The Third Plate

Chef Dan Barber argues that the farm-to-table movement, for all its good feeling, has not actually changed the way Americans eat. Buying local and seasonal, he says, has left the underlying habits of our food system largely intact, and it has encouraged a comforting but false picture of where food is headed.

Barber looks first at the cooking of the past, which took a heavy toll on the land, and then at the well-meaning dining of the present, which he finds is often misguided in its own way. From there he sketches what he calls the third plate: a style of American eating in which the demands of good farming and the pleasures of good food are treated as one concern rather than two.

The book speaks to eaters and cooks alike. It asks them to rethink what belongs on the plate and to picture a national cuisine that is delicious and also kind to the land that produces it. Barber, who has been featured on Netflix's Chef's Table, writes with a storyteller's eye, and the book was a New York Times bestseller.