Dan Barber Quotes

#1. When you pursue great flavor, you also pursue great ecology.

Dan Barber

#2. If you look at the carrying capacity of agricultural areas throughout the world, their ecological habitats are changing. So I think we're looking at - in our lifetime - great collapses of food services.

Dan Barber

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

Dan Barber

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

Dan Barber

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

Dan Barber

#6. For the past 50 years, we've been fishing the seas like we clear-cut forests. It's hard to overstate the destruction. Ninety percent of large fish, the ones we love - the tunas, the halibuts, the salmons, swordfish - they've collapsed.

Dan Barber

#7. 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.

Dan Barber

#8. 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.

Dan Barber

#9. 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.

Dan Barber

#10. 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.

Dan Barber

#11. We're achieving better marbling and better flavor with old world wisdom that's been passed down for generations but we're still using technology.

Dan Barber

#12. There is no such thing as guilt-free eating.

Dan Barber

#13. Clean plates don't lie.

Dan Barber

#14. It takes fifteen pounds of wild fish to get you one pound of farm tuna. Not very sustainable. It doesn't taste very good either.

Dan Barber

#15. If you just think exclusively about what would be the best tasting or the most profitable, you're just not seeing the big picture.

Dan Barber

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

Dan Barber

#17. The greatest lesson came with the realization that good food cannot be reduced to single ingredients. It requires a web of relationships to support it.

Dan Barber

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

Dan Barber

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

Dan Barber

#20. Conventional agriculture has never succeeded in feeding the world, and it's never produced anything good to eat. For the future, we need to look toward alternatives.

Dan Barber

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

Dan Barber

#22. 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.

Dan Barber