Green Book Reviews: The Third Plate by Dan Barber

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

As a permaculturist, the main message of this book made complete sense to me. Dan Barber argues that, rather than continuing to follow our current diet and striving to produce that food more sustainably, we should instead look at what food we can produce while supporting the health of our soils and ecosystems and then learn to cook well with that. Happily, food that is produced by flourishing ecosystems is always more nutritious and tastes better too. 

The book is divided into four parts: soil, land, sea and seed. Having been vegetarian and then vegan for a number of years, I found the land and sea sections more difficult to read than those that focussed on soil and seed. In particular, I was quite disgusted when the author admitted that he had known about the animal welfare concerns around foie gras for some time but had carried on using it in his kitchen anyway, due to the exceptional taste. To me, no taste can justify what amounts to torturing an animal. However, most of the discussion around eating meat and fish felt more balanced. The author admits that we need to eat much less meat and that we should eat the whole animal, rather than wasting much of it. The farms he applauds all treat their animals much better than ‘conventional’ industrial agriculture, allowing them to live a more natural life. If some people are going to continue to eat meat, the farms he visits provide a good model for how those animals can be reared. 

The soil section fitted perfectly with what I have learnt through permaculture about how to care for the soil. It provided a useful reminder of the importance of rotations and covering the soil as much as possible. Healthy soil always produces tastier food, as well as giving plants more resistance to pests and diseases. The seed section looks in detail at plant breeding (not to be confused with genetic modification) and warns that we should not be obsessed with fixed, heritage varieties but rather we should continue to encourage plant diversity and breed new varieties of vegetables and grains that are better adapted to our changing climate and that taste better. With more and more seed companies focussing on F1 seeds (the first generation of a hybrid cross, bred to be highly uniform), this was a useful message for gardeners: we should all be seeking out open pollinated seeds. 

The one thing that really lets this book down is the length. It felt to me like the author had obscured his message by providing too many anecdotes and repeating some of his points several times, which can be exasperating for the reader. In a few chapters, he introduces so many people (and describes so many meals!) that I found I’d lost the thread several times. This book could have had more impact if it were shorter.