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Our food system is broken. While we have solved the problem of how to produce lots of calories for a low direct cost, this same food system has resulted in an obesity epidemic; it is why nearly 10% of the U.S. population has Type 2 diabetes; and, most recently, it likely is playing a role in the huge spike in colon cancer for people in their 30s and 40s. What do we do about it?
Interested in reading more on food and nutrition? Visit this selection on Giving Compass.
Dan Barber is a famous chef and co-owner of the acclaimed restaurants Blue Hill and Blue Hill at Stone Barns. The Third Plate is Dan’s answer to the question, “what will the typical American dinner plate look like in 35 years?”
In response, Dan sketched three plates to show the evolution he imagines: the first plate, from the 1960s, had a large, corn-fed steak with a small side of industrial farmed vegetables; the second, from today, had a farm-to-table organic grass-fed steak with a side of organic heirloom carrots; and the third, futuristic plate, had a “steak” made of carrots garnished with a sauce made from leftover beef trimmings.
Dan’s point, with this third plate, is that the current high-end, farm-to-table, farmers’ market approach to food is a luxurious niche that doesn’t address the core issues of the food system: while the foods themselves may be natural and healthy, they are, in Dan’s words, “often ecologically demanding and expensive to grow,” and, by definition, they work at the edges of the system as a whole.
My belief is that our breakthroughs will only come once we start saying out loud that our ultimate goal is to build a global economic system that is extensive, not intensive. And then, once we recognize that such systems can be built, to ask ourselves what it would take to move that from niche to mainstream.
It’s OK for us to acknowledge that we don’t yet know the right indicators of systemic health, as long as we say that we’re willing to put ourselves on the line to create them.