Louisa Enright's Blog

Interesting Information:  October 26, 2014

Eating The Whole Farm

John’s “TUFTS” magazine came in the mail on Friday.

The cover drew my eye as I brought it inside:  a pink plate with a pig’s head and tail drawn on each side, with a fork and knife draped over the plate.

Helene Ragovin’s article, “Enlightened Palate,” (“Tufts,” Fall 2014) discusses chef Dan Barber’s attempts to get people to eat so that balance can be restored to food production.  To achieve that needed balance, people have been encouraged to eat “nose to tail” in order to utilize ALL parts of an animal.  People today, for instance, don’t really eat organs much.  Or take the time to…roast a roast.  Or take the time to…slow braise a pot roast.

Chef Dan Barber co-owns Blue Hill in Manhattan and Blue Hill at Stone Barns, in Westchester County, New York. The latter includes an agricultural nonprofit that surrounds the restaurant.

Barber’s “Eating the Whole Farm” mantra ups the ante on eating and tries to take into account what it takes to produce a crop everyone likes.

Here’s a quote from Ragovin’s article:

So, Barber says, if you want those peak-of-summer Brandywine tomatoes–a water-hogging crop that depletes the soil–you also need to cook with kidney beans, millet, and mustard greens.  Those less glamorous crops build soil structure, replenish nitrogen, and keep plant diseases at bay.  But because not enough people buy them, farers either sell such crops for animal feed, at a loss, or don’t even grow them.  “That’s very dangerous from an ecological point of view, and economically from the farmer’s point of view,” Barber says.

I would add that we should all be eating seasonally and eating a lot of different things.  We are…omnivores.  Too many of us eat the same old things week in and week out.