Dan Barber’s Quest for Flavor

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Support for this show comes from Pure Leaf Iced Tea.

When you find yourself in the afternoon slump, you need the right thing to make you bounce back.

You need Pure Leaf Iced Tea.

It's real brewed tea made in a variety of bold flavors with just the right amount of naturally occurring caffeine.

You're left feeling refreshed and revitalized so you can be ready to take on what's next.

The next time you need to hit the reset button, grab a Pure Leaf Iced Tea.

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Hello and welcome to Gastropod, the podcast where we look at food through the lens of science and history.

I'm Nicola Twilley and I'm Cynthia Graeber and we are your intrepid hosts.

This week we're doing something a little different.

We're spending the entire episode with just one person.

To get a delicious carrot on your plate is to support the right kind of soil.

That was Dan Barber.

He's a chef.

And not just any chef.

The James Beard Foundation named him the top chef in America in 2009.

And that same year, Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

And those accolades haven't left him sitting pretty, lazily enjoying all the attention coming his way.

Far from it.

He just came out with a new book.

It's called The Third Plate.

And we read it.

And we could not stop talking about it.

Right, because it's packed with really interesting and inspiring ideas, and it's also pretty thought-provoking and even controversial in places.

So we decided we had to talk with him.

And when you're done listening to this episode, you'll probably be itching to read it for yourself.

Fortunately, we have a signed copy to give away to one lucky listener.

We'll let you know more about that later on.

Also, just in case you are wondering where all that science and history we promised you has gone, don't panic.

We've got you covered.

Even though we're only talking to one person this week, our conversation breaks the idea of the third plate into into three.

How convenient.

Yes, exactly.

First, we talk about the historical connection between ecosystem and cuisine and examples of where that works and where it is broken down.

And then we get into the science and the relationship between soil health and nutrient density.

And then we end up with a look at the future of plant breeding for maximum flavor.

So let's get started.

That wasn't Dan Barber.

Right, yes.

Those were turkeys.

Jeff Mayno, who is my husband, grabbed that on his iPhone while we were chatting with Dan Barber.

We didn't even ask him to.

I think he's got a bright future as a radio producer.

I knew I married him for a reason.

His iPhone recording skills, how sweet.

Anyway, Jeff got close to turkeys because Blue Hill at Stone Barnes, that's Dan Barber's restaurant, it's surrounded by a farm.

There are fields and greenhouses and beehives and chicken coops and of course turkeys, and they're all part of Stone Barnes Center for Food and Agriculture.

They grow a lot of the food that Dan serves at the restaurant.

It goes way beyond farm to table.

It's more like tables in a farm.

That's interesting that you mentioned that, Cynthia, because going beyond farm to table is one of the central themes of the book.

And hold that thought.

We will be coming back to that.

Hello, I'm so sorry.

Hi.

Like, I'm embarrassed.

We're early.

It's fine.

Okay, how are you?

Here's Dan when we were first setting up and chatting.

Dan was kind enough to be with us before we'd released even one episode.

Even before we had a name for our baby podcast.

I hear you're launching a very exciting

podcast thing.

I don't know what.

We're gonna use that as our tagline.

A very exciting podcast thing.

That's right.

Star chef Dan Barber thinks our podcast is, quote, very exciting.

It's our first celebrity endorsement.

So exciting.

Anyway, we're sitting there in Blue Hill looking out on this completely gorgeous landscape.

But a lot of the book takes place in another equally stunning landscape, but in Spain.

The De Gesa is a man-made savanna in southwestern Spain that is 2,000 years old and about the size of Massachusetts.

It's an enormous area that has become famous for its rightfully famous culinary product, the famous, I say famous a couple of times here because you can't exaggerate the Jamon Imbérico pigs and the Jamon Iberico ham that is produced from this ecosystem.

This is actually 100% true.

If you have not yet tasted this Jamon Iberico and you're not a vegetarian or keeping kosher, of course, then you need to run, not walk to your nearest deli, grocery store, or even Costco.

You will experience what I can honestly only really describe as a taste orgasm.

And the taste is, in fact, out of this world, and the price is too, of course.

But it wasn't actually this super ham that brought Dan to the Spanish De Gesa.

I actually went to Deja because I was in search of this natural fattening of a goose liver.

So I came at this through many, many doors here, but I ended up realizing the extent of the agriculture ecosystem included cork production and included vegetable production and included grain production and with its intense forestry included wild products and mushrooms and then there was a whole cork industry which actually supplies most of the cork that we find in wine bottles in the world.

What I discovered through these visits to the De Gesa and getting to know its history and its agriculture products is that the brilliance and health of the system was really about how you could not covet or support particular products.

And that, when I say could not, I mean the culture and the cuisine, which is really what came out of this research, is the cuisine dictated a kind of pattern of eating.

If you take that further, it kind of dictated the culture and who you were to be a Spaniard from the extra Maduro region of Spain, which is where the De Gesa is located.

And by that I mean that the traditions and the patterns of eating, the cuisine that has developed over these thousands of years, is there to support the landscape.

And to support the landscape means diversifying and supporting all the products of the De Gesa.

So while ham is an incredibly important part of the harvesting from this area and I would argue one of the more delicious parts of the harvesting, it is not the only product and the cuisine of extremadura forces you to enjoy and support the entirety of the landscape.

And that's part of the reason that we're still talking about the De Gesa as an ecological model, and we're still talking about and pointing to a cuisine of extra madora.

I mean, that is the true definition of sustainability, is that it's lasted for thousands of years.

And so, what this kind of system does not allow you to do is to do the kind of thing that I did for many, many, many years as a chef, which is decide which products at my local farmer's market that I want to cook with.

So, just to reiterate, he is saying that the locals can't be like, wow, we have the most delicious ham in the world.

Even though, to be completely fair, they do.

Sure, but historically, they haven't been able to say, hey, we'll eat that ham every day.

And, you know, maybe we'll get everything else we want from the folks on the coast.

They've had to eat from the entire ecosystem because you need that whole ecosystem to work to get the ham in the first place.

Okay, so, Nikki, remember how I told you to hold that thought about going beyond farm to table?

Well, here is where one of the premier farm to table chefs in the country, maybe even in the world, he literally has tables in the middle of a farm.

He now tells us that farm to table is actually not all it's cracked up to be.

I want to be careful to not get negative about the farm to table move.

It's been a very important movement and it's raised a lot of consciousness and

certainly started a conversation between chefs and farmers and been very educational.

But the problem is when you engage in this connection with farmers at farmers' markets or through CSAs or any of the other ways that we now increasingly engage with local farmers, but we do it in a way where the chef or the eater decides how they're going to engage.

In other words, they decide what they want to cook with and how much of it they want to cook with, and that becomes part of their everyday diet.

That kind of system,

I realized through my research in the De Gesa, is not a system that's truly sustainable for the future of any ecology or culture.

And I would argue the same is true for us.

So when Dan said this, it made me think about that Wendell Berry quote, Cynthia.

You know the one?

Eating is an agricultural act?

Sure.

So when I first heard that, it was a really big mind shift to think of my plate as directly connected to miles and miles of fields.

But what Dan is saying is even crazier, that eating is actually an act of ecosystem design.

So your plate is a tool for designing an entire ecosystem.

And what's interesting about that is that it's really specific to where you're from.

Exactly.

He's saying a cuisine should exist at the scale of an ecosystem rather than an entire country.

America, unfortunately, looks at some of these great cuisines like French cuisine and says one definition for French cuisine or one definition for Italian cuisine.

Well, it's crazy as you look at it closely.

It's just hundreds, regional.

And Italy

fits in the state of California.

And yet look at how many micro-cuisines represent Italy.

And yet we seem to think that we could have in this country one cuisine or one diet that we can begin to understand what the United States is about through

one cooking style.

Well, that's preposterous.

Of course, we need to.

And there's a real opportunity.

There's an opportunity in all of these micro-regions to create mini-de Gesas, I guess, that truly reflect the landscape and then empower it and make it healthier for the future.

That's very exciting actually to talk about in that context.

It's very exciting because that hasn't been done.

I don't know.

I was just in California and I pissed off a group of people in LA because

I don't know, I was tired, but someone was talking about California cuisine.

And I just turned, I was like, what is California cuisine?

I don't know what that is.

Really, what is it?

And she's got really, the whole crowd, I mean, turned on me.

But I like, I must have pointed out someone who was popular in the group.

I don't know.

It was a large crowd, but I really, like, I felt like the wrath of California, like coming out of the world.

There is nothing like the wrath of California when it comes to food.

Seriously, I guess we just lost Alice Waters.

No, Alice, please come back.

We love you.

Don't stop listening, Alice.

I'm a huge fan.

But actually, I think this is one of the most exciting ideas I've heard in a while.

If you're a chef, or even if you sometimes daydream about being one, this idea that we actually need to get out there and invent all these different cuisines for our various ecosystems, It's super inspiring.

This is something I think about a lot.

There was a recent study showing that beef uses dramatically, like crazy dramatically, more land, water, and resources than other protein like pork, chicken, or dairy.

I think that study is really important.

But, you know, I couldn't help thinking about this on a smaller ecosystem approach.

So, like, here in New England, there are rocky hills that aren't necessarily great for farming plants, but seem to be good for cattle.

So, maybe, I mean, I haven't run the numbers, but maybe cattle is a great use of some of the the land here in New England.

It just seems that sweeping statements about our cuisines might not be as useful if we're talking about what would theoretically work best in a particular niche ecosystem.

But of course, as a country, we're not there yet.

Right.

And also, so here's my question.

I'm all super excited about this vision of inventing new cuisines that will reflect and support all the different ecosystems in the United States.

But here's what I couldn't help wondering while I was reading Dan's book.

Why do Spain and Italy and France have them already?

And yet, it seems like we don't.

What's up with that?

Yeah, I was thinking about this, too, during our interview.

I imagine those kinds of ecosystem cuisines did exist here before the Europeans came, and then natives died off from disease and war, and Europeans imposed their own crops.

I guess it ties back to our last episode, actually, when we discussed Hilary Rosner's article in Wired, the one about the scientists who were trying to domesticate wild edible plants in North America.

Mm-hmm.

Because the Europeans just showed up and basically ignored the food that already grew here.

I don't know as much about what happened here in the U.S., but I actually did a story on this in the Andes in Peru.

It's a pretty remote region.

So the locals held out longer and still farmed native crops.

But eventually the Spanish crops won out over local ones, and Spanish foods and farming methods were imposed on the landscape.

And this has led to a decline in the very systems and crops that work together so incredibly well there.

You know, and I think the same thing happened in Australia, too.

In all of these cases, the colonizers just imported their own cuisine onto an alien landscape.

There's another thing Dan pointed out to us.

Here in the U.S., the European settlers simply had it too good, right?

The soil here in the U.S.

is super fertile, and it's a big country.

They could use up one area and then move on to the next.

We were never forced into the kind of negotiations that the farmers of the De Gesa were forced into.

And what the story of the De Gesa, the story of really any cuisine, is that

when you look at it closely, is that these were peasants in all cases, whether we're talking about

French cuisine or Italian cuisine or the thousands of

southern Chinese cuisines alone or tens of thousands of India, really.

I mean, you're looking at micro-negotiations with the landscape that peasants were just trying to eke out what can the landscape provide and how can we make what it provides nutritious?

delicious, how can it last through the winter?

All the other things you have to figure out in your own particular ecology.

But But those cuisines evolved out of those negotiations, and they're the truest in the word of the sensibility term

because we're still talking about them today.

And what could be more sustainable in something that lasts thousands of years?

That actually is just like in the Andes.

The locals were able to eke out what the landscape could provide in a very tough, high, steep region.

And I mean high.

I had some serious problems with altitude there.

But they raised quinoa and potatoes and guinea pigs and alpaca.

It certainly doesn't seem optimal for farming, but it helped feed the entire Incan empire.

And that's also like the De Gesa.

It's a really poor region of Spain, not what you'd think of as a fertile agricultural landscape.

But it works.

And this is what he's talking about, ecosystem cuisines.

So actually, there was one example in Dan's book from American History.

I was surprised by this, but it's actually southern cooking.

More specifically, it's the rice-based cuisine that grew up in the pre-Civil War South.

This is a cuisine that food historians call the Carolina Rice Kitchen.

I became fascinated with the Carolina Rice Kitchen for a lot of reasons, but to me

here's an example of failing soils, a time in our history where we had these

soil crisis and I didn't even know we had a soil crisis.

We had a real soil crisis and it was a real threat to the country because how are you going to feed a growing population in a place that has rainfall and great soils?

I mean it just fast disappeared.

And so most farmers dropped their plows and moved out west and plowed up the prairie.

I mean, that's the, we talk about manifest destiny.

That's really the Kickstarter for this, is like looking for farmland, virgin farmland that had fertility.

It was a search for soil fertility.

It's so funny you can reduce it to that.

And of course, it's more complicated.

And our government was, with the Homestag and all these other government incentives, were encouraging it.

But a lot of it was like, it was

a run from soils that were not providing harvests.

So, okay, wait a second.

When Dan said this, my mind immediately went to images of the Dust Bowl.

But he's not talking about the 1920s.

He's talking about a century earlier.

And I had never heard of any great soil crisis in the 1820s.

Yeah, me either.

So, I mean, you know how I am, right?

I wanted to learn more, and Jeff had this book called Dirt at Home.

It's by an earth sciences professor called David Montgomery.

And I flipped through it, and of course, it has an entire chapter on the soil crisis of the 1820s.

Now, I'm super curious, too.

What was in it?

What did it say?

Well, okay, so first of all, this was a really big deal at the time, despite the fact that neither of us have ever heard of it.

In the newspapers, in political speeches, in books, there are all these predictions about a looming agricultural apocalypse.

Wow.

Yeah, due to the exhausted soil.

And European tourists were writing letters home using phrases like environmental devastation.

They could not believe how careless American farmers were with their soil, particularly down in the south on the tobacco plantations.

So, I never heard about that in school.

What was different here?

Why were Americans not taking care of the soil?

Well, so part of it, and particularly in the south, is that the entire economy relied on tobacco as a cash crop for export.

And so, there was no diversity and none of the rotations that could put fertility back in the soil.

And tobacco is really hard on the land.

Okay.

And then the other part of it is that, of course, all those southern plantation owners had slaves, and so they had slave labor to clear new land as soon as the old soil was exhausted.

And so they could just, you know, up and move on and let that worn-out topsoil blow away.

You know, what's really crazy, though, is that David Montgomery actually traces the origins of the Civil War to the South's eroded, exhausted soil.

And not slavery.

Well, yeah, I mean, that's part of it, obviously.

But his argument is basically that the South style of agriculture erodes the soil, right?

And that's a big part of what made westward expansion necessary in the first place.

And one of the main arguments between the South and the North that preceded the Civil War is whether slavery would be legal in these new western territories.

And of course, the southern states wanted it to be legal because they relied on slave labor for their particular style of tobacco plantation agriculture.

They needed that slave labor to clear the land whenever they exhausted it.

And so they had to fight to keep slavery legal in the West, otherwise their entire economy would have collapsed.

I admit that probably like for most of our listeners, this whole idea of the Civil War being in part about soil is totally new to me.

And like you said, it's kind of crazy to think about.

Okay, so we left Dan where he was describing folks moving out west to more fertile soils, but not everyone moved out west.

There were still plenty of people left in the South dealing with all this poor soil, and they still had to eat.

And so the people were left behind, largely plantation owners and slaves who had a tradition of negotiating the land quite well in North Africa and seeds that could work in depleted soils.

And so it was this moment of intense experimentation.

That's where the beans come from.

And

this iconic dish Hop and John.

It's like, I didn't understand Hop and John.

I mean, before Hop and John, it was rice, rice, rice cow and rice kitchen was literally breakfast, lunch, and dinner, rice all the way.

And so they introduced beans into the rotations to get the nitrogen that gave you the rice.

So you have a dish that has beans and rice, and then you have the collard greens because it desalinates the soil, and you have this smattering of pork because you can run the pigs in the lush forest and you have free pigs.

Well, that's a dish that puts it all together.

And then you extrapolate that into a cuisine.

You start to see that's a very nice negotiation, actually, because it's delicious.

None of this works unless it's delicious.

But it really supports bringing back soil fertility, which is what happened.

And I think it's a stunning example of what's possible.

That's a a De Gesa, too,

in a different climate.

Now, you might be thinking that's a historical example.

It's not happening today.

Right, the South today is less Carolina rice kitchen and more barbecue and waffle houses and cooking ham and Coca-Cola.

People cook ham and Coca-Cola?

Oh, they do.

And it is delicious.

But even so, it's hardly a De Gesa-like cuisine.

But all is not lost.

There are people applying this De Gesa-like thinking to cuisine and the landscape in America today.

In the book, Dan describes how Glenn Roberts, he's founder of Anson Mills, which is the company behind the grits at many a trendy brunch spot.

So Glenn Roberts has worked to revive the Carolina rice kitchen, not just the cuisine, but the entire ecosystem that supported it.

And Dan also told us about an example closer to home.

This was an experience he had, like that first trip to the De Gesa, that was really one of the inspirations for the entire book.

It involves a guy called Klas Martins.

He's a grain farmer in upstate New York.

And the way I sort of got into this book was I was excited to support his farm because I loved his farming philosophy as I heard of it, but I was really interested in wheat for the restaurant.

I wanted local flour on my menu.

And so I started buying his local flour, local wheat, and I started making these beautiful breads out of this Emer wheat that he was growing.

And it was fantastic.

And diners loved it.

And people wanted to sell their firstborn for a second slice.

This stuff was really, really delicious.

And so that's why I was like, okay, I'm going to write this book where I look at ingredients like his wheat and others and go back and figure out a recipe for how was it grown and or how was something raised and talk about that recipe.

And when I got to the first day of standing in the middle of his 2,000 acres, I realized that, well, I didn't see any wheat.

I saw a lot of other crops, millets and buckwheats and barleys and oats and then cover crops and crops like leguminous crops, beans and whatnot.

And I realized that I was thinking about this in the wrong way because here I was raising the farm table flag and supporting his wheat but not supporting any of the other suite of crops that were going to support soil fertility and in supporting the soil fertility I was really he was really trying to get the fertility correct to grow the wheat so how could I how could I support the wheat without growing without supporting all the other things that he was growing to get me the wheat that I coveted.

That was a big moment for me and it helped me understand that EJSA almost immediately, somewhat immediately, I mean, took several visits

and to understand what everything was being grown.

In the end, the lesson was sort of the same, which is like you cannot decide, which has become sort of this American right.

for our diets or for what we have for dinner.

We decide what we want and then we demand that the land produce it, where in fact it should really work the other way around.

So I was treating Klaus's farm, his ecosystem, in the wrong way, although he wasn't complaining to me, he was bringing me to see it.

And when I saw it, I realized, God, for a guy who's this champion of these kind of local farmers, and for someone who has a restaurant in the middle of a farm, and for someone who owns a family farm, I own a dairy farm.

The nuts and bolts of farming, in this case, escaped me.

And he wasn't selling any of the crops I was looking at, any of those lowly grain crops that were soil supporting, and any of the leguminous crops that were great for the fertility, any of the cover crops, he was essentially turning them either into the soil or making them into bag feed.

And he was losing money.

He loses money on all of these crops.

So I decided then I needed to change my approach, my cooking, and figure out a way to cook with this whole farm and still enjoy the wheat, but support the crops that support the wheat.

And that's very much what the whole De Gesa is all about.

But Cynthia, here's the thing.

Okay.

All the historical examples we've been talking about, where a cuisine evolves to support an ecosystem, like the Spanish de Jeso or the Carolina Rice Kitchen, they all have one important thing in common.

They all evolved in situations where there were massive constraints.

It's not even just the bad soil.

It's that you couldn't give up on your bad soil and buy food from somewhere else instead because you were poor and the place you lived was too remote.

But those constraints really don't exist in the U.S.

anymore.

Farmers can add fertilizer to poor soil, and in New York it's cheaper to buy veggies from California than from upstate.

And then we move around a lot more than those historical people did, too, so we don't have that lifelong relationship between the landscape we live in and the food we grew up eating.

So, say, even if I had grown up eating some sort of local Maryland cuisine, now I live in Boston.

So, how can we really have an ecosystem cuisine today here in the U.S.?

I mean, I want to get excited about this opportunity to go out and create millions of micro-local cuisines in these delicate negotiations with the American landscape that Dan describes so beautifully.

But we have the interstate system and we have container ships and we have Walmart.

I know, I know, I know.

Take a deep breath.

It's true, those historical forces that created the ecosystem cuisines in the past are mostly gone, right?

It's definitely a challenge, especially for people as skeptical as we are.

I've had those same thoughts.

I mean, I go to the farmer's market.

How do I know which crops farmers are planting to help their soils be richer and healthier?

But Dan did have two ideas for how to make it work.

One has to do with the trendsetting power of chefs, which we'll come back to, and the other has to do with deliciousness and the science behind it.

Aha, here comes the science part.

Exactly.

Not that there's not science in the whole idea of crop rotations and ecosystems, but for Dan, one of the things that just might make this whole ecosystem cuisine idea catch on is that it is actually more delicious and nutritious.

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To get a delicious carrot on your plate is is to support the right kind of soil.

You can't have a great tasting carrot and bad ecological functioning, ultimately, and bad soil.

And generally, if that carrot is truly delicious, it's nutritious.

I mean, it has flavonoids, it has nutrient density, otherwise, that's what you're tasting.

And so, through great flavor, and I'm not talking about ice cream, of course, I'm talking about true, truly great flavor, the depth of flavor that chefs are always pursuing.

I mean, hell, what are we without that?

You know, what are we?

Not a lot.

I want to go back to something you said a little bit earlier because I'd really like to get into a little bit of the science of this and the science of what makes something taste good.

Can you talk a little bit about that complexity?

And I remember in the book as well, you mentioned the idea of persistence and of flavor and how that also relates to things.

It's funny you bring that up because that's one of my favorite quotes, I think, from the Bose.

It was a conversation with this great winemaker named Randall Graham from California.

I remember that conversation.

I thought he hit it right because he talked about the definition of grape flavor, which is, you know, it's hard to define.

What the hell is, what are we tasting when we taste great flavor?

Is it different for different people?

And one way to baseline it is to say the persistence of it, which is to say, how long do you taste it for?

When you breathe out five minutes later, as one

might have the experience of

tasting a fine wine.

Not to be too haughty about the example, but a fine wine is a good example of like, hey, you can taste great red wine.

The persistence of that is several hours in some cases.

And Randall Graham's point is that it really is coming from fertility in the soil.

And he points to mycorrhizal associations, which are associations that happen on the root level.

I should jump in here because I did my big story for the UC Berkeley Food and Farming Fellowship, the one that Michael Pollen organized.

The one where in what will come to be seen as a pivotal moment in podcasting history, we met.

That exact one.

So I did my story on cutting-edge research on mycorrhizal fungi.

That's what he's referring to when he says mycorrhizal associations.

They are these microscopic creatures that live on and in plant roots.

They're one of many millions of creatures that live on or around plants.

You'll hear lots more about them next month, and they help plants access nutrients in the soil.

It seemed very clear to me that the healthier the soil community around a root of a plant, the more chance you had to experience this persistence.

And I look, from my own experience, I'm 100% sure that's right.

You talk to the best soil scientists in the world, and you get some scientists very careful with this.

Because, as one scientist said to me, I talked to him throughout this book, and sort of towards the end, he said, you know, you're sounding more and more mystified, and that's telling me you're getting closer and closer to the truth, which is we don't know what makes great flavor out of great soil.

We really cannot pinpoint it, and there's a lot of disagreement around the mechanics of it.

But for sure, everyone agrees that the life of the soil,

whatever's happening in our subterranean inability,

one

soil scientist said we're subterranean impaired, and I think that's right.

In our impairment, one thing we do know is that a vibrant community gives you the opportunity, at least, for great flavor.

There's a lot of other variables, including above soil.

But for sure, if you're pursuing great flavor, you need to pursue a vibrant community below soil.

And so that's what I discovered in all of these farmers were farmers that were farming soil.

And they were essentially trying to get the best and most fertility into their soil and allowing nature to do its work from there.

This is an interesting question, this idea of soil fertility and the nutrient density of plants and how they taste and then how that affects our health.

Like Dan says, it really is right at the edge of what the science we have right now can even show.

There is research showing that the food we eat has fewer nutrients than it did even a few decades ago.

There's this one study done by a biochemistry professor at UT Austin.

He compared nutritional data for 43 different fruits and vegetables.

He started in 1950 and then compared the figures to the same crops nearly 50 years later in 1999.

And they found significant declines in a number of nutrients.

There was 38% less vitamin B2 on average, less vitamin C, less calcium, less iron, and it's all stuff we need.

And that's partly because plants have been bred to grow faster and bigger.

And to withstand long storage and refrigeration.

And also, we know that the soils have been depleted of nutrients.

I read a horrifying statistic that agricultural soils in the United States have been depleted of 85% of their minerals.

And we know anecdotally that our vegetables tend to have less flavor than they did in the past.

But here's the thing.

I haven't actually been able to find specific research about whether plants that have more intense flavors are likely more dense in nutrients.

I emailed an agronomist at the University of Massachusetts.

He's been studying nutrient differences in variety of plants raised in a variety of conditions.

He didn't know of any studies that tested nutrient density against flavor.

Any of our listeners know any?

But I'm going to go out on a limb and say it could make scientific sense.

Otherwise, plants are mostly water, right?

Right.

I mean, where else is flavor coming from?

I did find a citizen science project that is working with labs and university extension departments to test the connection between soil nutrients, vegetable nutrients, and also bricks, which measures sweetness, but they haven't published any results yet.

But are we missing something?

And if not, why doesn't this research exist?

Scientists, we want to hear from you.

Let us know.

Either way, it's a problem that we've kind of dumbed down our taste here in the U.S.

I ate an omelette recently.

It had tomatoes, mushrooms, and cheese, and almost no flavor, but it could have had so much flavor.

That is so depressing.

Such a waste of a meal.

There are only so many meals we get to eat over our lifetimes.

Ugh, yeah.

This is hardly surprising, but Dan also finds this decline of flavor in America a bit of a bummer.

Here he is describing the ways he thinks our current system of farming has harmed taste.

Well, the dumbing down of complexity.

I mean, bitter flavors are not in the industrial food system for good reason.

They don't sell, I guess.

I don't know.

That's a sort of easy one.

But yeah, this idea that we have, you know, lost several generations, I guess.

for truly great flavor, for recognizing and wanting to pursue great flavor is,

you know, is a little depressing, I guess.

Okay, so we need to add relearning how to appreciate these great, intense, complicated flavors onto our to-do list as well, alongside inventing all these new ecosystem cuisines.

No problem, that's all.

Aim low, Dan, why don't you?

But as you already pointed out, Cynthia, there's more to flavor than just supporting the soil.

Absolutely.

It's also directly connected to plant breeding and genetics.

And that is the third part of our conversation with Dan.

Here's his story about a breeder he met from Cornell.

I asked this breeder,

I cooked him a meal, and when he came in, I was just sort of joking around with him.

And I showed him the workaday squash, the butternut squash, the fine squash.

But I said, can you, you know, do something here, shrink the thing and make it like super delicious?

And five years later,

a lot of conversations in between, but that's what this gentleman, Mike Mazurik, who's a great, he's a cucubits breeder, and he's a fantastic squash breeder.

But he breeds cucumbers and melons and all sorts of things.

But the squash he ended up developing is yet unnamed.

We call it 898 squash.

We served it here this fall and winter and it's fantastic.

But it's been selected over the years for flavor, but it's also been selected for pest resistance for the farmer.

So what you have here is yet another example of the correspondence and the connection between grape flavor and a good agriculture system because here the farmer can apply less pesticides to the plant and get a very good harvest.

So we're not talking about looking back at some kind of idealistic idea of agriculture that works for a shaker village and makes the farmer no money and is completely elitist.

We're actually talking about very good yields that is super delicious.

I say super because squash is a super food.

This squash blows your mind on that definition.

I mean,

it's just in a whole nother universe.

I was so shocked at 8.98 squash, I roasted it and served it without salt, without pepper, without butter I wanted people just to taste this it's like it you just stand there in silence you guys can't believe it but that was that was just one

guy doing this part-time he wasn't even doing this you know he was involved in a million other things he was doing this kind of a hobby you know what I love about that particular example it is not an heirloom vegetable don't get me wrong I am the first in line for some heirloom tomatoes in the summer but we really don't need to be stuck in the past when it comes to flavor heirloom veggies do often taste great because they were actually bred for flavor, but plant breeders are still coming up with new varieties today.

They can help breed food that tastes better and it fits a landscape and combats pests.

And here is where Dan actually comes back to the idea of chefs as trendsetters and the role that chefs can have in creating an ecosystem cuisine, part of which is asking plant breeders to breed for flavor, not just yield.

But you know, I do agree with the idea that chefs can influence culinary trends, but, and I hate to be the voice of doom yet again.

That's okay, voice of doom away.

It is my natural tendency.

I'm not sure that chefs really can transform the entire way we eat as a culture.

I agree.

And that's actually what we told Dan, that we were a little cynical that chefs could make such a difference.

You know, I'm a bottom-up guy with like everything.

You know, it's come from the people and come up.

But I think what we're talking about,

not to sound Reagan Republican, but I think it is top-down in the sense that it trickles down to the rest of the culture.

Yeah, yeah.

But in this sense, I really think it might work because these ideas need to bleed into the culture.

To me, what we're talking about, or at least what I believe the third plate represents,

is this pattern of eating is a cuisine that represents a small land area and a food system or an ecological function for which you are supporting through your diet.

That's going to require more than the home cook to shoulder.

Not that they can't be a part of it, of course, they can and they should.

But I think chefs have this unique opportunity to curate the how you put this together

so that we stop celebrating or fetishizing heirloom or celebrating or fetishizing the one or two, three, four crops that we celebrate through the support of the farmer's market instead of looking at the connections and the pattern of eating.

So you're right, the vision

that we need for the future is very large, and a vision for the future of eating

requires a large vision and a complicated one, a daunting one.

But I think part of the process here is going to be a cultural shift, and chefs have a unique position to play here because we put the pieces together.

That's not to say that there isn't a role for government, a role for activists, a role for writers and people who are broadcasting the message even further.

But if we can look at restaurants and chefs as places where these things can come together in repeatable ways, we're talking about a landscape that can be supported.

You know, look, there's chefs that are doing this.

I'm not leading this.

You know, I am in many ways reflecting what is already happening out there.

You look at the great chefs of the world right now, Rene Redzepe

at Noma in Copenhagen.

What did he do?

He looked at

what is Viking cuisine.

That's what his base is.

What is Viking cuisine?

You know, it's herring, right?

But he tethered that and then built an entire menu that celebrates Copenhagen and Denmark.

I mean,

Scandinavia,

that's brilliant and true, really true, which is the other thing.

I mean, it's exaggerated, but it's in a modern context.

And he's transforming a landscape.

Not only is he transforming a landscape through his little restaurant, but the disciples that have worked for him, they're all opening restaurants.

And farmland is being farmed in a different way, in a different system.

Well, that's based based on one person who had a vision to do that.

The same thing's happening with Masibo Batura in Italy, the same thing's happening in some ways with Alex Attala in Sao Paulo.

Sean Brock in the South is doing it right.

I mean, so there are not just pockets of this happening, they're happening all over the world.

And that's the ticket, I think, to the future of food, that we needn't look at a gourmet chef or a high-end chef, a white tablecloth restaurant chef, whatever you want to call us, as elitist and removed from these kind of ideas, but actually critical to making the transition between

a farm-to-table movement and what we need for the future, which is something that is more connected and truly resilient.

And that's going to take a cultural shift.

But I don't know that it's in our lifetime.

I'm okay with that.

I mean, what is it?

Wes Jackson says if you're thinking about an idea that you can solve in your lifetime, you're not thinking big enough.

I really do love that idea.

So this is an interesting transformation for his idea of the role of a chef or what constitutes a success for him.

In the past, a chef would have been proud of a signature dish like molten chocolate cake.

Today, for Dan Barber, he has a different idea of what he wants to leave behind.

What can be his claim to fame as a chef?

But you're growing wheat here.

Yeah, Jack Algier.

Jack Algier is the farmer here at Stone Barnes, and he is growing wheat and triticale and barley and experimenting on about an acre

here for grains.

Barber wheat?

Are Are we?

Yeah, so barber wheat was this experiment with Steve Jones where he bred a new variety that I'm super excited about.

He's been selecting for flavor.

And barber wheat, I think, is going to go on the ground this fall and over winter, and then we'll have it next spring.

That's amazing.

I'm looking forward to trying it someday.

I think for a chef to have a variety of wheat named after you, that must be a pretty good

thing.

I don't need anything more.

As long as it tastes good.

Oh, I think we're both with him on that one.

Oh, we definitely are.

But Nikki, we have been talking and talking, and I feel like we've barely scratched the surface.

I hear you, but you know, when you and I first sat down to talk about this book before we interviewed Dan, I think we talked for like two hours straight.

Absolutely.

And the interview went on longer than this, too.

This is just the edited highlights.

And I mean, edited, this podcast was originally about twice as long.

You can think as now.

Yes.

But it does just go to show you how much Dan gave us to think about.

And his book has even more stories about landscapes and cuisines, and it takes you to New York and to the south and to Spain.

It has all these amazing stories about plant breeding and tuna ranching and bricks levels and more.

And we are pretty sure you are going to want to read it for yourself, if you haven't already.

So we got Dan to sign a special copy for us to give to one of our lovely listeners.

Email us at contact at gastropod.com with the subject line the third plate.

Or Dan Barber.

Or tuna ranching or whatever.

We'll figure it out and we'll choose one of you.

Or just go on gastropod.com and find the link link there.

Now, I jumped in earlier in the episode when Dan brought up microbes in the soil.

Because you're obsessed with microbes.

I am.

It's true.

Microbes are cool.

Anyway, this month you've heard science and culture and history all entwined on the plate.

But next month we are going to dive into some really cutting-edge approaches to microbes and soil science out in the field.

I will take all of you with me out onto the hot, humid, bright green tropical savanna in Colombia.

Wait, really?

You'll take me with you?

I've never been to Columbia.

Over the airwaves.

Fine.

I don't mind staying at home while you explore South America, really.

Thanks.

Here, have a listen.

Tell me what we want.

Oh,

I'm glad we got me boots.

And that's it for this episode.

Thanks to Dan Barber, an amazing chef and thinker and author of The Third Plate.

Really, couldn't he leave something for us to be good at?

Seriously.

Well, you know, he's not hosting a podcast.

At least not yet.

Thanks also to Irene Hamburger, the vice president of Blue Hill, who helped us connect with Dan, and to my friend Jake Barton, who created this super cool virtual grange, which is an online community for beginning farmers managed by Stone Barnes.

He was the one who originally introduced us to Dan.

And of course, thanks to your lovely husband, Jeff, of Building Blog Fame, who drove us up to Stone Barnes and then spent the afternoon recording turkeys for us.

As always, you can find us online at gastropod.com, follow us on Twitter at Gastropodcast, and email email us at contact at gastropod.com.

We'd love to hear from you.

And while you're there, sign up for our email list so you never miss an episode.

You can subscribe on iTunes or on your favorite podcasting app.

And here are two more things you can do.

If you like us, let them know on iTunes by rating the Gastropod podcast.

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And finally, we're new in this podcasting world, and we're still trying to reach listeners.

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And now we're doing math as well as science and history.

It is a full curriculum on this show.

Thanks for listening.

Till next time.

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