I start with the premise that nature is smarter than I am and try to let nature teach me how reality Works. Ray dalio, principles
Feed the soil, and let the soil feed the plants. Dan Barber, The Third Plate
Dan Barber is a chef in New York. He owns 2 restaurants, Blue Hill, in Manhattan and Blue Hill at Stone Barns, a working four-season farm and educational center, 30 minutes north of Manhattan.
I watched one of Dan Barber’s TED talks a few years ago and it struck a chord in me. He talks about a fish farm in Spain that raises amazingly tasty fish and cleans the surrounding ocean in the process. The talk and the farm gave me hope that we can not only live sustainably, but can live in a way that benefits each other and the environment.
Recently I checked out Barber’s book, The Third Plate, because I wanted to learn more about sustainability in our food system. Is Barber’s book, he writes at length about mono-culture farming. This is the most common current practice in American farming: Massive farms that plant fields and fields of one crop, which depletes the soil of nutrients, then rely on chemical ferti
lizers and pesticides to maintain plant health.
Industrial farming is not a sustainable system. We’ve known this for a while, but keep using more chemicals instead of looking to nature and past practices for solutions. Barber talks about “dead zones” in our oceans, whole areas where no fish or plant life can live because of the pollutants in the water.
In traditional farming, farmers learn what a crop takes from the soil, and what a crop feeds the soil and rotate crops to continually nurture the soil. Just like we exhale carbon dioxide and inhale oxygen, while plants do the opposite in the beautiful give and take of nature, certain crops will support each other and soil life if we learn about crop rotation.
We hear, “you are what you eat,” but Barber says, we are what our food eats. We get minerals from the minerals in the soil that our vegetables grow in. Dan Barber is the chaser of delicious food and believes that the tastiest food is also the healthiest food. He says, “Truly delicious food is contingent on an entire system of agriculture.” Barber quotes his farmer,
“The development of the flavor, and the health of the plant, are the same freaking thing. You don’t get one without the other”. Farmer Jack in Dan Barber’s
So what can we do? What can I do? Start small, start with one change, and then make another. Support your farmer’s markets. Learn about and stop supporting industrial farming as much as you can. I have a microscopic garden plot that I ignore most years, but this year, I’m going to learn to garden and to enrich the soil first Plant a small garden and learn how to feed the soil.
Because our planet’s health is our health.
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