Dan Barber Quotes

We need the humbleness and clarity to see that our food, while benefitting from technological advances, has benefitted even more from free ecological resources: Cheap energy, lots of water everywhere, and a stable climate.

It's a fallen world. We eat and sacrifice in the process.

I think all chefs who pursue great flavor have good ethics.

Vegetables deplete soil. They're extractive. If soil has a bank account, vegetables make the largest withdrawals.

I said, 'Don, what's sustainable about feeding chicken to fish?'

People complain that cities don't have fresh, sustainable food, but it's just not true.

Clean plates don't lie.

I'm not here to say I don't eat vegetables - I do, a lot of them - but, from a soil perspective, they're actually more costly than a cow grazing on grass.

The greenhouse is driven by three things: economy, flavor, ecology. Where ecology is what's being grown in this micro-ecology that can simultaneously thrive and better the soil/rotation, not just the flavor.

I'm not an environmentalist, or a doctor, or a nutritionist.

The history of food has never had a better biographer. Required reading for anyone who eats.

In the rush to industrialize farming, we've lost the understanding, implicit since the beginning of agriculture, that food is a process, a web of relationships, not an individual ingredient or commodity.

In food, issues that surround purchasing and that whole realm have a very political component and they branch into stories that can be really compelling. Just being on the farm, interacting with all these people in the industry, leads to personal narratives that can be used to make a larger point.