The chef-activist is now as much a part of the grassroots food movement as animal welfare groups and muckraking journalists. Jamie Oliver is one of the most vocal advocates of the United Kingdom's sugar tax. White House chef Sam Kass was one of the most effective surrogates for Michelle Obama and her Let's Move! campaign. Vegan Chloe Coscarelli used her 2010 win on the Food Network's Cupcake Wars to show that baked goods do not, in fact, require butter or heavy cream.
Perhaps most acclaimed is James Beard Award-winning Dan Barber, whose book "The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food" argues for a new vision of the American meal, in which grains and vegetables dominate and meat plays a supporting role. Yet at his restaurants, Blue Hill, in New York and Blue Hill at Stone Barns, north of the city, that's an expensive proposition: The tab is $188, plus tax and tip, for the bar tasting menu upstate.
Barber sat down with us last week at the New York Times food conference at Stone Barns. Here, condensed and edited for clarity, are his thoughts on what he has achieved, what remains to be done, and how serving the 1 percent can change food for everyone.
You call for big changes in the way we grow and eat food today. But restaurants like this are accessible to only a small segment of the population. How do you reconcile the two?
Yes, we serve a small segment, and in definitely an elitist, rarefied world. Our dishes, our food, our menu, the work that we’re doing here has to become a little bit more accessible or a little bit better understood by the people who are eating it. We could do a better job of that. And then, I think, ultimately that ends up trickling down into the mass markets.
Can you give examples of where you've seen that happen?
The trickle-down idea is that chefs at high-end restaurants can set a precedent and a culture that becomes infused into the everyday food culture. Look at sushi, or Greek yogurt, or quinoa. People think that sushi became popular because of sushi chefs. But actually sushi became popular because high-end chefs started serving raw fish in restaurants. As fishing and refrigeration became more advanced, the quality of the fish became staggeringly more predictable, and that’s when raw fish could be served on a consistent basis. So that’s the role, it seems to me. You end up on high, starting with these ideas that get co-opted and dumbed-down, not all of them for the bad.
The thing is, I don’t want to be remembered for that. I’m much more interested in what happens to the whey [discarded as a byproduct] when you make Greek yogurt. We’re heading into a world where hopefully you won’t enjoy your Greek yogurt without some of the whey in your diet, like the Greeks have done since the beginning of time. Whey is all over Greek cuisines, but we don’t do that in this country. That’s why whey from dairy farms is poisoning soils in upstate New York. Or what kind of complex rotational, ecological environment do you need to get certain kinds of quinoa to really express themselves? The question for me is, can we look at all the other aspects and not just one product?
What do you recommend for people who can’t afford to eat at Blue Hill but want to start to incorporate these principles into their diet?
I would just say, cook. Cooking is the greatest way to activate these ideas—and it’s the simplest, most pleasurable, and delicious. These kinds of ideas actualized into food are not expensive if you cook.