The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food – Dan Barber

Thoughts: I found this book in a little library and while it was a step in a new direction for me—I’ve read plenty of books on the environment and biodiversity, but almost none about food—I’m glad I came across it. The Third Plate is a pleasure to read, with lively anecdotes and a cast of colourful characters among the farmers and researchers he consulted in writing it. I came away from the book with a better understanding of the benefits and shortcomings of the world’s current food systems, and an adjusted mindset toward food, particularly ingredients that are varied and variable rather than standardized.

(The notes below are not a summary of the book, but rather raw notes - whatever I thought, at the time, might be worth remembering.)

Barber, Dan. 2014. The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food. Penguin Press.

Introduction

• 11: Books mentioned: Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America
• 20: John Muir: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”

Part I: Soil

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

• 34: Book mentioned: Peter Thompson’s Seeds, Sex & Civilization - claims that the world’s three most common grains—wheat, rice and corn—“provided the foundations for civilization”

Chapter 3

• 39-40: The Roller Mill, invented in the late 1800s, replaced the stone mill. Allowed the endosperm of a grain of wheat to be separated from its germ and bran. Flour ground in a Roller Mill had a longer shelf-life, since the nutrient-rich germ was removed rather than being ground in with the flour, meaning microbes didn’t have the nutrients they needed to grow in it.
• 41-42: Wes Jackson: “If you’re working on a problem you can solve in your own lifetime, you’re not thinking big enough”
• 42-43: perennial prairie wheat is tall and has an extensive root system. Modern/conventional wheat is short and has a much smaller/shallower root system.
• 44: John Deere, blacksmith and inventor in 1837 of the cast-steel plow
• 50: states in the US “wheatbelt” have become depopulated over the past century, beginning during the Dust Bowl and continuing into the 21st century, while most other US states have experienced population growth

Chapter 4

• 53: up until the middle of the 20th Century, little was written about weed control. One of the rare earlier mentions is in a book from the 1930s by Bernard Rademacher, who said “vigorous plant stands are the best means for eradicating weeds”
• 54-55: Barber, after Eliot Coleman, states that while conventional farming treats symptoms (e.g. the appearance of a pest), organic farming identifies and addresses underlying causes – argue that the best way to control pests is to make sure plants aren’t stressed, as healthy plants have robust defence systems against pests
• 57-58: different weeds can serve as indicators of imbalances in soil chemistry, e.g. Queen Anne’s Lace, chicory -> general low fertility, milkweed -> lack of zinc, wild garlic -> low sulfur, thistle -> soil too compacted, etc.

Chapter 5

• 76: book mentioned: Albert Howard’s An Agricultural Testiment - “became the bible for the organic movement”

Chapter 6

• 81: Brix (unit of measurement) measures the amount of sugars in the juice of a plant. Sometimes used as a surrogate measure for the amount of nutrients in a plant. (doing some quick googling, correlation between sugar content and nutrient content appears not to be straightforward)
• 87: phytonutrients (nutrients synthesized by plants) are largely responsible for a plant’s flavour. They’re largely produced as part of a plant’s immune system.
  • when insecticides, fungicides are used, they mean a plant doesn’t need to produce as many phytonutrients. “Some scientists suggest it’s one of the reasons organic food tastes better than conventional food.”
• 88: ecologist Frank Egler: “Nature is not more complex than we think, but more complex than we can think”
• 93: large organic operations are referred to by Eliot Coleman as “shallow organic” and by Michael Pollan as “industrial organic” - don’t use chemical fertilizers/pesticides, but grow crops in monocultures, tend to maximize for short-term profit rather than long-term soil health, etc.
• 95: 1942 study of soil health vs. draft rejection in Missouri, as the US entered WWII - men from areas with degraded soil were rejected at twice the rate as men from areas with more mineral-rich soil
• 95: biomass dilution: plants are bred/fertilized to grow bigger (effectively, maximizing for carbohydrate production), but with similar levels of other nutrients per plant. A person eating such plants has to eat more food to consume the same amount of non-carbohydrate nutrients.
  • cf. that veritasium video
  • 97: this may contribute to rising levels of obesity, as people have the urge to eat more in order to meet our nutrition requirements.

Part II: Land

Chapter 7

• 104-: to learn more about: Spanish dehesa - ecosystem and system of agriculture - savannah-like landscape of grasslands and oak trees
• 110: hybrid vigor: crosses of different breeds of animals; “yields healthier animals that grow faster and, if you’re lucky, taste much better than either of their parents”

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

• 137: examples of famous chefs in a time when most chefs worked in obscurity: Fernand Point, Auguste Escoffier, César Ritz
• 138: more names of chefs, associated with French nouvelle cuisine (reaction against "grande cuisine"): Paul Bocuse, Michel Guérard, Troisgros brothers, Alain Chapel
• 140: more names of chefs, who forged “modern, innovative, highly personal style[s] of cooking” in the 1980s and 1990s: Wolfgang Puck, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Daniel Boulud, David Bouley, Jean-Louis Palladin.

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

• 159-160: numerous studies have shown that animals that suffer, particularly in the last moments of their life, yield degraded meat.
• 165-166: the Spanish dehesa system of agriculture took its modern form with the rise of the wool market in the 1300s - uncultivated lands were brought under pasture, which led to forests being converted into grasslands. Over the following centuries, legal protections were set up to protect the dehesa’s grass and oak trees
• 174: cork harvested from dehesa oaks is used to make a significant proportion of the world’s wine corks
• 177: the biodiversity of the dehesa has been compared to that of tropical rainforests
  • j: Barber seems to be surprised by this, since it’s a semiarid region. But I thought other semiarid regions, like South Africa’s scrubland, are frequently biodiversity hotspots…

Chapter 13

Part III: Sea

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

• 230: many shellfish (e.g. most shrimp) are injected with boric acid, which preserves the seafood’s colour and makes it appear fresh

Chapter 17

• 235: some of the challenges/problems with fish farming:
  • tend to be located near the shore, i.e. where edge effects naturally lead to increased biodiversity. Thus, a significant tract of biodiverse seafloor is converted into a monoculture
  • high feed conversion ratio, and since feed usually comes from other species of fish caught in the wild, it tends to deplete the stocks of these fish
• 235: feed conversion ratio: the amount of feed necessary to effect a unit of weight gained in the animal being farmed.
• 239-240: mentioned: Rachel Carson’s The Edge of the Sea - one of several books she wrote about the ocean’s edge, before becoming famous for writing Silent Spring

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

• 260: Mentioned: Song for the Blue Ocean by Carl Safina, “the world’s supreme ocean authority”
• 266: biodynamic agriculture (j: I think this is more or less the same thing as permaculture), somewhat occult, treats farms as living organisms. According to a farmer, “Every good organic farmer follows the precepts of biodynamic agriculture, just shorn of the mysticism.”

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

• 297: done conventionally, farmed tuna doesn’t protect tuna stocks: most farmed tuna are caught as juveniles (removing them from the wild before they’ve had a chance to breed), fed in a farm, and then harvested when they’ve doubled in weight.

Chapter 23

• 309: picaresque - “there’s a tradition in Spanish literature of rascally characters—they do things like steal, cheat, and drink, but as long as they’re smart, they’re respected and given space to operate.”

Chapter 24

Part IV: Seed

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

• 339: Mentioned: Daniel Dennett’s book Breaking the Spell in which he argues that sweet foods aren’t inherently sweet—they’re just energy-rich. Our evolutionary past has equipped us with a preference for “sweet” foods because they contain lots of energy.
  • j: cf. sensory desktop/icons

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

• 358-359: landrace farming: an approach to agriculture where, in contrast to monocultures, intra- and inter-species diversity is encouraged. Tends to look disorganized, and is hard to process automatically, but requires fewer inputs and is more resistant to shocks like pests, droughts, etc.
• 360: hybrid vigor: only persists for a single generation. Farmers using hybridized seeds thus can’t expect the same yields if they collect seeds from one year’s crop and plant them the next, leading them to purchase seed from seed companies each year
• 363-364: Norman Borlaug bred wheat to triple its yield (when supplied with fertilizer), and crossed it with a dwarf variety so that wheat stems wouldn’t topple over with the weight of the seed heads. Similar strains developed for other crops, like rice that matured fast enough to be harvested twice a year.
  • “It is estimated that a billion lives were saved by Norman Borlaug’s work, which makes questioning the success of the Green Revolution complicated.”
• 365: mentioned: Cary Fowler and Patrick Mooney’s book Shattering: Food, Politics, and the Loss of Genetic Diversity, which notes that fertilizers and dwarf seeds tend to reinforce each other’s use: “The fertilizers made the new varieties possible. The new varieties made the fertilizers necessary.”
• 367: Vandana Shiva argues that while yields of single crops were increased by dwarf seed varieties etc., the increases are much less dramatic when you compare to biodiverse farms (e.g. landrace farms) where all of the biodiversity is utilized
• 369f: an example of unintended consequences: NGOs invested in Norman Borlaug’s work, hoping that reduced starvation would lead to reduced political instability. But dwarf crops led quickly to mechanization, which led to mass migrations into urban areas, creating large slums etc.

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Epilogue

• 446: Barber began the book thinking he’d trace the stories of several individual ingredients. “But 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.”