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Dan Barber has always been a visionary. His commitment to locally-sourced organic ingredients has put him at the forefront of the farm-to-table movement in the United States and around the world. Now, with restaurants, the supply chain and food culture in general reeling from months of coronavirus lockdown, he is setting out a vision to propel that movement to previously unimaginable heights.
The Kitchen Farming Project will aim to sow the seeds of a change of consciousness in how we all think about our food. Starting from the renowned Blue Hill at Stone Barns Center for Food & Agriculture, it will attempt to regrow and nurture the mycelium of the connected food chain, and save small farmers from the disappearance of their restaurant customers.
Taking three chefs from the kitchen at Blue Hill the project will document through stages or ‘recipes’ their journey, from complete novices, through planning, planting and harvesting their own small gardens. And Barber wants everyone to come along on that journey.
“If you sign up you’ll get step-by-step recipes for what you need to start their own garden,” says Barber. “You’ll get a list of the basic tools you’ll need. We’ll hold your hand through every stage, with very detailed plans and a step-by-step video guide. You’ll be taken all the way through weeding and harvesting, and then we’ll take you into the kitchen with the ingredients.”
Photo: Courtesy of Dan Barber
Recipe One is about digging out a patch of land where you can prepare your garden, measuring what you need and thinking about seeds. The recipe instructs you to carefully choose the things you plant in terms of families, such as nightshade or brassica. “In order to have a healthy garden, with heathy soil attracting the right insects, you need biodiversity,” says Barber. “But you can’t have one big garden filled with potatoes and tomatoes, because that’s all the nightshade family.”
Barber has chosen three young Blue Hill chefs with no prior horticultural experience to be the protagonists in what is essentially an online instructional reality show about growing food and cooking it. People who sign up to the programme may take an interest in one particular protagonist, or all three. Each have different backgrounds, with different stories to tell, and they are all treating their 12-by-15-foot gardens in a unique way.
Originally from Thailand, Pruitt Kerdchoochuen came to cooking through environmental advocacy. She dreams of a future as a ‘hot sauce mogul’, so her garden is full of interesting peppers that she found either in her home country, or through research. She’s going to tell a unique story, and the series will follow her as she harvests those peppers and takes them into the kitchen to start work on her world-conquering hot sauce.
Bronson Petti is a confident young chef from the Mid-West who believes anything is possible. Around his garden he has built a moat full of mushroom inoculants, and he is insistent on planting rice. He may not harvest much, but he believes that dry rice farming is the future, and wants to prove it. Meanwhile, the energetic and extremely competent Chuan-Chieh Chang has a different background: she was a chef at Blue Hill New York for a couple of years before transferring to Blue Hill at Stone Barns.
Photo: Courtesy of Dan Barber
Anyone can get involved in the Kitchen Farming Project. All you need is a small plot of land (it doesn’t matter how small), some basic tools and a willingness to roll up your sleeves and get in the dirt. Of the 2000 people around the world who have already signed up, a third have no connection with the restaurant or food industry, but want to be part of it. The movement grows daily.
But if the farm-to-table movement is an organic, living thing - much like the gardens at Blue Hill - Barber has seen it suffer a severe setback in recent weeks. For years, it gathered momentum until it was becoming embedded in mainstream food culture. Beyond the arena of fine dining, the world was moving inexorably towards good, fresh, local and organic ingredients. Now, with a severe ‘drought’ hitting the movement, Barber fears the whole burgeoning culture risks devastation.
“Everything is in jeopardy,” he says. “The project is a symbolic movement – we have restaurants that are shuttered, and we have supply between restaurants and farmers, a connection that has been hobbled. That connection was the most exciting social movement of the last 50 years, at least in America. It was growing, it hadn’t plateaued. Every year the prevalence of local, organic, delicious fresh food was on the rise. It wasn’t just limited to the white table-clothed cathedrals of fine dining, it was beginning to inculcate into the food culture of America.
“In a moment that’s all been thrown into question. Now you can feel the pendulum swing again, it’s a generational moment. You have to think about, what do you do with that sea change? You go to the source of what created the farm-to-table movement. It was chefs and restaurants.”
Photo: Courtesy of Dan Barber
Barber traces the farm-to-table movement back to nouvelle cuisine in France, and the chefs who refused to be bound by convention. They wanted to bring the food they had eaten growing up to the wider public, and it was all about seasonality.
“The nouvelle cuisine chefs didn’t want to be shackled by diktats that make no sense. They wanted something new and light and French,” he says. “What hasn’t been covered so much is that it was all about the market. It was about these local, regional specialities, which their grandmothers cooked for them, and which the chefs wanted to bring to their restaurants. That was the heart of the movement. What got talked about in the press much more was that it was about sauces and plating. Small plates, all that sort of thing. It was about that, partly, but much more was the drive for seasonality.
“Paul Bocuse, Alain Chapel and the Troisgros brothers were the ones who gave birth to the cooking of Ducasse, Robuchon. And in America, Jean-George and David Bouley were the leading lights, and their disciples, from Nancy Silverton to me. I’m a disciple of that. I’m the grandchild of that.”
Photo: Courtesy of Dan Barber
Barber refuses to let the farm-to-table movement die. For him, the time to act is now, not when this is all over, or when restaurants get back on their feet. The Kitchen Farming Project is a grassroots initiative, led by those young people who will inherit the movement, and resow the seeds that will grow a thriving food culture for tomorrow.
More than a gardening or horticultural movement, this is a human movement with a wider vision to empower everyone to take control of a shared food future. A big idea maybe, but from small acorns grow mighty oaks.
“Right now there’s a fork in the road, we have a choice,” says Barber. “We’re at a critical point in the movement and if we don’t act now, then a generation of small independent farmers won’t make it. It’s lights out. It’s that simple.”
Sign up to The Kitchen Farming Project here.
