Dan Barber on Food--Meet Adam Smith

Dan Barber has a piece in the NYTimes Week in Review section on "Change We Can Stomach". Mr. Barber is a chef at two restaurants. As is often the case, I take exception (my snark in brackets):

"...small farms are the most productive on earth. A four-acre farm in the United States nets, on average, $1,400 per acre; a 1,364-acre farm nets $39 an acre. "[Snark--yes, and a 1-acre farm will probably do $5,000 and a half-acre farm will do $12,000. His argument fails because he's comparing apples and oranges. A 4-acre farm isn't growing field corn, it's growing truck crops. That said, while a smaller farm growing the same crops might be more profitable, I'd bet it would be because of greater intensity of inputs--i.e. more hours per acres.]

"To encourage small, diversified farms is not to make a nostalgic bid to revert to the agrarian ways of our ancestors. It is to look toward the future, leapfrogging past the age of heavy machinery and pollution, to farms that take advantage of the sun’s free energy and use the waste of one species as food for another." [Snark--Dan Barber, meet Adam Smith. Believe it or not, right after WWII we didn't have heavy machinery and pollution and we had farms that were diversified and used the waste of one species as food for another. I shoveled lots of that manure. The advantages of specialization work on the farm just as much as in the restaurant--a great chef can outcook my mother 7 days a week without breaking a sweat.]

"With a less energy-intensive food system in place, we will need more muscle power devoted to food production, and more people on the farm." [Absolutely, if you reduce the inputs of capital (i.e. equipment) and supplies (fertilizer, etc.), you have to increase the inputs of labor. That's called sweat equity. You get the sweat equity by importing migrant labor to whom low U.S. wages look high, or importing romantics for whom the sweat perfumes the country air.]

"Truly great cooking — not faddish 1.5-pound rib-eye steaks with butter sauce, but food that has evolved from the world’s thriving peasant cuisines — is based on the correspondence of good farming to a healthy environment and good nutrition. It’s never been any other way, and we should be grateful. The future belongs to the gourmet." [Snark, Hell if it does, not at the prices you charge in your restaurants. Someone living on a 4-acre farm would never pass through the doorway of your restaurant and pay $78 for a dinner. That's over one percent of his net for the year.}