Dan Barber Quotes

#1. There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.

William James

#2. 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

#3. A baby smiles between fifty and seventy times a day, and a toddler approximately six hundred times, according to research. I'm sure some of us have asked ourselves where that smile goes. What robs us of it? - GOLDIE HAWN, 10 Mindful Minutes

Joseph Emet

#4. They wore their strange beauty like war paint.

Holly Black

#5. 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

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

Dan Barber

#7. You are what your deepest desire is. As is your desire, so is your intention. As is your intention, so is your will. As is your will, so is your deed. As is your deed, so is your destiny.

Upanishads

#8. 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

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

Dan Barber

#10. Clean plates don't lie.

Dan Barber

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

Dan Barber

#12. I regard the rights of men and women equal. In Love's fair realm, husband and wife are king and queen, sceptered and crowned alike, and seated on the self-same throne.

Robert Green Ingersoll

#13. You should stop and listen to yourselves sometimes. 'We're practically adults, let us run wild.' 'We're only kids, leave us alone.' ... You can't have it both ways.

Ally Carter

#14. 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

#15. Society is held together by our need; we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that without it we will be hurled into that void, within which, like the earth before the Word was spoken, the foundations of society are hidden.

James A. Baldwin

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

Dan Barber

#17. 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

#18. Power is the gem of necessity. Without observing power, identity remains undiscovered.

Lionel Suggs

#19. 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

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

Dan Barber

#21. 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

#22. Failing to plan is planning to fail

Alan Lakein

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

Dan Barber

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

Dan Barber

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

Dan Barber

#26. You wouldn't expect a cattle dealer to sit down at a grand piano and play it beautifully. That's my father.

Deirdre O'Kane

#27. I refuse to be part of a generation that celebrates the death of communism abroad with the loss of the American dream at home.

William J. Clinton

#28. Well, as a general rule, most women, before they've got 'em, present to their men smiling, agreeing faces. They hide their thoughts. You now, when you're feeling hateful, honey, you are hateful.

Harper Lee

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. Life is not an inconvenience to the work we dream of; it's the reason we do it in the first place. A calling does not compete with or even complement your life.

Jeff Goins

#33. 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

#34. 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

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

Dan Barber