The Third Plate

This week, my newsfeed had a trailer for a documentary that apparently blasts some of the leading environmental organizations for failure to rail against hamburgers. Several other headlines informed me that eating beef results in more greenhouse emissions than driving a car, apparently extrapolating from a study recently published in the journal Climatic Change. And Elizabeth Kolbert writes in the New Yorker of her week-long experiment with the trendy paleo diet and laments the damage so much meat eating could have on the climate.

Never in human history have we been presented with such an an abundance of food choices as at the average U.S. supermarket, and never before have we seen so much hand-wringing about what to eat. As Dan Barber reminds us in The Third Plate, only a few generations ago, human diets were largely restricted to what the local region produced. Cuisine and culture were intrinsically linked to place.

In recent years, the farm-to-table movement featuring prominent chefs such as Mr. Barber, has sought to reacquaint diners with the sources of their food. Farmers' markets have proliferated and the term"locavore" is in the dictionary. In my small town, several restaurants proudly list the nearby farms and producers contributing to their menus.

Yet the resulting "second plate" of farm-to-table goodness still closely resembles the "first plate" it aimed to replace, which at the American table is meat-centric and flanked by a limited supporting cast. Mr. Barber envisions a "third plate" representing a sort of nose-to-tail for the whole farm, incorporating and starring crops that currently may not be beloved, or even known, to diners but are important to the ecology of the land. Chefs, he says, can use their skills to create demand for these oft-discarded goodies, from the bycatch of tuna nets to the cover crops of wheat fields.

Few chefs are better positioned to expound on this than Mr. Barber, who incorporates a farm and educational center as part of his flagship restaurant north of New York City. Nearly all of his journeys to investigate spectacular foodstuffs result in an experimental planting or livestock introduction at the farm, and the mouth-watering prose in which he describes these experiments may have some readers vowing to never again cook polenta until they, too, can get their hands on some Eight Row Flint corn.

If this planet is to support 9 billion humans by mid-century without absolutely devastating every other species, we must get over our predilection to "eat high on the hog." Unfortunately, so many previous calls to mend our dietary ways -- whether the motive is to improve health, environment, economy or even mood -- have led many to equate virtuous eating with limitation. Mr. Barber, thankfully, is an immensely talented chef who refuses to sacrifice flavor for virtue, and he makes a convincing case (one I wish I could taste for myself at his restaurant) that such a compromise is unnecessary.

Now to size up a plot in my backyard for a patch of wheat.