The Third Plate: Field Notes On The Future Of Food (2014) - Plot & Excerpts
Michael Pollan recommended this, so I decided to check it out. It has some really cool ideas about the future of sustainable food. At times, it's a bit of a "foodie" book, so I wasn't really diggin that. But I did end up taking lots of notes.Fave clips:The best kind of farming can not be reduced to a set of rules. It takes up to 13 pounds of grain to produce one pound of beef.Wheat covers more acreage worldwide than any other crop. Veggies and fruits cover 8%.While the bran and the germ represent less than 20% of a wheat kernel's total weight, together they compromise 80% of its fiber and other nutrients.Try using more spelt. It's a perfect soil builder because of its extensive root systems reaching deep into the earth, creating air pockets that allow the soil to breathe. Too much of a good thing isn't good. See what you're looking at. In the past 50-70 years many veggies have shown nutrient declines of anywhere from 5% to 40%. If we as humans have this same basic tendency as other animals, whenever our food choices are limited, we may well consume more of some nutrients than we need in an attempt to get enough of others to meet our basic nutritional requirements.Foie gras: The glut of food causes the liver to swell up to 10 times its normal size in geese. For a 175 pound person, it's equivalent to eating about 44 pounds of pasta per day.Without the endless supply of cheap grain feed allowed by synthetic fertilizers, our modern meat-eating ways could never have materialized.Today the average American spends about 33 minutes per day preparing food.We are a nation of eaters who don't cook.The 7 ounce slab of protein on your dinner plate is as much an American invention as it has become an American expectation.The cuts of meat we often enjoy the most come from muscles that rarely work when the animal is alive.The overproduction of grain helps enable the overproduction of chicken, which lowers the price of chicken, which means even more chickens are raised to make up for declining revenue. That leads to even more unneeded chicken. So it's fed to other animals it probably shouldn't be fed to, like fish. And then the overproduced chicken gets dumped to places like Mexico. To compete, Mexico turns to the same kind of system, the get big or get out system that feeds on itself: produce more chicken at lower prices. Laid off poultry workers seek work in America, often illegally, which drives down wages and helps poultry companies produce....more chicken.We are taking fish from the ocean faster than they can reproduce.Aquaculture is inefficient. To get a fish to market weight quickly enough to clear a profit, you usually have to feed it somewhere from two to five times its weight in wild fish.Flour has been shown to lose almost half its nutrients within just 24 hours of milling. "Food as fuel" in our culture is why nothing tastes good and why our farming systems are collapsing. Hoppin John is an ode to soil fertility: the black eyed peas provided the soil with enough nitrogen to grow the rice, and the collards usually took up whatever salt was left over from the sea water that flooded into the basin. So I got most of the way through this and I could ignore his smarminess and I could ignore the way he breathlessly states basic facts as if we are all just learning them and I could ignore the way that His Farm in New York is just the Best Place Ever, but then he got to a part where he started rhapsodizing about the sad loss of the "farming system" (?!) of the antebellum South and that was the straw that broke the camel's back and I had to stop.
What do You think about The Third Plate: Field Notes On The Future Of Food (2014)?
Interesting rumination on how we eat what we eat. This is the next step beyond eating locally.
—Ashley
A must-read for fans of Pollan, Salatin, etc. This was a very interesting book (but long!).
—Doqqi
