FEATURE
Put your money where your mouth is WORDS BY
NiNa RosNeR
late of food,’ answers award-winning chef and champion of the ‘farm-to-table’ movement, Dan Barber. Dan is renowned for his ethos of sustainable agriculture and cuisine, which runs through all of his writing and is the foundation upon which his restaurants are built. in his vision, our culture of cooking and eating must be totally transformed – moving away from the traditional ‘meat & 2 veg’ model that we’ve inherited, but that is no longer viable, and towards what he calls ‘the third plate’- a way of eating which seamlessly connects responsible farming and growing with delicious food. The third plate is basically a better way of eating – whichever way you look at it. Less than two years ago, i embarked upon a journey of inquiry into food: both its immediate effects on my own body but also the
economic and environmental implications of everything i bought and ate, where it came from and where it was going. The further i ventured down this path, the more determined i was to strip away the layers of the primordial act of eating. eating, this thing we enjoy so much, the thing we must all do to survive, is our most basic and candid interaction with the earth, the ground beneath us. it’s the stuff we’re made from and the stuff we return to. it’s something worth caring about — something worth investigating. The simple act of eating has developed into a complex industrial and economic process. While we still enjoy the celebration of food around a dinner table, the fundamental link between us and the crops — or indeed the creatures — we consume has largely been cut. We stroll up and down supermarket aisles, where a million people, production lines and layers of plastic stand in between us and our most basic necessity. at best, eating could be a grateful reception of whatever the land can provide. But above all it is now a commercial transaction – which by default means that we have expectations about what our food should look like, taste like, and how much of it should be available. in the supermarkets that satisfy these vast and immediate expectations ease and convenience are championed over quality and nourishment. Ready-made ingredients and meals, pre-packaged fruit and veg in uniform colours and shapes – they’re all so far removed from the reality of nature that they negate any need to question their origins. it’s hard to believe that packets upon packets of standardised and carefully selected carrots or mushrooms actually grew from the soil. similarly, meat –
46 CIBUS | may 2017