TTT Interviewee: Dan Barber Session #3 Interviewer: Judith Weinraub New York City Date: March 15, 2011 Q: This is Judith Weinraub. It is March 15, 2011, and I’m with Dan Barber at his restaurant in Greenwich Village. Good afternoon. Barber: Good afternoon. Hi. Q: Hi. I wanted to just follow up our conversation the other day by clarifying a couple of very disparate things. I know this is going to sound a little bit corny, but you mentioned that you didn’t cook fish ahead of time, as many restaurants do. I wondered how unusual that was and also if there were other techniques that you were careful to do that other restaurants might not bother with. Barber: I don’t think so. Most of the restaurants that I worked at either seared fish in advance or prepped it in a way that it falls under the definition of, like, precooking. Not all, but a lot. Some of the better restaurants I worked at in France didn’t. What I think I was saying was that David Bouley, when he opened up his restaurant and served two-hundred-people-plus a night, always cooked fish to order. From what I understand, he was one of the first ones to do very high-level cuisine at very high numbers, with a lot of concentration on fish, and do it in that way. So that was a revelation to me and very important. Q: It might be seared and what else by other places? Barber: Well, it depends. Shellfish is cooked ahead of time and reheated. Lobsters are cooked ahead of time and reheated. That’s most restaurants that you work in. Q: Really. Barber: Sure, sure. You don’t cook razor clams to order. When it comes in, you have to clean them and cut them. So they’re cooked ahead of time and then— Q: And then the timing is, I guess, very precise. Barber: The timing for the precooking should be very precise, yes. Q: As to other common practices that other restaurants might do that you don’t, are there other things? Barber: No, not really. Q: I wanted to ask you how the idea for the non-menu at Stone Barns developed. Barber: The menu for Stone Barns developed because we were so frustrated by the small and disparate amounts of vegetables and meats that were coming off the farm, that in order to put them on the menu, we would run out of them very quickly. So it happened one night in particular, where we were waiting for many weeks for one of our lamb deliveries, which had been delayed and delayed, and finally we got in one beautiful baby lamb that we were very excited about. We had been talking about it for weeks with the waiters. We put it on the menu. The waiters sold it in the first twenty minutes. We sold out of our baby lamb, and now people who had waited two months for a reservation now had to be told that the lamb that was on the menu actually wasn’t from Stone Barns, it was from another farm, another local farm and delicious lamb, but it wasn’t Stone Barns lamb. And the waiters had all been trained for this lamb. So it became very frustrating, and that was sort of a slew of stories similar to that. I felt like the confines of an à la carte menu just didn’t work for a farm. Q: How many people does the restaurant seat? Barber: It seats eighty-eight. Q: Just go through how it works now. You have this list of ingredients, and then what happens? Barber: We have a list of ingredients that we develop dishes from during the course of the day, and when the diner sits down to eat, they have a conversation with the captain and your waiter, and the conversation is something along the lines of what do you like to eat, find out more about why you’ve come to the farm and why you’ve come to the restaurant and all of that. For those people who have absolutely no interest in the farm or no interest in what we’re doing, very happy to serve you the steak and the stuff that just has no connection to what we’re growing. Those are fewer and fewer people, but there are some of them. They’re just as friendly and pleasant and great. They just don’t really come at this—they come at it because they’ve heard it’s a great restaurant and they want to be there, and they don’t want to talk about anything else. But then there are people like you, who would come to the farm and be really interested and want to know how something was grown and why it was picked and all the rest, and for that we have a lot of stories. Q: And there’s a standard price? Barber: Yes, it’s the same price. Q: It’s all the same, no matter— Barber: Yes. You choose between an eight-course or a five-course. Q: For the record, also I wanted to ask you—I mean, I think I know what they are, but your brother and sister-in-law’s names. Barber: David Barber and Laureen Barber. Q: Is Laureen still involved with the restaurant? Barber: Oh, yes, yes. She’s the designer. [Interruption] Q: Let’s continue along the themes of your writing and your what’s become activism about food and agricultural issues, the farming issues. What came first? Barber: What came first. I worked on the farm, so in that sense, maybe the consciousness. I don’t know about activism, though, because you call it activism. I think every chef who cooks with great ingredients, and those are most chefs that I know, are generally activists without calling themselves activists. Q: But you speak and you write, and you write about these issues very often, so that’s why I wondered. Barber: I appreciate that, and it’s true. The activist makes me sort of—I don’t like activists, really. Q: Even [unclear]. [laughs] Barber: Yes. I meet an activist, it’s like, I don’t want to have dinner with an activist. Q: I know what you mean. Okay. All right. Call it what you will. Barber: I think less than the writing and the speaking, although I hear you that there’s been a lot of that, it’s less that and more the canvas that I have to work on, which is from Mr. Rockefeller and Blue Hill Farm. So I’m working off of real farms that are real economies, that have real ecologies, that we have relationships with, and there are not many of those that are out there. There’s a lot of restaurants with connections to farmers, and that’s why I always say what I’m doing, I’m on this canvas where I can talk about these issues in an easier way, but I don’t believe that my connections to the farmers that supply us, from either Stone Barns or Blue Hill Farm, are any different than the relationships that I have with other farmers. Q: Oh, no, I certainly hear that. Barber: That’s why other chefs have those same relationships and can affect what those farmers are growing and can learn from what those farmers are growing in the same way. In fact, I have better relationships with some farmers in and around the Hudson Valley that I’ve learned a great deal from and perhaps that I’ve influenced a little bit. But they don’t have to be on your farm to— Q: No, I understand that. Barber: Well, most people assume that I have this kind of—the relationship even for our own property—my brother and I own Blue Hill Farm—even our own property, the farmer grows what he wants to grow, he sells it to us at a fair market value, and he sort of dictates what gets delivered. Now, that’s an interesting way to have a farmer on your farm. But those are things that all chefs are doing, which is why I sort of recoil at this idea that I’m kind of leading anything, because I’m speaking about what chefs are doing, which is leading a movement, and I believe that. Chefs are leading a movement, and I don’t think it’s driven by an ecological conscience, and I don’t think it’s driven by anything more than a pursuit of flavor. Q: Really. Barber: Yes. I know a lot of chefs who are really devoted to this cause, for sure, and have deep knowledge and passion for it, but I think overall, you poll chefs, it’s like people just take what’s the best flavor. What’s the best flavor is the flavor of a vegetable that’s picked at the right moment, that hasn’t traveled far enough, that was grown in the right soil. Their interest is in good flavor. If they’re interested in good flavor, I guess my contention is that you are then interested, by definition, in good environmental stewardship. You have to be, because you’re not going to get good flavor. And you’re interested in good energy use, because generally, food that’s grown with less energy-intensive inputs is better food. So all of these things line up. And food that’s grown in better soil is more nutritious because it has more flavor. Flavonoids is part of the carriers of nutrition. So all these things add up, and that’s why I believe as a chef or anyone who loves really good food, in the pursuit of good flavor you end up pursuing a lot of these environmental issues and nutrition issues and even community-justice issues, and a lot of things revolve around good flavor. So if you’re in pursuit of, like, this kind of hedonism, you are activating a social movement without really even knowing it. Q: Could you talk a little bit about food justice? Because I think a lot of people don’t get that. Barber: Yes, me neither. Q: In terms of what it means, how it works, how difficult it is to achieve. Barber: The one I was referring to is justice for the kind of workers who are involved in food production. There’s a lot of different ways to look at food justice, but people who are— Q: Well, that’s actually what I meant. Barber: Oh, it was. Okay. So the people who are producing our food are generally not the ones making money producing our food, certainly farm laborers, but even farmers, even big farmers. One of the great misconceptions of our food chain is that it’s the farmers, the bigger you get, the richer the farmer gets. It’s all screwed up. The people who are making the money are the people who are the middlemen. It’s true of any industry, and it’s especially true of food. It’s the people who are able to distribute the food, and it’s the people who are able to value-add the food, the people who take the food and turn it from a raw product into a product that is either pickled or preserved or mixed with other ingredients and processed and preserved. That is where the power comes, because you value-add. You add more economy to the transaction, and that economy generally falls in the hands of the people who are adding that value, and not the farmer, who was where the real value comes from. So one of the problems with our food system is that in the effort to change it, the call, the reactionary voice is, if you’re a Dan Barber or if you’re a Michael Pollan, you are trying to hurt the farmer because you’re anti-farmer. Q: I don’t understand that. Barber: Well, the idea is that the kind of farming that Michael Pollan talks about probably represents about 4 to 6 percent of what’s farmed in this country. Ninety-four percent of what’s farmed in this country is done primarily on larger farms, primarily through subsidized agriculture, primarily through agribusiness, primarily through a food chain that feeds into a much larger food chain. And if you speak about the issues surrounding farmers’ markets, let’s say, or you speak about the issues surrounding CSAs or any of these issues that are part of the sustainable agriculture movement, you are, true, talking about a very small slice of the pie, and a lot of the farm lobby comes out against you and says, “You are anti-farmer. You don’t know what it means—.” Q: Meaning those other 96 percent. Barber: Yes. Meaning what it really means to produce food, you don’t understand. And to a large extent, for me, anyway, they’re right about that. The system, the way the system is set up, the paradigm has been working, I guess, for some people, and it does feed us. Q: Well, you don’t mean that they’re right about your being anti-farmer? Barber: They’re right about my not understanding the complexities and the entrenchments of what’s in place. I mean, I’m beginning to understand. I understand probably a lot more than most people, but still, it’s very complicated and very hard to see how our food system is going to change. I mean, look. I love the story from a farmer who told me that—a farmer-activist. This man’s a real activist. He went to an industrial chicken-processing center— Q: That’ll do it. Barber: Yes, right. And he took a tour, and what amazed him more than the amount of chicken that was being killed and more than the conditions that the chickens were being slaughtered in, was just the infrastructure. It was just built—it was just a city. He looked around and he said, “How is this going to change? This is built. I mean, you use a lot of money. There’s a lot of infrastructure here, and there’s a lot of potential for growth here. This is not going to change easily.” That’s what our whole food system is, is big and kind of shock and awe, and that’s what, in part, drives the system, is this idea that we’re down a certain path which is highly centralized, which is species-specific, which is mono-culturing, which is processing, which is long-distance travel. All of those things have a very large infrastructure attached to it and millions of acres of land and millions of people involved in it, and so changing that is going to be difficult. On the positive end of it, again, sort of dialing back to our first conversation, when we talked about opening here ten years ago, very few people were talking about this issue. So there’s a real consciousness and awareness that I think amounted to the most exciting social movement in America. It had a long way to go. Q: Maybe this is naïve of me. I mean, I understand what you’re saying, but wouldn’t it be possible not to grow turkeys so that they were all breast meat and can’t fly, in order to make more money? I mean, is that totally naïve? Barber: Would it be possible to— Q: To produce kind of normal turkeys. Barber: You mean turkeys that actually— Q: Look like a turkey. Barber: And live outside and do all the rest of the stuff. Q: Wherever they live, but that were not raised primarily so that they met the demands of what was desired to be sold. Barber: So in other words, they’re raised in a more natural environment. Q: I guess, yes. Barber: And what’s the question again? I’m sorry. [laughs] Q: In the big food system— Barber: What would be the harm? Q: —there could be some choices, couldn’t there? I understand what you’re saying about the food system and how can you reduce it to simple things. Barber: Right. Q: On the other hand, it seems like some of the processes, if the desire for money weren’t so enormous, could be better for the animals, better for the food. Barber: Yes, better for the flavor. Q: Maybe that is naïve. Barber: No, no, I don’t think it’s naïve at all. I think your first point, though, it’s the economy of the whole thing. It’s like a turkey that is raised in the way that we raise it at Stone Barns, for example, takes much longer to raise them. It’s takes an extraordinary amount of space. It takes a lot of labor to move the turkeys around to different places. You get a happier turkey. You get a much better-flavored turkey, but you get a turkey that’s very expensive to produce. It’s not the fault of the industry, to a certain extent. I mean, their point is to grow a lot of turkeys and bring it to market as cheaply as possible. You know, it’s very easy to lambaste the big-agriculture food chain. What’s harder to do, and I think ultimately more interesting and what I’m trying to write about, is to look at what drives all of that, and why do big players—how do they become big, and what drives them. Because I think when we better understand that, we’ll be better positioned to look at a future food system that is going to face dramatic changes, because what’s driving the ability of big food to produce food so cheaply is largely very free ecological resources that are not going to be available in our lifetime or in our children’s lifetime. Q: Explain that a little bit more, these free resources. Barber: A free ecological resource would be cheap oil, for example. Our system is built on $30 a barrel of oil, as one activist rightly argues, and a system with oil that costs $130 a barrel is a price that the food system can’t afford. So if you’re a Purdue chicken producer or turkey producer, you’re dripping in oil, from the amount of grain that gets fed your turkeys and chickens, to the amount of energy it takes to build a structure that I described before, to the amount of energy it takes to transport your chickens across the country, to the amount of energy it takes to process your chickens in the chicken fingers. All of that is based on very cheap oil, so that’s not going to last, I don’t think. I mean, maybe you have another thought about oil. I don’t know. But that kind of resource— Q: Not this week. [laughs] Barber: Yes, right, not this week. Exactly. I mean, look at what’s happening. So where are we headed with this? We’re probably headed with a food system that by default is going to have to become more localized than centralized, and more localized, less centralized, more regional. Q: And more expensive. Barber: You’re probably going to have to pay the real cost of producing food. Yes, probably. Q: That’s what I think people don’t understand. Barber: Yes. Food is subsidized. Q: I mean, do you get a lot of, “I don’t want organic food. It’s too expensive”? Barber: No. I get accused a lot of being elitist in this whole thing, that what I’m talking about is an elite idea and that you can afford to serve a restaurant with sixty seats, but you’re really talking about feeding the world, and how do you answer that for a turkey that costs so much more money to produce. We have 900 million people who are starving now. That’s 300 million more than thirty years ago when we launched the Green Revolution. We have a billion people who are food-insecure, and we have a billion people who are overfed and over-nutrified. That’s a system that’s failing. If 50 percent of the 6 billion population have horrific issues with food, that’s a food system that’s failing. Q: Do you mean diabetes and that kind of thing? Barber: Obesity, yes. Q: When you and Mr. Rockefeller came to an understanding about what you’d be doing there, did he have strong feelings? Barber: It’s a really interesting—I thought you were going in [another direction]—the Rockefellers were very large proponents of the Green Revolution and gave quite a bit of money to especially wheat research in Mexico that ended up saving hundreds of millions of lives then. My question always was, how much of that did David Rockefeller know and understand, and was this a new direction for the Rockefeller family in terms of it was sustainable, small-scale agriculture, not something that they invested in largely. Largely, their history is with what launched the Green Revolution, which is essentially the advent of modern agriculture, and a lot of people criticize them for it, fairly or unfairly. So did Mr. Rockefeller and I or my brother have any conversations about it? No, not in that respect. I think his desires were much more simple, although I could be wrong. In terms of what was articulated, it was mostly just about wanting to have a place that served really good food and that preserved the memory of his wife. Q: And that would have the use of that particular land? Barber: His wife really loved the land, and so the fact that we would be farming it made him very happy, because he felt like it was a great service, in service of his wife’s memory. Q: I’m sorry, remind me. How many acres is it? Barber: Stone Barns is eighty acres. Q: And you farm on approximately how much of it? Barber: Well, we farm on as much as we can. We have twenty-five acres of pasture and about eight acres of horticulture, and the rest of it is woodland, which we generally farm pretty intensively with the pigs. Q: You talk very articulately about all of this now. How long have you been able to do that? Barber: [laughs] Thanks, but not long. I’m still learning about all this. Like I said, I do think it’s very easy that now that it seems like quite a few more people are conscious about these issues, we’ve entered into an area that I think is a little bit dangerous, which is painting these black and white pictures of what’s good agriculture and what’s bad agriculture. There’s a lot of bad small-scale farming, a lot of terrible small-scale farming, and the fact that a farm that raises 1,000 pigs is better than a farm that raises 100,000 in a confined –animal-feeding operation, it’s true there are some bonuses for the small family farm that raises 1,000, but if they’re raising it in the same way, you know, their farm is only raising pigs, they’re bringing in grain from the Midwest, etc., they’re generally not doing anything much better than the confined feeding operation, although the pigs live a happier life in general. My point is that when these free ecological resources, like fossil fuel, like water, like global climate change or any kind of instability in our ecosystem, which we’re clearly seeing more of in different places in the earth—those are three; labor would be another one, I guess—we’re going to end up having a lot of problems with small-scale bad agriculture. And by bad, it’s hard to make a sweeping statement about it, but it’s true. If you’re not thinking in an ecological way, and you’re thinking even small-scale intensified production, I think for the future is probably a lost cause. Anyway, my point is that it’s hard to do these black-and-white, big farms are bad, small farms are good. There are a lot of good big farms, too, great ones. Q: Like what kinds of farms? Barber: West of the Mississippi are big farms. We have this idea of the Thomas Jefferson sort of yeoman farmer idea of the idyllic American farm, and what we all aspire to, these small family plots, that was a romantic idea wrapped in a bewildering reality, which is that there’s no water west of the Mississippi. Jefferson was talking about the thirteen colonies, which was wet agriculture. That’s where we are. That built us in the beginning, but if you’re moving out west and you’re in California, you have to have a large farm because you have less water sources, and that’s the way it works. And the grasses in many areas aren’t like New England, and on and on. So we have this sort of romanticized vision of what a farm should look like. I don’t know that that really adds up to realities of certain parts of the country or of the world. So, big farms can be okay. They can be great. Big cattle farms, I’ve been to one in Arizona that pastures its beef cattle and moves them around in huge numbers, that does a great job of managing the grass and moving the animals in a way that’s actually quite beneficial to the landscape. Q: I think most people don’t know, really, how very educated you have to be to be a farmer of any size, and how much you have to know about, way beyond you own farm. Barber: That’s right. That part of the big problem is our conception of brilliance is kind of over-determined with the Bills Gateses and the Steve Jobses of the world, this idea that you’ve built a thing and that’s brilliant. But if you look at a farmer who uses current energy on the farm, energy from the sun that gets transferred to the plants to feed the animals that feed us, and works with companion planting and works with healthy soils, and amendments that are produced on the farm, you’re talking about a very brilliant person. And the fact that there are not a whole lot of them in our future is a part of what you just said, which is that we have a great lack of appreciation for that kind of thinking, which I think is sort of biological. We don’t give a lot of credence to biological thought, especially ecological thought and those connections and seeing all that. We tend to take our best students, and they go off to these jobs where they’re considered where bright kids go, and the sort of dumber kids go on farm jobs, and that’s how it’s been for the last forty years, fifty years. And understandably, in some way, but in farm life, it shouldn’t be glorified. It’s very hard work. But everything is hard work. Everything is hard work. [laughs] I think about the education part of it, and I think there’s a lot that we could do on a university level. And I think about the land-grant universities, of which I’m going to next week, to Cornell. There’s a land-grant university in every state, and its M.O., its modus operandi, when it opened was to educate the state about farming techniques. The farmers would come to the university and have all these available ideas. That was set up because our politicians in Washington were worried that we didn’t have enough to feed a growing population and that we needed regional expertise on growing techniques and soil analysis and seed distribution. Q: I don’t know when the land grants were set up. Barber: 1890s. Q: Across the country? Barber: Yes. Every state had to, and you got federal money. I mean, it was a brilliant idea. It was one of the most brilliant overlooked ideas of the success of this country, because it established a food security that we never had and that many were fearing, and rightfully so, that as the country expanded west and we grew in population, we wouldn’t be able to feed ourselves. This was our ticket, and that’s where a lot of seed varieties came from. That’s where all breeders—I mean, they funded breeders, breeders who were breeding vegetables and fruits and breeding newer varieties of animals, selecting, naturally selecting for hardier breeds of cattle and pigs for particular landscapes, hot arid environments, cold winter environments. That’s what helped feed us, and it was enormously successful. It’s been de-funded in the last thirty years, based on deregulation of everything, and, in part, those breeders have been left to accept money from agribusiness, because if you’re a breeder now at any one of these universities, and they’ve cut breeding programs almost to the bone—Cornell actually still has one that’s somewhat thriving. But if you’re a breeder at Cornell, for example, you need to justify research on a trial of a seed. You can’t just go and do it. Q: Is it funded through the Farm Bill or something else? Barber: Well, the Farm Bill has funding for land-grant universities. What has been de-funded is on a university level, to continue the specific support for different programs like agronomy. All the departments have been cut. In particular has been the breeding program, and the reason for that has been because the money has been flowing in from corporations that say essentially, “We’ll give you a donation and, oh, by the way, if you’re working on a tomato variety that—.” Now, they’re not saying, “I want a tomato variety that’s filled with flavor and nutrients.” They’re saying, “I want a tomato variety that can grow in these kinds of conditions and can be picked green and can travel 3,000 miles.” That’s how they make their ends meet. Q: So how does that result in de-funding? Barber: The university—well, for Cornell and for several others I’ve looked into—either takes money and puts it in other departments under the quasi of agriculture, or lets it go altogether, knowing that they’ll be able to match and supersede those funds from corporations, who themselves don’t want to hire a breeder full-time. They already have their breeding departments. They can save a great deal of money by spreading it to different universities. It’s an ingenious way. I mean, if you’re a company and you’re looking for new seed varieties that will help either a particular area of the country that you’re in or help a new generation of fertilizers and pesticides based on a particular seed, you go through the university and you essentially get free R&D. That’s what’s been happening in our country for the last thirty years. It’s a side note, but it’s very interesting, I think, and partly why I’m going up to Cornell, because I want to write about it. Q: What are you going to Cornell for? Barber: I’m going to Cornell to speak, but I’m meeting with all these breeders, many of whom have retired, who I want to talk to, and some who are on the verge of retiring, and some that are young and really fired up. This whole generation of breeders came up to Cornell in the seventies, the hippies up there, and were there to change the world and to breed nutrient-dense vegetables and organic seed varieties and all that, and they’ve all pretty much been replaced now by a younger generation and the need to be accountable to funding that comes in. Q: So what are you going to talk about? Barber: I’m going to give a kind of standard little thing just about all this stuff, sort of, from the chef’s perspective. Q: I wasn’t living here, but the first time I was aware of your writing about all of this was “Amber [Fields of Bland],” [title misstated and corrected] because that was a real knockout punch, and it was huge real estate in the newspaper. Barber: Yes, they were very kind to me. Q: How did that come about? Why don’t you explain for the record what it was? Barber: “Amber Fields of Bland” was an Op Ed that I wrote for the Times, I can’t remember now, two years ago or three years ago. Q: Longer. Barber: Longer, was it? Q: I think so, yes. Barber: Oh, god. Anyway, I wrote my first Op Ed for the Times the first year we opened. Was it the first year or the second year we opened here? And then every year, I think, I was doing one at around Thanksgiving time for many years, and then I think I had a couple of interruptions. But there was an editor there, who actually just left last month, which is very sad to me, David Shipley, who was amazing, just a big foodie, and we got talking, and he increasingly saw these connections between food and politics and between food and energy and between food and everything, and he opened that up to me, which was a really great blessing, and I feel very thankful for it, because it gave me a voice in this whole movement that I didn’t have. Q: You wrote Op Eds, obviously, before that big piece. How did you decide what to write about? Barber: I wrote Op Eds before the “Amber Fields of Bland”? Q: Yes. Barber: How did I decide? Q: They were things on your mind? Barber: Yes. The first one I did was this sort of apple piece, comparing two apples to each other, one at the Greenmarket and one across the street at a cart that was selling off the street from Mad Apple from South America. But I just got these ideas. I don’t know how. I was just really interested in these issues and always had been, going back to college. But I became more focused as Stone Barns opened and all the rest. Q: How did you make time for that work, the writing? Barber: Well, I’m not sure, because I’m trying to figure out how to make time to write the book, so I don’t know. Q: What is your book? Barber: What is it about? Q: Yes. Barber: A lot of the issues that I’m talking about. They’re stories, though, that are about specific sort of experiences with farmers that have led me to kind of understand why something tastes good. Q: Does it have a name? Barber: No. No, it’s probably halfway done or two-thirds done, something like that. No name yet. Q: But David Shipley was then enormously helpful to you to continue this line of thought. Barber: Yes. He was a great editor and a very great encourager and famous encourager of anything that he found interesting. It was great. Q: Did you meet here at the restaurant? Barber: No, no. I just blindly sent it to him. Q: That particular piece? Barber: Yes, the first one. Q: Oh, I see. Barber: And I got a note back a day later. He’s like, “I love it.” And that was the beginning of just a great friendship, which I hope doesn’t end. He’s off at Bloomberg News now, but I hope I don’t lose contact with him, because he’s a major, major, great editor. You don’t find many like that, at least I don’t. Q: But just to get back to “Amber Fields of Bland” for a minute, I’m sure you know it was much longer and more detailed than most pieces, and so there had to be a decision on the part of the newspaper to make that available to you. I don’t know whether he had to fight for it or— Barber: Well, he’s the editor, so he decides that. And usually he decided it based on, like, was it an interesting perspective, had it not run before, and was there something there that was gripping readers, and he found there was. Q: The idea, as you articulated it, did it start with flavor or what? Barber: You know, it didn’t. He’s the one who— Q: Who found that? Barber: Yes. He’s the one who said, “You know, you shouldn’t be writing like Michael Pollan. You’re a chef.” He said something like that. “So why are you coming at it from this angle?” It’s like, “This still is new and fresh, and we could go, but your expertise is in flavor, and I don’t understand why you’re not concentrating on it.” He was right, and that changed a lot of what I ended up talking about way beyond “Amber Fields,” and it’s what I’m talking about today. He really focused me on, like, this is about flavor, because if it’s about anything else, it’s boring. Plus, I don’t have any expertise in all the other stuff. I just have knowledge, not an expertise. Q: How did that piece come about? Barber: The “Amber Fields”? It was a yearly thing that I was doing, I think, so I always was gearing up for something. This idea that I was sending him ideas that he was accepting or rejecting, but it’s not really—I would just send him an idea, and he would work with me until he found it acceptable, which most editors, obviously, don’t do. He was very, very, now that I’m saying it, very particular. Q: When did you start to speak? Barber: I started speaking sort of at the beginning, I guess because chefs get these invitations to speak. I don’t know. I can’t remember what my first couple of ones—I have to ask Laureen about that. But as this issue became more and more accepted or mainstream, the invitations to speak about it became more frequent. Q: This is slightly corny, but is it, in part, because your education made you write papers all the time, that you could do this? Barber: Yes, maybe. I never thought of that but, true, I have probably an extensive education compared to most chefs, and I had an interest in writing, so those probably came together in a way that was very unconscious. I think by the time I wrote the first Op Ed, we were planning this thing at Stone Barns, and I wanted to try and get people to understand what we were headed out to do. Q: Has that changed, by the way, what you’re doing at Stone Barns? Barber: Versus what we thought? Q: Yes. Barber: Of course, only because it’s been ten years. But in terms of I think what your question is, more sort of macro, the underpinnings of what we were trying to accomplish I think is exactly the same. Q: Could you describe what it is? Barber: It’s very simple, just that there’s an Education Center, a farm, and a restaurant, and that there’s these three entities that are working together to talk about sustainable agriculture and the future of eating and cooking and enjoying food, and those three entities are quite important to have an understanding of how that works. You can’t really get that from just going to a farm. You can’t really get that from going to a restaurant. You can’t really get that from just going to a classroom. But when you have three together, when you have those three entities together—and they could look very different. I always say is Stone Barns replicable. I mean, it’s just Rockefeller money. It’s like, well, it is, actually. If you don’t take it so literally, and you look at a place like, I don’t know, North Dakota, you have a school and you have a farm, and a farmer’s daughter goes to the school, and you have a principal who’s smart about capitalizing on this farmer and serving his ground beef in the cafeteria, and then teaching about the economies of raising a steer on grass and the taste difference in a cooking class or the biology class, so you have all this together that ends up educating and inspiring in a way that I think is much more productive than doing it within one entity or on your own. Q: How much time do you give to that at Stone Barns? Barber: To the Education Center? Q: Yes. Barber: I mean, I do, probably not enough, but I’m on the board and I am very involved in certain activities. The day-to-day runnings, I’m not. Q: But you’ve been writing in other places besides the Times. Barber: Yes, I’ve written in a lot. So I wasn’t always just about these issues. I was published in Food & Wine, I think, and Gourmet magazine. I just tried to write more and more about these issues because it’s what interests me. Q: How did you fit that into your schedule? Barber: To the time, yes. You know, I do very well late at night. Q: Very late. [laughs] Barber: Yes, it’s very late at night. Also, it’s become easier because I’ve had a great group of people, phenomenal. Q: You mean here? Barber: And up at Stone Barns. Yes, great, and as that happens, you—I mean, how did [Barack] Obama write a book that he wrote when he was doing all of his stuff? It’s like, how do people—I don’t know. You have something to say, and you fit it in in different times. It’s taken me a long time to write this book, many, many years, so I’m not exactly the most productive guy in the world. Q: I don’t know about that. Do you have a due date? Barber: Yes. Thirteen months ago. My contractual due date. I am quite, quite late, so that’s been one of the things that weighs on me. Q: I noticed, because I was there, that you spoke at Michael Batterberry’s service. Barber: Were you there? Q: Yes. Barber: Oh, I’ve forgotten you were friends, friendly with him. Q: Well, I wrote a little bit for him. Barber: Oh, you did? Okay. Q: I found him amazingly supportive, given what the magazine is about, which is for chefs and has lots of technical things, the recipes and things like that. But he was also very interested in educating chefs about agriculture. Is that how you got involved with him? Barber: And that’s what you wrote about? Q: Well, he did actually ask me to write something some years ago about what chefs needed to know about the Farm Bill. Barber: No kidding. Q: That’s what I said. [laughs] Barber: Great. I think I remember that piece. Did it run? Q: Yes. Barber: I think I remember that. Q: I just wondered how the two of you—and I guess for the purposes of this, I ought to say that he was the publisher of Food Arts, which is a magazine— Barber: And editor. Q: —and editor of a magazine for people in the food industry, as opposed to philosophical in any way. Barber: Right. I met him because I graduated from—I went to cooking school, I went to French culinary, and I think I got back from California and I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do, so in that phase, and so I just wrote him a note and said, “Would you sit down and chat with me?” And he did, and he was wonderful, a wonderful man. Oh, wow. Just really took a great interest in me, and I think I probably spoke to him once every two weeks for twenty years or fifteen years. Q: Good heavens. Barber: Yes. I didn’t really even realize that when he died. It’s one of those things that became such a part of my life that it wasn’t as if—I didn’t see him that often, so I wasn’t going to dinner with him, but I’d go to his office probably once a month, once every two months, but I was talking to him on the phone it seemed like all the time. I really miss him. There are not many people like that in the industry, as you know. Q: It must be very unusual to have somebody who is essentially putting out a magazine take that much interest in the agricultural situation, in the population that produces it, in the immigrant farmers, that kind of thing. Barber: Yes, yes. He was amazing. But, you know, that was Michael. He was so smart and looking at connections and looking beyond just the next issue. So, you’re right, he was a very extraordinary man. Q: Do you have anything scheduled besides your book that you’re supposed to be writing right now? Barber: No. I’m not writing anything. I’m doing some speaking stuff, but I’m hoping to relate that to the book. Q: What about the President’s Council on Physical Fitness? There you are amid all these athletes, these quarterbacks and basketball players. Barber: You know, what’s interesting about the Council this year is that it’s the first year, the first administration that’s, first of all, changed the name. It was the President’s Council on Sports and Physical Fitness. He changed it to the President’s Council on Sports—I’ve forgotten what it is—Food and Nutrition. Q: Physical Fitness and Sports— Barber: No, that’s that old one. So it’s expanded to—it has the words, I think, Food and Nutrition. Q: It does have Nutrition in there somewhere, yes. [The name is President’s Council on Fitness, Sports & Nutrition.] Barber: So I’m not just with athletes. I’m with a pediatrician; I’m with a doctor; I’m with a woman who runs the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Q: But not other chefs. Barber: No other chefs, not right now. But it’s the first time that this group has been expanded, and it’s, I think, obviously a very smart way to look at what it means to be healthy. It’s got to include food, and it’s got to include good food. And that definition, broadening that definition is quite important, and I feel really honored to be a part of it. Q: How does it function? Do you have meetings or what? Barber: We have conference calls quite a bit and then twice-yearly meetings in D.C., one coming up at the White House, actually. Q: Who asked you—was it the president or the first lady’s staff—to be on it? Barber: The first lady actually has nothing to do with it per se, because it’s the President’s Council. But the first lady has a lot to do with it because of her initiative, so, yes, I think it came from the first lady’s—you know, from the East Wing as opposed to the West Wing. Q: Did you have any idea what you were supposed to do, being on this? Barber: No, I had no understanding of it, and I still am not quite sure. It’s sort of like a week-to-week thing. But if there’s a radio interview or there’s this thing that just talks about Let’s Move, which is her big push to get people to eat healthier, so I’ve been involved with that. Q: You mean if they are asked to produce somebody who can talk about that aspect of fitness or another aspect of fitness, they call upon one of you to— Barber: Yes, exactly. They kind of filter all the stuff through to the right people. So, yes, the athletes are going off talking to school kids, and I did an event in Midtown with school kids and Billie Jean King, which was fun. So anyway, it’s a learning experience. It’s been great. Q: Is there anything else you’re trying to fit into your life at this point? Barber: Yes. Well, I’d love to have a family. Q: That would be nice, yes. Barber: I just got married a year ago, a year and a half ago now, so I’m quite happy about that and thrilled to spend time with her and, again, yes, and hopefully have a family of my own. I’d love to. Q: Is there anything I haven’t asked you about that you would like to— Barber: No. This has been the most exhaustive, but not exhausting, interview, interview or talk, confessional. I don’t know what it is. Everything. Thank you for taking the time. It’s been so lovely. Q: Thank you for participating. It’s really terrific. [End of interview] Barber - 3 - PAGE 36