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DECEMBER 2006/JANUARY 2007 |
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Dan Barber |
What does it take to challenge a food system an entire society has come to depend on for the past two centuries? Just your everyday trip to the grocery store, says the Barber family of Blue Hill restaurant in New York City and Blue Hill at Stone Barns, a complex comprised of a restaurant, farm and food education center. |
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Because of the current food system’s emphasis on large-scale and inexpensive production, the bulk of the foods we eat have come to be packaged, processed and shipped from all different corners of the world. It has therefore become an ironic truth in modern living that most of us bear no connection what we eat before putting it into our bodies. After all, when was the last time you read the label on an energy bar wrapper or cereal box and could actually visualize what each ingredient looked like? Or had any idea of where the asparagus or green beans you had for dinner last night were grown and harvested?
Having spent childhood summers at their grandparents’ farm in southern Massachusetts (which later became the namesake of the family restaurants), the Barber brothers Dan and David gained an early awareness not only of how and where food is produced, but also the importance of local farms and the foods the farms produced within a community. Although the two went down very different professional paths as adults, both agree that their choices were in many ways driven by their shared experiences. While Dan pursued a career as a chef that allowed him to put his budding philosophy on the benefits of cooking with sustainably and locally grown ingredients, his brother David attended Harvard Business School because of his fascination with the workings of our economics system and how it affects what is both produced and consumed.
With a shared love of food and local business, it’s not surprising that the Barber brothers’ career paths intersected at what they like to think of as their neighborhood bistro. Joined by David’s wife, Laureen, who contributed the design talents she developed working with both Fortune 500 and start-up businesses, the Barber family opened up Blue Hill restaurant in Greenwich Village, New York to make restaurant-goers feel truly at home with their food. Not only is Blue Hill a local favorite, it also shows the public that they can be more connected with their food by using seasonal ingredients from the nearby farms of the Hudson Valley.
As with any great restaurant, word gets around. And with a well-known reputation for supporting local and sustainable food practices, the Barbers were approached to submit a proposal for a farming operation that applied those very principles on an aging Rockefeller estate in honor of the late Peggy Rockefeller, who dedicated much of her life to upholding them. What the Barbers submitted, and later enacted with the Rockefeller family’s blessing, became Blue Hill at Stone Barns of Pocantico Hills, a beautifully transformed estate just outside New York City that stands as a testament to the notion that we can and should be mentally, physically and spiritually closer to the foods we eat. While the restaurant attempts to use as much of the foods grown on the surrounding property so that diners are literally closer to the processes that brought their meal to the table, the farm operation works against the monoculture, mass production system that distanced us from those steps in the first place by growing a variety of crops on the same soil throughout the year. The educational center furthermore encourages visitors to learn about and experience farming for themselves.
But according to David, Stone Barns is not meant to be the only place where people can reflect on the processes behind the food they eat. Instead, it should be a starting point that will lead to a deeper understanding of the larger repercussions of our food choices.
“One of the real jobs [of Stone Barns] is to raise the public awareness and get people questioning something they do three times a day. They should think a little bit about the implications of their food choices on their personal health, on their environment, their community—all of those things. That’s what we’d like for people to take away after visiting Stone Barns. If we could do that, then I think we’d make a big difference.”
