0:26
Did I ever tell you the story that how Eliot picked this field? Did I tell you that?

Dave Chapman 0:29
Tell me.

Dan Barber 0:30
No, did I tell you? I don’t want to repeat myself.

Dave Chapman 0:32
Yeah, it’s okay.

Dan Barber 0:33
We had chosen the field that is over there. I was with him right there in 2002, and he stopped short and ran into this field, up and down and back and forth like a gazelle. Then, I’ll never forget, he walked back to me and said, “This is our field.” I never understood until many years later that he wanted something that was close to the dairy. It was, in retrospect, so brilliant.

Dan Barber 1:07
At the time, I just thought, “God, this guy who I’ve learned so much from found a spirit calling in the field and chased after it, and then decided that’s where we’re going to put the vegetables.” But what he told me is he reasoned that the dairy farmers, when they would pasture the cows, wanted them closest to the barn because it was the shortest walk to the milking at five o’clock in the morning.

Dan Barber 1:36
This is where they spent most of their time.

Dan Barber 1:38
It’s a mineralized field and therefore would provide the best vegetables from the 50 or 70 years of incredible manuring of that field. He’s right. The vegetables that come out of there are just unreal. It makes me look like a better chef every day, Dave.

Dave Chapman 1:57
You took the brilliant shortcut, which is to have the best ingredients for the food. Can we talk about the evolution of where Stone Barns is going? So, Stone Barns is this – for people who don’t know it, whoever they might be, hard to believe – this amazing combination of a brilliant farm growing beautiful, real organic vegetables, meat, and grain, and a top-end restaurant, Blue Hill at Stone Barns, preparing it to be absolutely delicious.

Dave Chapman 2:32
You just described the past 20 years, which we’re now celebrating. Now we’re in our 21st year, and we’re looking toward the next 20. So, what is the next 20? We’re sitting here after 20 years, Dave. What are we saying we’ve done? It’s less about the vectors pointing to the farm and to the restaurant and that relationship, which we call Farm to Table, which has so much to inspire, excite, and energize a generation around the direct connections between a farmer and eating.

Dave Chapman 3:04
But how can we take those connections and that relationship and get it out of here? How can the vectors point out and democratize what we’re looking at and what we’re tasting? Because what we’re seeing over 20 years of work is that while most of these ideas have been celebrated through my menu and through Blue Hill, there is an opportunity to democratize flavor, nutrition, and farmer equity.

Dave Chapman 3:34
What does the farmer need to grow in the field – a particular rotation, variety, family of vegetable, or a particular animal – as part of a rotation for a really healthy ecosystem? What we used to call organic, we now call regenerative.

Dave Chapman 3:51
Some of us call it real organic.

Dan Barber 3:53
Sorry, real organic. No, it’s good. That’s why I’m talking to you – because the definition is so important. Because, as you know, you can dumb down organic to what it is today, or you can be what it should be, which is this conceit. I say it’s a conceit because I think it’s simply bold – and one we don’t stop to consider enough – which is: can we produce agriculture that’s not less bad? Can we produce agriculture that improves the environment and ecological functioning?

Dan Barber 4:26
That often goes unasked, and it’s at the core of what I think – what I have read of the organic movement – the spirit of it was, is: how could you create an ecosystem and a community around an idea of improvement? Here we are 60 years later with the definition being, “Let’s just do less bad.” How much less bad we do, and we get celebrated for how much less bad. We have to turn that idea around.

Dan Barber 4:54
What we are seeing is these ideas being incubated in a very privileged environment. Let’s call it what it is, Dave. This is very privileged. But we are finding that these ideas have legs. Buckwheat is not a privileged crop. Buckwheat is actually a poor-soil crop. Buckwheat is a magical rotation crop that’s not in the purview of a white-tablecloth restaurant charging $450 a person every night – which is what we do. But in fact, it’s really a miracle and should be in nearly every region around us anyway, in this environment.

Dan Barber 5:37
Dairy cows are another one. You had a taste of dairy cow earlier. Those are animals with stupefying deliciousness and nutrition that are being fed to the dog food chain or to the fast-food burger chain because they are considered degraded meat. We’re figuring out processes to take these genetics and hone in on them, dry off the cows, have the fat return to the meat and marbling, and create something that just defies imagination. Wagyu beef – it makes Wagyu beef look like a sick grandcousin.

Dan Barber 6:14
Yet Wagyu beef – we were sitting here 20 years ago when we opened – it was nothing. We didn’t know what Wagyu beef was here. Now you can get a Wagyu hamburger at a joint in New York for 18 bucks. It’s gone from 0 to 60 overnight. I think something like dairy cows or buckwheat or the whole host of ideas you saw this morning can take shape and form in a way that is very accessible.

Dan Barber 6:43
I think that’s the goal of the next 20 years for our work together. It’s not to have the vectors point at me or Blue Hill. It’s that the learning and the incubation of these ideas spread. Not scale – spread. That’s the key. I think you saw that around: “Don’t ask me how this scales; ask me how this spreads.” Because scaling is how we got into this mess. You know better than I do. We got into this mess because we drive to the lowest common denominator.

Dan Barber 7:06
That doesn’t mean that buckwheat grows in every region. It doesn’t mean that dairy should be practiced in every region. There are regional niches we should be exploiting in a good way – digging down, drilling into a regional context that is rich with… and every region is rich.

Dan Barber 7:24
You know what? That’s how I said it. I was just talking to someone the other day. They were investing in a Blue Zone thing – one of those Blue Zone deals. I’m just like, “Is it really like the Okinawan sweet potato is this magic? What? It’s like – this is a Blue Zone. Right here is a Blue Zone.” We just haven’t had the mindset for it yet. We don’t have the history, the community, and the ecological intelligence, as Wes Jackson might say, to exploit it for richness.

Dan Barber 7:57
That just seems like an opportunity waiting to happen. That’s what we’re doing here. We’re trying to take the niche and create a Blue Zone because we know we have it. Everyone has it.

Dave Chapman 8:06
You have to build this kind of biological sophistication. We also need to build a social network, which is an important part of this.

Dan Barber 8:17
Nicely said. Although the organic dictate would be biological resilience. It’s connected to the social results. It has to be. That’s why organic is an organism. The whole thing. It’s not one part. We’ve obviously dumbed it down. But yes, you’re right. If you don’t have the market excitement, the food culture pulling this, then you could be the most exalted farmer in the world. But it stays in places that are elitist.

Dave Chapman 8:46
I’ve always been struck by the difference between Eliot Coleman and another wonderful farmer who has never spoken aloud about what he or she is doing. They have incredible food for their customers.

Dan Barber 9:00
Who’s that? Go ahead and name it.

Dave Chapman 9:02
There are dozens of them. But Eliot was unusual in that he also has incredible food. Anyone who’s lucky enough to be a customer and go and eat there…

Dan Barber 9:13
He wrote a book too.

Dave Chapman 9:13
He wrote several books…

Dan Barber 9:16
I know. I’m writing the introduction for it right now. I’m trying to think of how to frame it, but I think he was able to articulate his ideas in a way that people could understand.

Dave Chapman 9:26
In the book, in many speaking engagements and articles… My point is, Eliot had the skill set, the ability, and the temperament to be public about it. What he did became a model for many people. I’ve run into them all over the place. Eliot’s books changed my life.

Dan Barber 9:45
You’re running into them here. I’m a chef because of Eliot. You’re right.

Dave Chapman 9:49
That’s right. We owe the people who are able to do that. We don’t need to worship them; we need to appreciate that they did that and thank them, saying, “Thank you for being so loud about this.” I think what you’re imagining is very similar, which is that, okay, we have an awesome restaurant. I have eaten here as your guest, I will say, and you do amazing stuff. But how do we make this a gift to many people who will never eat here and still be touched by it?

Dan Barber 9:53
Yes. That’s the goal. What we’re seeing are ideas that I said are incubated here that have the potential to spread in a way that produces scale, but we have to differentiate between the two. We want to become a playbook for what a hyper-regional food economy really looks like. It has to be a food economy that benefits the farmers who are farming and the ecology that they’re farming from. It has to.

Dan Barber 10:46
Otherwise it’s not a real economy. It’s an economy that’s not sustainable. As we say, it won’t last. So, what’s one that lasts? One way to look at food economies that last is through cuisine. Cuisine is the dictate. It’s how the pieces come together. It’s where the rubber hits the road. If you study cuisines, they are the best soothsayers. They are the foretellers of what remains intact in an ecological system.

Dan Barber 11:16
Because if you have the food culture mimicking what the agriculture can give you, then you have something that’s very fragile, as we know time and again. But it is the surefire sign that something is working because it’s worked for a long time. Those traditions, whether they’re personal traditions, family traditions, religious traditions, or community traditions, regional traditions are all mimicking the landscape and what you could eke out from a landscape. That, in and of itself, is a sustainable way to think about.

Dan Barber 11:45
Here, we’re so young, and we were so rich: soil health, agriculturally and environmentally, rich, rich, too rich. We’ve been living high on the hog, as they say. As you know, this country was never forced into the kind of negotiations that people from every corner of the world have had to negotiate. America is just this terrible example of richness. Without those forced negotiations, living off the cream, unfortunately, we’re exporting that idea to the rest of the world.

Dave Chapman 12:20
I was going to say, I was once fortunate enough to go to China with a Tai Chi school – 200 of us driving around China, being put on display as the barbarians who were doing Tai Chi. Our teacher was Chinese. The food that I ate on the street – not in the restaurants, on the street – was probably the best food I’ve ever eaten. Just unbelievable.

Dave Chapman 12:44
I thought, “Oh my God. Any one of these little street stands, if they had a restaurant in the US, their success would be unending. But probably there would also be the challenge of: now we have to scale up.” The golden goose would have disappeared. I’ve heard that obesity is becoming a world epidemic now.

Dan Barber 13:06
We are exporting our genius to everybody. But what you touch on is, as much as we desperately need a new generation of farmers to be energized by this work out here, we need this work over here – and I’m pointing to the kitchen – because we need a generation of chefs and cooks who don’t feel the need to drive, dumb down, and commoditize.

Dan Barber 13:30
That’s a very hard thing to be arguing for, but that’s what I spend my day with: young, incredibly smart, thoughtful generation of cooks who want to do the right thing and want to be trained to do it. My hope is that they go out there and think in a regional context.

Dan Barber 13:49
Look, I think if we’re also talking 20 years – I’ll predict the future – I think we’re all going to retrench. I think that’s where we’re headed. It’s a grand retrenchment. This idea of shipping calories and nutrition from one corner of the world to the next has become a very old idea. I think it already is, in many ways. Restaurants are starting that way.

Dan Barber 14:13
I think I talked to you about this before, but I’ll say it again – if you think about restaurants 40 years ago, not that long ago, they were measured by the same dish that was presented in different areas. You went to fine dining in America, you essentially ate from a list of a couple dozen dishes. A generation before that, it was really just a dozen dishes. In regions of France… it wasn’t the ingenuity; it was how well you prepared the classic dish. That rubbed off on America for a long time, but now the whole world has just opened up.

Dan Barber 14:52
In fact, that’s the sign of the death of a restaurant. Right now, the restaurants that are truly thriving – not just busy and well-supported, but also considered the top restaurants (that’s the people who are judging) – these are restaurants that are so individualistic that you have to travel there to get that experience. When you travel there to get that experience, it’s about experiencing a region and a place. That’s a very new idea. I can’t stress that enough. In America, on the high end, on fine dining, it’s a very new idea.

Dan Barber 15:29
That is becoming more and more of a necessity. As the younger generation gets older, they don’t want to spend their money on one-size-fits-all – the Gap clothing store kind of idea where you get your same shirt wherever you are in every region. That was the restaurants not long ago. That’s changed. That’s going to trickle down.

Dan Barber 15:49
My worry is that we won’t be able to produce food in a regional context for very long, as you know – especially real organic food. It’s just been a terrible 20 years, 30 years. But I believe we’re at the moment where that switch is coming. Part of this is fashion and desire – what people are willing to pay for. I believe that there’s a turn that’s coming.

Dave Chapman 16:16
That’s great. Do you remember what year “The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food” came out?

Dan Barber 16:20
I remember it very well. I wrote it for 12 years, and it came out in 2014.

Dave Chapman 16:26
Okay. Eleven years ago, and you started it 12 years before.

Dan Barber 16:29
Yeah.

Dave Chapman 16:30
Since that book came out, or since you were in the middle of writing it, do you think that the food system has gotten better or worse?

Dan Barber 16:38
Worse. I hate to sound like my grandfather, who would complain about everything, but I think we’re in an existential moment. I was just in California at some big organic farms – the kind of farms that you would frown on. I almost wrote you because one is 2,000 acres of diverse vegetable farming.

Dan Barber 17:10
I went through those with an open mind. I’m thinking about writing something. Row Seven is the vegetable company that we’re contracted with all these farmers across the country. I’m visiting them and getting to know them. Some of them are just big scale. This guy has 2,000 acres, and he’s very diversified in a way that’s almost like what you’re looking at out here.

Dan Barber 17:35
The math on this thing is bonkers. They’re at 40 acres. Each of the 15 acres… but nothing is planted in the same place for five years. Tons of soil amendments. Big cover cropping. Compost up… He owns a compost company, and he’s just huge – on scales that just boggle the mind.

Dan Barber 17:59
There are 180 combine-size – those soil levelers? He has 180 of them at $750,000 a pop. It’s just incredible value. This is in Watsonville. You want to go there and sneer and say, “This is industrial organic.” Then you get there, and it’s just like… He inherited this land. So, it’s not like he’s trying to take over everyone. He’s big scale, and he’s trying to do the right thing. It’s very clean food.

Dan Barber 18:30
I still think it’s a little bit of a mining operation. But he looks at me when I talk to him about, “Well, what about diversifying grains and animals?” He’s just like, “What are you talking about?” The fact that I actually diversify any vegetables is… His neighbors and his neighbors’ neighbors are doing…

Dan Barber 18:49
He took me to a field where there were 35 years of Brussels sprouts on Brussels sprouts on Brussels sprouts – all the way through. And they thought they were organic and enlightened. It’s just incredible. I don’t know. I came away from that experience feeling so… The end result was, like, “He’s not really doing that well.” It’s a huge business. Labor is so tight. Water issues. And then, competition.

Dan Barber 19:19
The biggest thing he said – and that’s why I almost wrote you – is not labor or water, although those are really fraught compared to 10 years ago when I was writing The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food. The biggest problem is big conventional farms getting into organic. Just saying, “Okay, all of a sudden we’re organic.” They’ll spend the three years on the conversion. They do it. They flood into Krogers and all these people that he supplies, and they do it cheaper.

Dan Barber 19:46
Now the price of organics has come down, and they’re like, “Ooh, this doesn’t make sense anymore.” Then he said, “But now what they’ve done, post-COVID, is these industrial farms have continued organic at the absolute lowest possible definition of what organic is. And even if they are – that’s a whole other thing – but okay, even if they are, the lowest common with size that dwarfs him, with machinery that dwarfs him, and they’re taking a loss on it.”

Dan Barber 20:22
They’re saying to Kroger’s, “You have to buy from Tubi. Buy from us. Here’s organic. Here’s our price.” They’re losing money on it, but they’re undercutting this guy. He’s not a small Eliot Coleman guy – 2,000 acres. They’re undercutting him. But they want the sale on the conventional, and so they keep it in one account.

Dan Barber 20:37
I didn’t understand this, but he’s saying people like Kroger’s, Albertsons, and increasingly others that we like, are trying to bundle. So, they’re not playing with lots of different farms. It’s more expensive. They get these big contracts, and they use organic as the loss leader to get in there. Incredible. He said, “It’s just killing us.” He’s like, “There’s no way that I could possibly compete with that.”

Dave Chapman 21:06
It’s amazing. Not to diminish the impact of labor, because he’s paying 20 times what a worker would cost in Mexico.

Dan Barber 21:16
When I was writing “The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food,” I brought it up in 2000. I asked, “What was it like for workers?” He said, “I’d show up to work and there’d be 100 people waiting to work. There was never one day where I didn’t have excess labor. Now I plow under fields because I don’t have anyone to pick.”

Dan Barber 21:16
But I said, “Oh, my God. Your biggest prize.” He said, “It’s not my biggest prize.” Then it went on to the topic of the corporate dumping of organic and how you compete with that because those guys are just getting richer.

Dan Barber 21:54
You keep drilling down to it, and he takes me to the machinery that they have and he doesn’t. It almost compounds itself. The labor is hurting. But what he needs is more robotics. That’s really what he needs. All these farms that are this size need robotic weeding. He can’t afford it, because his margins are just going down, while the other guys—their margins are going up, and they’re getting the latest in AI weeding robotics.

Dan Barber 22:25
He was showing me what’s out there. Oh. my God. It’s unbelievable. This is not an Eliot Coleman guy. This is a guy who has 180 tractors – $750,000 each – that run by satellite. They all run on satellite. I’m watching the fields. The guy’s just laying back – because you have to be in the tractor. The rule is you have to be in the tractor.

Dave Chapman 21:58
Then 50 feet from the end of the row, it shakes to wake you up.

Dan Barber 22:49
To wake you up, exactly. I watched that. I was like, “Oh, my God. This is out of a futuristic thing.” Who’s the enemy here? Is it the industrial organic guy who’s organic, diversified, and concentrating on soil – not in the way that we do, but who could?

Dan Barber 23:10
Then you could say, “Well, why is he that size?” It’s like, “I don’t know. I think it was handed to him.” He’d be out of business. Everyone around him who is smaller is out. So then what? Then you’re like, “Okay, you proved your point. It’s too big.”

Dan Barber 22:52
I left there feeling so depressed. I was like, “What is the answer to this?” I don’t know. That’s my answer to you. Is it worse? From what I’m seeing, it’s infinitely worse. You know what, Dave? I’ll tell you something. Michael Pollan said this to me not that long ago. When he says something in his way, it’s always so smart. I feel like he’s the smartest guy in the world.

Dave Chapman 22:49
I know. He’s the smartest guy in the world.

Dan Barber 22:49
He said, “In 2006 and 2007, which is really when I was in the midst of the book, it’s like we were indomitable.” The Farm to Fork movement – we were too confident that it was the future. What we didn’t understand or grapple with enough was the power of the food industry. I was like, “I don’t know what he’s talking about.” That was probably five years ago.

Dan Barber 22:49
Today, I’m just like, “Of course, he’s right.” I think the recognition – the wide-scale push – for local food, regional food, it’s died a little bit. Organic may be growing and that’s questionable, but it seems like it is. But the push for local food…

Dave Chapman 22:49
Eight years ago we sold to a bunch of chains in the Northeast, and they all had a local program. They were serious. It wasn’t all of their stuff, but they were serious. Local growers were really being invited in, they wanted to give them shelf space…

Dan Barber 22:58
How many years ago?

Dave Chapman 24:59
It was around 2016 – 2017. They sent film crews to film us, with models so somebody looked good in the picture. Now that’s all gone. All that local buying is gone – for all of them.

Dan Barber 25:32
I don’t know what happened. Michael’s point was: the industry fought back. Is that right? I don’t know how that works that way.

Dave Chapman 25:40
One thing that happened is that all of those chains have been bought by a multinational…

Dan Barber 25:45
There you go. That’s true.

Dave Chapman 25:46
Three years later, everything changed.

Dan Barber 25:51
Okay, but a multinational that was confronting a real market for differentiated local products – products people were willing to pay a little more for – would respond to that. They wouldn’t just drop it. It seems like the interest has also waned. I don’t get that one.

Dave Chapman 26:08
It is hard to say, though. Honestly, we used to sell a lot of our crop to Stop & Shop, which – before Walmart came in – was kind of the big dog. They didn’t drop us; they said, “We can’t afford to pay the price.” I said, “We haven’t raised our price in 20 years. What are you talking about?”

Dave Chapman 26:29
We had a very dedicated following there. Sales weren’t down, but they were bought by Ahold USA, a Dutch multinational. They said, “Well, we’ve got to cut our prices just as a matter of principle.” That pushed out any local, differentiated product.

Dave Chapman 26:49
I don’t feel it was the customers. I feel it was a corporate decision from somebody way, way at the top who was saying, “This is how it’s going to be.” At that point, they were saying, “This is how we compete with Walmart” – which, for sure, is a Goliath. It’s bigger than the next five put together. It’s certainly the biggest vendor of certified organic food in the world.

Dan Barber 27:18
Yeah, they’re driving it.

Dave Chapman 27:19
They’re driving it. But the one hope I have is that Michael answered it the same way as you – that it’s getting worse. I asked Michael the same question about it on “The Omnivore’s Dilemma.” He said, “But what’s gotten better is the conversation. The public awareness is much better.” This is now something that my students at Harvard are talking about. They weren’t talking about this 15 years ago.

Dan Barber 27:43
Good point. I hope that leads to more action. But what I’m seeing is: look, we are importing over 50% of our vegetables now. What’s more scary than that? In a country like ours, that is reliant on other countries for its food, what more of a wake-up call is that?

Dave Chapman 28:05
It’s a little creepier to me, which is we’re importing about two-thirds of our certified organic soy and about half of our certified organic corn. The other things you go, “Okay, they’re paying one-twentieth of what we are in labor, and these are high-labor crops.” In soy and corn, we’re supposed to be the best in the world. Why are we importing stuff that’s certified as organic, but none of us actually believes it is? That’s a different kind of thing.

Dan Barber 28:05
I was just talking to a fish guy who started a company called Dr. Dish, which is supporting fishermen in Montauk – which is right here – to get a fair price for fish. Man, talk about a decimated industry. The average age of the fishermen in Montauk is 65. It’s like farmers – the same idea.

Dan Barber 28:59
But today, we import 90% of our fish. How much fish do you think we export? Ninety-four percent. I wish you could have talked to him. It’d be a great interview. He said, “We’re the last generation because none of these boats have a 30- or 40-year-old on them. They’re all 60 years. They all paid for the boat, so for them, they’re just going through their time. They’re running out.”

Dan Barber 29:27
He’s like, “Unless this were really to change…” Again, it’s the corruption. I’m not much of a corruption guy. I don’t like going there. People hear it so much – eyes glaze over. But he was telling me about fluke. It’s a very popular fish that can sell on menus. He’s paying his fishermen 35 cents a pound for beautiful Montauk fluke.

Dan Barber 30:00
By the way, when the fluke get to Montauk, they’re in the most pristine, fatty, unbelievable condition. Virginia – which is not that far down the coast – their minimum haul is 15,000 pounds. In Montauk, it’s 1,500 pounds. That’s it. You can’t take more because it’s well-regulated. Very well-regulated. For Virginia, it’s 15,000.

Dan Barber 30:24
So, the Virginians come up to Montauk, fish, and go back down to Virginia. Then they sell it and undercut them by 35 cents. He was saying, “I can’t even sell fluke anymore because chefs are just looking at that, and people are just looking at the price difference per pound, and won’t do it.”

Dan Barber 30:43
But there’s no understanding that the fish system – it’s so screwed up. You’re completely at the mercy of an unregulated industry. Actually, it’s not unregulated. The harm of it – the pain of it – is that it is regulated in certain areas. Then you get outside the area, and all hell breaks loose. It’s like there’s no way out. It’s frightening.

Dave Chapman 31:06
It seems that the only way to… Food is Medicine is a great new movement. It’s not a new movement; it’s a very old movement.

Dan Barber 31:13
I have someone who’s going to Joan Gussow’s memorial on Monday. It is a very old movement.

Dave Chapman 31:14
It’s a very old movement. But it’s gotten wind in its sails lately. It’s being pumped up and talked about. One of the things that bothers me about it is they don’t really talk about organic.

Dan Barber 31:18
They don’t talk about soil health or any of that. It says, “If it’s disconnected from your health.” That’s what Joan was talking about in the ’70s. You’re right. By the way, that’s what we’re talking about. We’re just not doing it through nutrition because I’m not wearing the other white coat. I’m wearing this white coat. But you’re right. It’s like there’s a wide open…

Dan Barber 31:54
We know – I’m predicting the future now – 20 years from now, if I’m sitting here with you, we’re going to be talking about food as nutrition. We’re going to be talking about food as nutrition that starts with seed and soil. The idea that we’re not is like smoking a pack a day around a newborn. It’s so stupid. You look back and you’re like, “What were you thinking?” We’re going to look back on food and nutrition and think, “What were we thinking?”

Dan Barber 32:20
I hope we can get the science right enough, because, as you know, science is so tricky. It depends on who’s doing it and how we’re doing it. As Joan said, it’s very nearly impossible to measure these things – not individually, but holistically. Individually, you can do it, but holistically, it’s like, “No, you can’t.” That’s what people need: numbers that are very clear, black and white. It drives me nuts.

Dan Barber 32:53
But yeah, I think there’s a wide-open opportunity to put a positive spin on it. That’s what I’m telling our cooks. You want to get in the food business? This is the future. We’re not going to allow nutrition as food to be defined as just nutrient-dense. We won’t in the future.

Dan Barber 33:09
The only way you’re going to get it is through real soil, and it’s going to come from local farms. People are going to be willing to pay more for it, and the government’s going to get involved. Look at now, the government’s getting involved, actually, however you view that. It is interesting, that conversation. I’m sure for you it must be so gratifying to see it happening.

Dave Chapman 33:28
Something is happening, and we’ll see what happens next. But it is amazing that, for the first time, we have leading political figures agreeing with us.

Dan Barber 33:40
It’s incredible. On a side of the fence that you would never imagine.

Dave Chapman 33:43
That agreement has become bipartisan. There isn’t much that’s bipartisan, but on that one, there is widespread agreement. Whether we get the change, we’ll see. We’re on Michael, his food quote: “Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much.” What is that? Seven words?

Dan Barber 34:09
Yeah.

Dave Chapman 34:11
Amazing. I to wrote him. I said, “Michael, I just gave a talk, and I added three more words to it. I’m sorry.” I said, “Mostly real organic.” I said, “I think this is very important.” He wrote back and said, “I do too. So, thank you.” I didn’t want to mess up the beauty of the seven words, but to leave out the fact of how that food is grown is not right. We need to talk about it.

Dan Barber 34:39
Right. I’m doing it through deliciousness because I don’t think you can talk about the importance of that without someone getting excited about the flavor. But like I said, it seems like nutrition is getting people, and there’s another way in.

Dave Chapman 34:55
Let’s talk about deliciousness.

Dan Barber 34:56
By the way, deliciousness and nutrition are the same conversation. In 20 years, when we’re sitting here – the guy who hates making predictions. I’ll make another one – we’re going to be seeing the correspondence between flavor and nutrition as one and the same. That’s a big one.

Dan Barber 34:56
For some reason – I think it’s our Puritan background – we don’t have an understanding that flavonoids are flavor. I don’t know where that came from, but in most cultures that you look at and in cuisines, the difference between a doctor and a chef did not exist. The best chefs were the doctors. That’s “food is medicine.” That’s in every corner of the world, except here. Western medicine is so divorced from that. We have a lot to learn. You know what I’m looking at?

Dan Barber 35:42
The reason I just got to that is… you’re sitting next to a revolution, and you don’t even know it. I should point the camera at that thing. That’s called Spinach Lettuce. That’s from a former Monsanto breeder who was so fed up with the drive towards profits – and also towards nutrientless romaine and iceberg, which is 95% of the market, as you know.

Dan Barber 36:08
He couldn’t get Monsanto to understand the opportunity out there for the number one vegetable eaten in the United States – salad – and the fact that we have a nutrition crisis. What if – very obvious idea, especially for lettuce breeders – what if we could breed nutrition into lettuce and have that become the vehicle for mineralization of vitamins, minerals, and all the things that we need? More of it in fiber, which we need more of in our bodies.

Dan Barber 36:40
He quit and started his own breeding business. Now he’s breeding romaine and iceberg lettuces that are loaded with nutrition and flavor. That’s what I stumbled upon. They’re all stupefyingly delicious. What you’re looking at is a romaine that was an offshoot – what they call a sport. It was really a genetic mutation from a couple of romaines that he was playing around with. He noticed it, put a fence around it, saved the seed, selected – and here we are 10 years later.

Dan Barber 37:12
It looks exactly like a head of spinach, but it’s an open romaine. The reason I’m saying it’s so important to be open is that it’s allowing photosynthesis to happen. So that rich green is not just on the outer leaves – which we’re usually peeling off and throwing in the garbage – and then the rest of it is water. But here, you’ve got full nutrition.

Dan Barber 37:34
This is something that is so delicious, I want to get it out into the world. It doesn’t belong just here.

Dave Chapman 37:41
I’ll make sure I include a picture.

Dan Barber 37:43
I’ll get you a picture. It is a stunner. It’s just the kind of thing where the industry in Salinas – where he is, the Belly of the Beast – says, “Oh, that’ll never work. There’s no market for it.” Then he goes to the market and people there say, “Oh, growers will never grow that.” He’s like, “Okay, that’s a circular something right there.”

Dan Barber 38:03
We’re going to try and make a stab at getting it out into the world because its yield is fabulous. This is not meant for a small bespoke farm. It’s really modern genetics with huge nutrition. Exciting.

Dan Barber 38:18
You know what I love about that species as I’m looking? I just got back from visiting him in his Willy Wonka field of lettuces. It is breathtaking to see the diversity in lettuce. Yet, as I’m walking through the whole field, I’m thinking: lettuce is the most lawyered-up vegetable in our refrigerator.

Dan Barber 38:36
Do you know that 70% of lettuce genetics are owned? Seventy percent are patented. What he has to do to get around that – to get Spinach Lettuce and everything else I was looking at – is mind-blowing. I was thinking, it’s like me cooking in my kitchen and reaching for an ingredient and having a lawyer tap me on the hand and say, “You can’t use that. That’s owned.” That’s what he deals with – 70% of lettuce genetics. It’s even more incredible that he’s able to produce this stuff.

Dave Chapman 39:18
Owning life is other… Let me go back to taste for a minute. You and I have shared a lot of intersections with Hugh and Lisa Kent at King Grove Farm Organic Farm.

Dan Barber 39:38
You got me involved with them.

Dave Chapman 39:40
I did.

Dan Barber 39:40
You had me send… That was a revelation. I know blueberries. I never had something like that.

Dave Chapman 39:51
I know. We just finished another season, and we have a little bowl left in our fridge.

Dan Barber 39:57
So do I. I’m saving it for fall. Same with me. I put a tape around. My kids aren’t touching it.

Dave Chapman 40:05
We have a lot of frozen berries coming. What did you learn…? You visited the farm, and what’s more; you sent a bunch of chefs down to the farm in Florida. Amazing.

Dan Barber 40:18
Yeah, they had to learn that. That’s the only way. You got to see that up close. I’ll tell you what I learned, and it’s probably not what you’re thinking. Forget about the whole hydroponic disgrace and the USDA organic – all of that. You cover that better than anyone.

Dan Barber 40:40
To me, the obsession that I have is with genetics being paramount. We talk a lot about soil, but actually, I spent a lot of my day with Row Seven looking at genetics. As I have matured with Row Seven, I’m also seeing that you can have all the genetics in the world, but if you don’t have the right farming – and definitely if you don’t have organic, but certainly even good organic farming – you’re not going to express this genetic. So forget it.

Dan Barber 41:05
So now, you really are in the farming business too. But where I really had a breakthrough was at Hugh’s place. Two things: Number one, the genetics are pretty workaday. The best blueberry it has in there is a variety called Sweetcrisp, which is very good, but it’s not like over-the-moon. There are other varieties that pack more flavor.

Dan Barber 41:33
It’s a big producer, which means the vine is giving up a lot of its nutrition, but it’s now dispersed over a very good yield. That generally means the berry tastes a little bit weaker. I think it’s probably the same with tomatoes. There’s this tradeoff between yield and flavor.

Dan Barber 41:50
What Hugh didn’t so much teach me as knock my socks off was seeing that he was growing this variety – and many others from the university – at astounding flavor. On top of that – you’ve been to the farm – if you walk a quarter mile that way, you’re in sand. You’re just in sand. Nothing grows.

Dan Barber 42:18
Then you come back to Hugh, and he’s built up soil. He’s built soil. That is what’s igniting. You’ve got this thing where soil, in a natural soil habitat, is not that great. He argues with me a little bit, but a quarter mile out, it’s sand.

Dave Chapman 42:36
It was sand when he started.

Dan Barber 42:38
Yes. And so he built it up. He’s saying that it has alluvial, or… what was it before, where it has a lot of fossilized whatever-it-is down there? I don’t understand it, because sand, to me, you can’t grow… it looked really empty.

Dan Barber 42:53
Then yes, he built up this environment to the point where the richness of the soil community is taking the genetics in a couple of these varieties he’s growing and expressing them to their full extent. It’s just a very good lesson about the tug between genetics and environment. It’s always G by E. Which is more? I’m a genetics guy now because of what I’ve learned, but I’m starting to waver back to soil again because of him.

Dave Chapman 43:27
Well, and it’s not just good yields and great flavor; it’s also astonishing resistance, not just to disease but to insects.

Dan Barber 43:38
Insects. It’s unbelievable.

Dave Chapman 43:39
Down there, his neighbors five miles away are spraying every five days, prophylactically, because otherwise they will get wiped out. Hugh and Lisa haven’t sprayed anything in years. The same insects are there; it’s just that they never become a problem.

Dan Barber 43:57
Right. They never become very predominant.

Dave Chapman 44:02
Occasionally, something will surge up and he’ll be scared. If he talks to the county agent, they say, “You need to spray.” He goes, “I can’t do that. I’m organic.” They go, “Well, you better find something else to do.” He’s seen it happen over and over – that this balance is there, and it’s getting better with time. The longer he’s in with his perennial crops.

Dan Barber 44:27
Exactly. There you are. There’s the improvement of the ecological functioning, the resilience, and the strength. It’s just astounding. Can you imagine if we actually invested some money in that kind of research?

Dave Chapman 44:43
Amazing. When you consider how much money we invest in the wrong research…

Dan Barber 44:47
For 60 years, how much money has gone into the other thing? No wonder everyone has a solution because that’s all they know. You don’t have to be a hippie-dippie person to believe in the fact that we are just underserved in science. That right there is a great example of what’s possible. It really hurts when you think about it and what’s there. They really are amazing.

Dave Chapman 45:12
Even if we just got 7% of the USDA research budget for organic because 7% of the food sold, imagine what that would be.

Dan Barber 45:22
Amazing. You’re right, because the genetics on those things are not… There’s another layer to the astounding. It’s that the genetics of what he’s growing are not grown in an organic environment. He’s taking conventional genetics and throwing them in. That’s like you and me being thrown into a fight with one hand tied behind our back. That’s just incredible. Again, that says how strong that environment is. It’s just amazing.

Dave Chapman 45:55
Before we leave taste, is there anything else…? Oh, just one thing that’s interesting about that project. You had a tasting. Hugh brought up blueberries for your team to taste.

Dan Barber 46:07
Yeah. Hands down, he won. That versus the hydroponic is really… That’s what I want all the cooks to taste. We were unanimous – twice. We had two tastings. It’s very easy to tell when it’s side by side.

Dan Barber 46:20
When it’s not side by side, I don’t know. You get confused when it’s not side by side. You can be convinced of a lot of things. You get affected by the environment. You’re with friends, you’re with family serving blueberries, like, “Oh, it’s okay.” But, boy, you put it side by side, I wouldn’t feed the hydroponics to my family.

Dave Chapman 46:10
That was great. Now the next step is to test those same batches, which are now frozen, for nutrition.

Dan Barber 46:46
I’m excited to see where that goes. Dr. Lee actually just wrote me, so I have to tell Hugh that we’re on our way there. It’s very exciting. I want to get Stefan Van Vliet involved too, and I have a call with him.

Dave Chapman 46:59
Great. I’m very excited about this because if we see that there’s an alignment between the nutritional testing and the taste testing of these very refined palates…

Dan Barber 46:59
Yeah. We got it. I know.

Dave Chapman 47:02
It’s good. We’ll do some testing for pesticide residues too.

Dan Barber 47:18
I can’t wait because that’s going to be a good thing.

Dave Chapman 47:20
I know. Would you rather have the one that tastes best that has no pesticide residues…?

Dan Barber 47:24
Yeah, that’s the big one. I’m so excited. You’re doing God’s work, Dave.

Dave Chapman 47:29
Before you go, this is it, I promise. Joan Gussow, our dear friend, died this year. You’re speaking tomorrow, but I wonder if you’d speak right now. Not everybody knows who Joan was, of course. She really, really was significant in my mind. She was the first in many places to say it… I think it was Michael Pollan who said, “Every time I think I came up with a pretty good idea, Joan had already said it.”

Dan Barber 47:58
Yeah. I couldn’t say that more strongly. For me, personally, what you just saw today – and I’m going to say, for those who didn’t understand where you were – you were a part of chefs and farmers showing and tasting for the outside world.

Dan Barber 48:16
The experiments that we’re doing further the environmental enrichment of this place and the farmer’s pocketbook by giving an economy, and the cooks by getting excited around an idea that’s important to farmers and creates a food culture around it for healthfulness.

Dan Barber 48:33
I think, as you saw, almost every table had a nutrition analysis of what we were doing. We’re bringing in a lot of sciences to get that, Stefan Van Vliet being one of them, but we wanted to prove that what we’re tasting is at the highest level, but also the nutrition follows. Dave, it has been the through line – always consistent, same.

Dan Barber 48:50
Now, what I just said, what you just looked at, is really an ode to Joan. That was her idea, and we said it earlier, and it’s worth repeating over and over: the correspondence between good food that’s good for you and grown in the right way and improves an environmental niche is truly healthy food.

Dan Barber 49:15
She was saying that in the 1970s. I feel like we are just waking up to that – but not yet – because, as you said, people are leaving that out of the definition. Joan’s wisdom – as much as I think, when I read these odes to Joan after she died – a lot of it was, “Joan was saying this thing for a long time,” and only now are people recognizing it, actually.

Dan Barber 49:38
I think Joan’s wisdom is going to become even more important, prevalent, and acknowledged 20 years from now. Here I am, back to our 20-year conversation from now. I think she will be looked back on the way we look back on Sir Albert Howard, actually. I really believe that. Sir Albert Howard wasn’t Sir Albert Howard till many, many years later.

Dan Barber 49:58
He’s sort of the godfather of organic. I think she’s going to be the godmother of this idea that organic food and nutrition have to be at the same nexus. It’s a very powerful idea. Intuitively, you could say, “Well, we already understand that,” but we don’t.

Dan Barber 50:16
We need a wholesale re-evaluation of what healthy food is, and it has to start with soil, and she nailed it. She was the best influence on me. By the way, she was the original consultant for this project. I don’t know if you knew that.

Dan Barber 50:35
No, I didn’t.

Dan Barber 50:36
Her, Michael, and Eliot. She was part of the brilliant “fertile dozen,” we called them. What she said absolutely affected me greatly. I’m the beneficiary of that wisdom. As you can see, so are my cooks.

Dave Chapman 50:54
Yeah. So are we all. All right. Dan, thank you so much.

Dan Barber 50:57
Thank you. Man, it was great talking to you. I love talking to you, Dave.