39 Quotes by Dan Barber

Conventional agriculture has never succeeded in feeding the world, and it’s never produced anything good to eat. For the future, we need to look toward alternatives.

Vegetables deplete soil. They’re extractive. If soil has a bank account, vegetables make the largest withdrawals.

It takes fifteen pounds of wild fish to get you one pound of farm tuna. Not very sustainable. It doesn’t taste very good either.

I’m not an environmentalist, or a doctor, or a nutritionist.

For the past 50 years, we’ve been fishing the seas like we clear-cut forests. It’s hard to overstate the destruction. Ninety percent of large fish, the ones we love – the tunas, the halibuts, the salmons, swordfish – they’ve collapsed.

If you just think exclusively about what would be the best tasting or the most profitable, you’re just not seeing the big picture.

I’m not here to say I don’t eat vegetables – I do, a lot of them – but, from a soil perspective, they’re actually more costly than a cow grazing on grass.

If you look at the carrying capacity of agricultural areas throughout the world, their ecological habitats are changing. So I think we’re looking at – in our lifetime – great collapses of food services.

Fixtures of agribusiness such as five-thousand-acre grain monocultures and bloated animal feedlots are no more the future of farming than eighteenth-century factories billowing black smoke are the future of manufacturing.