S2E5:
Reinventing Cuisine
with Chef Dan Barber
Dana Thomas: This is Dana Thomas and you're listening to The Green Dream, a podcast about how to green up your life.
Climate change is bearing down on us like a mighty hurricane, and it's scary as hell, but it doesn't have to be. I'm Dana Thomas, a leading voice in the sustainable fashion movement. On The Green Dream, I welcome global experts, creators and change-makers, from politics, business, and the arts for dynamic conversations on how you can green up your life. The Green Dream is the podcast of hope.
This episode is sponsored by Another Tomorrow, a women's fashion brand that redefines luxury with a commitment to ethics, sustainability, and transparency. From farm to fabric to atelier. Find Another Tomorrow on its website, anothertomorrow.co, at its flagship boutique, 384 Bleecker Street in New York City and at select stores.
Dan Barber is known as the “philosopher chef.” He's the author of The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food, published by Penguin. In it, he proposes a new way of eating, one that, as he explains in the book, “helps us recognize that what we eat is part of an integrated whole, a web of relationships, that cannot be reduced to single ingredients.”
He puts these ideas into practice at Blue Hill at Stone Barns, his family-run restaurant at the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, a multipurpose non-profit organic farm and education center set on a 1920’s Rockefeller estate outside of Tarrytown, New York. The 250-acre grounds, a beautiful spot I visited earlier this month, are open to the public, with paths weaving through fields and forests and around lakes. There, in fields, pastures, and greenhouses, organic produce and meat is farmed for the restaurant, as well as sold at the center's farm stand. Pick-up orders can be placed ahead of time on StoneBarnsMarket.Org.
My favorite Barber project is Row 7 Seeds, a vegetable seed company that breeds new varieties for flavor, such as the Honeypatch squash, a yummy little butternut that sits in the palm of your hand, like a baseball, Beauregarde snow peas, which have a deep purple tint, and the Badger Flame beet, a big golden beet the size of, well, a butternut squash. The seeds, which are certified organic and non-GMO, are available on row7seeds.com. I can attest: They grow wonderfully well.
Chef Barber has given TED talks and written opinion pieces for the New York Times and The Guardian. He has served on President Obama’s Council on Physical Fitness, Sports and Nutrition, and received multiple James Beard awards, including Best Chef: New York City and America's Outstanding Chef. In 2009, Chef Barber was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world. As award-winning food critic and author Ruth Reichl has said: “Dan Barber asks questions that nobody else has raised about what it means to be a chef, the nature of taste, and what ‘sustainable’ really means. He challenges everything you think you know about food; [The Third Plate] will change the way you eat.”
Also on today’s program, The Green Dream’s literary critic Hermione Hoby returns, with a review of An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, a new book by the Pulitzer-prize winning Atlantic magazine writer Ed Yong, published by Random House.
But first, Chef Barber, who joins us from his office in the kitchen of Blue Hill at Stone Barns. You’ll hear his team hustling and bustling around him as he speaks.
Dana Thomas: Chef Barber, welcome to The Green Dream. Tell us about your mission at Blue Hill at the Stone Barns.
Dan Barber: Blue Hill Stone Barns is a restaurant that's surrounded by a 250-acre farm that raises livestock and has vegetables and grain production, and an indoor greenhouse that produces vegetables year-round. And we are an experiment station for the future of food, that is soil-based, healthy, delicious, and gives tremendous amounts of equity to the farmer. And that's the experiment, and the goal is to create a pattern of eating, which used to be called a cuisine, but a pattern of eating for this environment in the Northeast that improves the ecological functioning of the world around us and actually celebrates food, not just for its environmental benefits, but its health benefits. And we do it through deliciousness.
Dana Thomas: Deliciousness and flavor, you talk a lot about flavor. Now you're in the kitchen today, on a Wednesday, you're not open and you said you are experimenting. You have a lot of experiments in trying to figure out ways to use things. What are you working on today?
Dan Barber: Well, at any one time we have 50 or 60 experiments in the work, some of which are related to our menu and a lot of which are just ideas that our sous-chefs and myself go in a direction of for various reasons. One thing we're very excited about right now is creating more of a market for lowly grains–lowly in the sense that in America they're not coveted like they are in other countries. These include grains like oats, and barley, and buckwheat, and rye–crops that are really easy to grow for farmers, really beneficial for soil health, but we need more markets for them. And so we're trying to create ideas in the bakery and in the kitchen that celebrate these grains. And one thing that we're particularly thrilled about is an attempt to make sugar out of oats. And so we've been sprouting oats, and essentially boiling it, and from that liquid creating a simple syrup.
Dana Thomas: To replace sugar or sugar beets?
Dan Barber: Well, to replace high-fructose corn syrup for the moment. The end goal is that Blue Hill removes all white sugar, all processed sugar, from all of its dishes. We've gotten to a place where we're pretty close, but sugar is tough to get rid of and I think very important. So that's what we're working on.
Dana Thomas: Why should we get rid of sugar in our diet?
Dan Barber: Well, for one thing, it's not good for us. High-fructose corn syrup and white sugar–white processed sugar and white processed beet sugar–just wreaks havoc on our metabolism and our glycemic index. And every study that I've ever seen points to sugar as the main culprit in adult-onset diabetes, of which we have an alarming problem in this country, especially over the last 25 years. So, if we can cut back on our sugar intake, we would be doing a lot for our body. We'd also be doing a lot for the health of the planet, because sugar cane and beet production of sugar is monoculture and some of the worst environmental distresses in crops. So, we can sort of cut two problems with one. I'm not against sweetening. What I'm in favor of is sweetening with product–in this case grains–that we need to grow more of and we need to create more of an economic environment for. So that's what our experiments revolve around.
Dana Thomas: These grains are really great for fighting climate change because they sequester carbon?
Dan Barber: They're really great for fighting climate change in the sense that, yes, whenever you have a rotation of grains beyond corn and soybeans–which right now is about 200 million acres in our country of monoculture crops that end up poisoning our soils and our waterways and as I said, wreaking havoc on the environments in which they're grown. If we can take those crops and rotate in, after they are harvested, rotate in these other crops that are soil-supporting and very nutritious for the land, as well as for us, we would go a long way to sequestering carbon. And you know, right now agriculture is 33 percent of our issues related to climate change. By the way, 33 percent is more than planes, trains, and automobiles combined. If we don't change agriculture, we don't change the climate situation. And the question is how do we go about doing it?
Dan Barber: And sort of two camps for arguments. One is: Get rid of the cow–create the Impossible burgers of the future, vastly reduce the amount of farmland and get ourselves to disrupt the environments that grow food in the least possible acreage, feed as many people as possible, but return as much farmland to wilderness and wildness. My argument, based on my research over the last 20 years, is really around doing very much the opposite. It's doubling down on good farmland and it's not the cow that's the problem, it's the "how," as people have said. It's how do we use the cow? How do we use farmland and can we rethink our diets to support a landscape that is actually truly regenerative, which actually improves ecological functioning? And that sounds like such a straightforward idea, but it's very revolutionary in the context of American agriculture.
Dan Barber: American agriculture is really extractive, and what you learn when you study indigenous foodways and really other cultures, non-colonial cultures especially, they treated their land in a way that was eking out what it could to feed its community and in eking out what it could, they recognized certain principles, which was when you harvest a crop, you have to return fertility into the soil to get your next crop. That's where rotations come from. In every culture in the history of the world, there's profound rotations that become part of the incredible cuisine. Japan is a rice culture, but to grow rice well, you needed buckwheat. And so buckwheat into rice is a fabulous rotation in the sense that it grows very good rice organically. This was pre-chemical and did amazing things in the field. It also was encouraged in the diet, you had your bowl of rice but you also ate your soba noodles. That kind of negotiation is critical, I think, to the future of good eating, because we see it everywhere in every great cuisine. Buckwheat crepes in northern France was a nod to the reality that buckwheat into wheat is a fantastic rotation, in the same way that beans are into corn in the Global South. There's a reason that you have corn and beans as primary. And so whatever part of the world, if your king crop is rice, corn or wheat, there are a slew of rotation crops that allow those king crops to come into being.
Dana Thomas: Because those king crops extract or absorb so much nitrogen and nutrients from the soil.
Dan Barber: Exactly, are extremely, extremely needy of fertility, and soil becomes exhausted. The American experiment is 250 years old. That's nothing. If you look at China, or you look at India, or you look at Europe, you have 4,000 years. And that's how soils become tired and extracted, and you start to see what people figured out they needed to do to feed their families and their community. And a lot of that revolves around rotation. To me, the exciting thing of that is that, you discover these amazing dishes and culinary dictates, which is again, cuisine is tradition, it's culture. The whole thing is wrapped up really around agriculture and soil, which to me, it's just a very exciting way to think about the future, because it's not deprivation, it's actually hedonism.
Dana Thomas: It's actually hedonism. So what is the future of food then? We hear all the time that we need to feed the planet. I personally think we just need to feed the people in our circle and all those circles add up to being the planet.
Dan Barber: It's not a bad way to think about it, I don't think. We have plenty of food, we have enough food production. If we didn't feed all of our food to cows and eat meat in the way that we do in this country and exporting this idea to the rest of the world–it's a very inefficient way to utilize resources. Because you need 200 million acres to feed cows. It doesn't make sense. If you converted that into these rotation grains, like barley, and buckwheat, and rye, and all these others, you'd be feeding a lot of people very healthfully, and you'd be improving the environmental functioning of some great farmland just in the US. And if you cut down on food waste, which is 40 percent of everything produced, you would be able to feed three Earths, three planets. Right now, even with all that waste, and with all of our resources going to feed essentially animals, most of it. We still, by tonnage, produce enough food to feed a double population. A double. So what we have is a lot of waste. And what we have is inequities that often are political in bad distribution of food. So the argument that we need to produce more food because people are hungry is an argument that goes back 200 years. It's the pedal-to-the-metal argument because people are starving. And the truth is people are hungry because of great inequality in distribution of food, not tonnage.
Dana Thomas: Right, now you talked about meat and how we overeat meat. I remember reading once, I think I was at Monticello and I saw that Thomas Jefferson said, "Meat should be a condiment to vegetables." And it seems like that's basically what you're saying too, that we should have a plateful of vegetables with a little bit of meat on the side or a little bit of protein of some sort.
Dan Barber: I'm saying that actually out of just looking at the history of all cultures and cuisines, nobody didn't have that. And that's a double negative, but let me say it in a different way. Everybody used meat as a smattering on the plate, or as a condiment. Every cuisine, the carrying capacity of land didn't afford it, so there was no choice. I just wanna stress grains because vegetables, as we just talked about, are art on the land. They require a lot of fertility, certain vegetables, a tomato is a hummer of the food world. It's a huge extractor of fertility, which is part of why it tastes good. Grains are much less extractive and have the potential with the right rotation to really benefit soil fertility. So do vegetables, too. But for sure, meat in the amounts that we enjoy them in the US and in western culture is completely unsustainable.
Dan Barber: So I'm not a vegetarian, I'm actually an active meat eater. I really love meat, but I really love it as a flavoring and in a percentage that works for wherever you live. And where I live in the Hudson Valley, eating meat is really very defensible. We have seven months of the year where you can't grow anything else but raise animals. If you live in Southern California and you want to be just a vegetarian, I would argue for that, but I wouldn't argue for it here. So eating less meat, I think, is a very, very smart way to think about your impact on the environment and also your impact on your health.
Dana Thomas: This episode is sponsored by Another Tomorrow, a women's fashion brand that redefines luxury with a commitment to ethics, sustainability, and transparency. From farm to fabric to atelier. Find Another Tomorrow on its website, anothertomorrow.co, at its flagship boutique, 384 Bleecker Street in New York City and at select stores.
Now you talk in your book, "The Third Plate," about wheat. You say, or the experts you interviewed—because you did a really wonderful job researching, but also going out and talking to people for the book—that wheat has been murdered. And I just laughed out loud when I read this because I thought: right, the French had been saying that for a while. How has wheat been murdered? Can you explain this to our listeners who are probably buying that bread in a plastic bag, because that's what you get in America–it's really hard to find a good bakery–and how we can bring it back to life.
Dan Barber: Well, the way to answer that I think is the way the farmer who I chronicle in the book, this guy Klaus Martin's answers it, he says, "We've lost the taste of wheat." And I think, once you lose the taste of wheat, it's very easy to be an innocent accomplice to murder, because you don't know what you've killed. So if you have no idea that wheat has very distinctive flavors, then eating a loaf of bread that isn't distinctively flavored doesn't seem like you're missing much. But the story of our killing of wheat is not a new thing, actually. It's quite old, and it really goes back to Roman times where there's evidence of screening whole wheat. A wheat is a seed that gets milled, and the object even back then was to try and sift out some of the bran, some of the bitter outer-coating, to get more of the white stuff, the endosperm, which today we call white flour. The issue with that is that the bread will often taste a bit sweeter, but it's not necessarily better for you, and I really would argue that it's more delicious, because it's not–the bran is actually quite delicious, if you mill it right, you treat the bread correctly. But the real travesty happened in the late 19th century and the late 1800s.
Dana Thomas: During the Industrial Revolution.
Dan Barber: I think the Industrial Revolution really created a way to harvest and mill wheat efficiently, so that you could commodify it. So you could take wheat, and you could strip it of its bran and of its germ, which is its life-giving force. The germ is about 5 percent of the wheat kernel. And you could strip that away, essentially throw it away, feed it to animals, and have that white flour. When you have white flour, the wheat is literally dead. It is inert, and you can now store it for a long time on a shelf. Before that occurrence, which is very recent– it's a hundred plus years–you had wheat grown everywhere in the US, everywhere in the western civilization. Wheat was grown locally, because you harvested the wheat and once you milled it, it was like squeezing fresh oranges. Once you were able to separate the bran and the germ from the endosperm, you were able to take white flour, and commodify it, and make it shelf stable.
Dan Barber: And once that happened, it was a seismic shift, because you had farms everywhere around me. I mean, I'm in Tarrytown. Tarrytown, tarwe town in Dutch is wheat town. And everywhere there were hundreds, in fact tens of thousands of varieties of different wheat that were locally grown and then were locally milled, because once you milled the wheat, you were very much like once you squeeze an orange for orange juice. It's very delicious right after you mill it. It does not last long. You would not covet a glass of orange juice that was squeezed a year before. It would degrade terribly. It's the same thing with wheat. Actually, wheat has more polyphenols. With a freshly ground and milled wheat, you end up with something that has flavor and smells that are intoxicating, and they bake the best bread in the world. But once we were removed from that kind of food chain, the commodified flour became the standard. And so that's where we killed wheat. We killed it because technology allowed us to not just kill it, but sort of mummify it. You could really allow it to be shelf-stable in a way that changed American agriculture forever.
Dana Thomas: Now let's talk a bit about you and your background. You actually studied English literature at Tufts. What were some of your favorite books and authors when you were studying there? Who did you love?
Dan Barber: I became obsessed with Philip Roth in college and that didn't end ever. I've read everything he's written, some of them multiple times, and it's just a big influence on my writing my book, just because I felt that he was the greatest storyteller in a way that–what makes him a great storyteller wasn't just the stories were so rich and layered, but the communication was so straight. It was so clear. To be able to have that profound intelligence and cerebral everything that Philip Roth had, but then to be able to write like that I just thought was astounding. So I fell in love with him in college, and it never ended.
Dana Thomas: And then you went on to become a baker at La Brea Bakery in Los Angeles. How did you pivot to the kitchen from wanting to be a writer?
Dan Barber: I was trying to earn some money. That was it.
Dana Thomas: That's it. And then you worked with wheat. So you started baking. You were baking bread?
Dan Barber: Yeah, my first real love affair was with bread. And I was thinking, I've become a part-time baker and writer. Actually what I thought is, "I will bake at night and write during the day." And literally in my early twenties I forgot that you had to sleep at some point.
Dana Thomas: And then, so how did you get to Tarrytown from La Brea Bakery?
Dan Barber: Well, I got fired from La Brea Bakery because I was a terrible baker, but I ended up...
Dana Thomas: Well, everyone has to get fired at least once in their career. And then it was done.
Dan Barber: I ended up working in a lot of other restaurants, and then eventually opened my own called Blue Hill in Manhattan. And Mr. Rockefeller walked in one day and said, "I've got a place up in Tarrytown that could have a farm attached to it and we could be partners." And that's when my brother and I and my sister-in-law opened Blue Hill Stone Barns many years later.
Dana Thomas: What have you learned by being on the farm? You go to the fields, you work with farmers.
Dan Barber: Yes, I've learned a tremendous amount from the farmers here. Blue Hill is a farm in western Massachusetts. We do dairy on that farm and I grew up being very close to that farm and caring for the cattle. So I've been sort of inculcated with agriculture for a long time, and very influenced by farming and farmers. They've been my teachers, both.
Dana Thomas: And you've done good works there. You said when you arrived there, there were only 20,000 bees, and now they're how many?
Dan Barber: Uh, millions. That's the work of the farm. Bees are a nice indicator of the health of the system. That's how they eat. The system's increased its robustness and healthfulness, and one way to measure it is through the vitality of the bee community, which continues to grow, and the quality of the honey, which continues to get better.
Dana Thomas: And you've also developed this seed line, which I buy and grow, called Row 7 Seed, where you have purple snow pea pods and little butternut squash that fit in the palm of my hand and giant golden beets. How did that come about and why did you do it?
Dan Barber: A lot of what we're talking about is an appreciation and a reverence really for farms, which I think has become much more of a realization for people as now America realizes that we're faced with some choices, for the future of food, that are very important. I guess my argument as I've learned about these ideas more and more is that we need to dig a little bit deeper than just the farm. It can't just be farm-to--table. It needs to be something more proactive–as we talked about those rotation crops, and really having more of a dictate to how we structure our diets and how we think about our cuisine, because our cuisine is a reflection, it should be a reflection of the environmental health of where you live. And which is why I think eating locally and regionally is so important.
But added on another layer to that—this is sort of like peeling an onion—is, if we are going to eat more grains and vegetables, we're going to center them on the plate and have that smattering of meat become more of a reality, we need to make sure the grains and vegetables taste good. And part of the problem with the prevalence of proteins over the last hundred years and beyond because of Western approaches to agriculture and farming, is that vegetables and grains have actually really gone by the wayside, in terms of their breeding. And the problem with that is that the flavor has also gone by the wayside. So what you have is a situation where we're being told to eat more grains and vegetables, but they have not been bred to taste good. And even if in the hands of the best farmers, the most proactive, the most organic, the most enlightened farmers, if the genetics aren't there to be expressed, they won't be expressed. And what I decided to do, based on, really, breeders that were teaching me in the same way that the farmers were teaching me, it was possible through modern breeding to create vegetables that were unbelievably delicious, and, by the way, unbelievably nutritious, but that also had very good yield for the farmer. So we're not talking about heirloom varieties of anything. We're talking about varieties of vegetables and grains that are stunningly delicious, but can equal the kind of modern conventional seeds that are out there.
Dana Thomas: Robust.
Dan Barber: That was a really, really winning combination. And I've, in fact, become less enamored with heirlooms and old varieties. Not because they don't taste good. They do. I used to be an evangelist for those kinds of seeds. In some ways I still am because the genetics are so great, but they're also so outdated. And so if farmers grow those seeds now, they will be servicing the 1 percent because they'll tend to be very expensive to grow. And therefore you need chefs like me who are charging the kind of money that I'm charging to sit in my dining room. That's not a way to improve the food system. It's not a way to democratize nutrition. And so I turned to these breeders, and started this company, with a hope that we can get better nutrition and better flavor out into the world.
Dana Thomas: Because that's one of the things that I hear when I write about the fashion industry and how people say they can't afford to buy sustainable fashion because it's too expensive. And I'm sure you hear the same thing in the food industry–that organic is too expensive, that farm-to-table restaurants are more expensive. What do we do if we're on a fixed budget? So this is a way for you to democratize flavor in a sense.
Dan Barber: Exactly. That's the idea. Democratize flavor. And there's no reason that we shouldn't be able to do that.
Dana Thomas: I love that. Now, this was also the argument of your book, "The Third Plate.” Can you explain to us what the third plate is? It's not the plate before home base, clearly <laugh>.
Dan Barber: The Third Plate is a rejection of the first plate, which would be a hulking piece of protein that centers our plate, a steak or a chicken breast with a little bit of white rice and a bit of vegetables scattered about. But it's also a rejection of the Second Plate. The Second plate is that hulking piece of meat that is locally grown, or grass-fed, with maybe not white rice, but brown rice, or whole grains, and vegetables that are local and organic. That is a much better plate, but I still reject it as a plate for the future, because the carrying capacity of the Earth to produce that plate of food is too costly–not just as costly as the First Plate, but too costly for what we need for the future. So, the third plate is a kind of reinvention of a plate of food, which is what we've talked about where vegetables and grains take center-stage.
Dana Thomas: That they're not the sides. They're the main course.
Dan Barber: They’re the stars. And meat plays a role. Meat has to play a role in most environments. Again, I think there are environments where fertility is rich, and a concern is not as much. But for most diets, I think meat or fish play a very important role.
Dana Thomas: Now, we're doing this conversation right before Thanksgiving, and, of course, the centerpiece of Thanksgiving for most families is the turkey, which is about the biggest slab of meat you can put on the table. With a bunch of sides all around it. Very heavy on carbohydrates, lots of potatoes, maybe some mac-and-cheese, not a lot of greens unless you're into kale. So how can we rethink Thanksgiving Dinner with the third plate approach?
Dan Barber: First of all, I don't want to discourage you from having a Thanksgiving that's more Third Plate because, let's advertise it, and that's good product marketing for me and for my book. But I will say there's something about Thanksgiving that is very special and celebratory. The Third Plate is meant to be everyday plates of food. What I find very pleasurable, and I bet you do, too, is to celebrate special occasions. Whether it be birthdays or a promotion or a holiday, like Thanksgiving or Christmas, where you really do dig into the cream of the crop. And the cream of the crop can literally mean lots of rich desserts and...
Dana Thomas: A lot of cream.
Dan Barber: And proteins that you eat in excess. And I don't think that's a big problem. Having said that, I really do enjoy–and I think most people would back this up–I really enjoy the sides more than the main actor. I love turkey, but a lot of it can be really boring. My suggestion would be to not change the traditions of—I'm a traditionalist on Thanksgiving–I wouldn't change the traditions. But I would amp up the sides. And I think that's a more delicious Thanksgiving.
Dana Thomas: In France, we have much smaller turkeys, too, so you can get a bird that looks like a big chicken in a way.
Dan Barber: I know. We have the butterball. It's an illustrative bird for the American diet. It's bland, it's bloated, it is extractive of huge amounts of resources to get it to that market weight. And we celebrate it, instead of questioning why that's for dinner, and that's something that we need to change over time. I think chefs can take a leading role doing that, because we curate really good food all day long. We should have more of a voice...
Dana Thomas: What will be Thanksgiving at Blue Hill? What will be some of the sides that you have and some of the vegetables?
Dan Barber: We're closed for Thanksgiving at Blue Hill at Stone Barns. The Blue Hill in New York is going to open, but it's a very traditional Thanksgiving. I love the traditional stuffing and we'll do it with whole wheat. I love a traditionally cooked bird. I love the kales. I do everything pretty straightforward and I tend to not be very creative at Thanksgiving.
Dana Thomas: And how can we pull in some of those grains that you're experimenting with–the barley, the buckwheat–into our Thanksgiving meal?
Dan Barber: Good question. I think a bowl of, like, barley, with brussel sprouts is like heaven on Earth. And if that's your game then I would go for it. Oats is hard for people to think about, but if you just replace any dish that you make with rice and you make it with oats and mix in rye, you have an infinitely more delicious side, or main course, for your meal.
Dana Thomas: And that sounds fantastic. Barley with Brussels sprouts, instead of filling it up with bacon, we'll have to give it a whirl. Thank you so much, it's been a pleasure and we can't wait to dig into the Third Plate and Blue Hill eats. Chef Barber, it's been a delight. Thank you.
Dan Barber: Thank you.
Dana Thomas: This episode is sponsored by Another Tomorrow, a women's fashion brand that redefines luxury with a commitment to ethics, sustainability, and transparency, from farm to fabric to atelier. Find Another Tomorrow on its website, anothertomorrow.co, at its flagship boutique, 384 Bleecker Street in New York City and its select stores.
Animals perceive the world differently than humans — this we know. But how so? Ed Yong, the Pulitzer-prize winning science writer for The Atlantic magazine, has tackled this question in his new book, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, published by Random House. The Green Dream’s literary critic Hermoine Hoby is here to tell us about it.
Hermione Hoby: Back in 2004, David Foster Wallace famously asked us to consider the lobster. The author’s great, tragicomic essay of the same name – an appetite-ruining exploration of crustacean suffering – ran in Gourmet magazine of all places, surely a flex in and of itself: I don’t imagine that magazine’s readers ever took a bite of a lobster roll again. The philosopher Amia Srinivasan achieved something similar in 2017 with her essay on octopuses, which explored the richness of cephalopod consciousness with as much canniness as its subject. Both Foster Wallace and Srinivasan were continuing a tradition begun by Thomas Nagel whose influential 1974 essay asked: “What is it like to be a bat?” All three thinkers were wrestling with the ethics of what and how an animal feels.
Now, via Ed Yong’s mighty new book, An Immense World, we are asked to consider not just the lobster, bat, and octopus, but a menagerie of creatures so multitudinous that to list them here would fill the next ten minutes. Unlike Foster-Wallace, Srinivasan, and Nagel, Yong is foremost a journalist, one whose lucid, spirited pieces on Covid for The Atlantic earned him last year’s Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting. Also, unlike those three mentioned above, Yong’s project is not a philosophical or even a narrative one. Instead, his approach is scientific and comprehensive, even if those seem rather dry terms to use about a writer as avid and disarming as this. His enthusiasm for the natural world lights up this enormous book, in which he attempts to explain something thrillingly close to the inexplicable, namely how various animals perceive their worlds. He journeys, by way of creatures great and small, through smell, taste, vision, pain and touch – as well as through categories more alien to human understanding, like echolocation and electrocommunication.
As he insists in the book’s opening pages, this is a book about animals as animals. They are not, he says, “just stand-ins for humans or fodder for brain-storming sessions. They have worth in themselves. We’ll explore their senses to better understand their lives.” An unnamed mantis shrimp is among those thanked in Yong’s acknowledgements, as are, “Finn the dog, Margaret the rattlesnake, Zipper the big brown bat,” and several other non-human personages. Yong’s delight in the myriad, fantastic quirks of the animal kingdom is infectious. Consider Coenesia attenuata, otherwise known as the killer fly, which bears the distinction of fastest photoreceptors on the planet. “If you looked at an image at the same moment as a killer fly,” Yong writes, “the insect would be airborne well before a signal had left your retina.” Or, consider the jumping spider, born with light-detecting cells that get bigger and more sensitive with age, meaning, as our author points out, that getting older for them “is like watching the sun rising.”
Yong’s display of knowledge is dizzying. It comes with a nerdy chattiness of tone that might remind you of your enthusiastic high school teacher who wanted to be your buddy and blow your mind at the same time. When Yong, in explicating the mechanics of smell detection in dogs, drops the technical term “G-protein-coupled receptors,” you can almost see him straddling his backwards chair and swiveling baseball cap around to swiftly assure us: “Ignore the convoluted name; it doesn’t matter.”
The stars of this show are of course the creatures, but the humans who study them – those charming dorks who devote their lives to one particular creature’s oddities – make welcome cameos. Biologist John Caprio, who studies catfish and their taste bud-covered bodies, is immortalized with this line: “If I were a catfish, I’d love to jump into a vat of chocolate. You could taste it with your butt.” We also encounter one Daniel Speiser, whose research into the vision of scallops–yes, it turns out they have eyes–led him to create what he called Scallop TV. As Yong explains: “He strapped their shells to small seats, placed them in front of a monitor and showed them computer-generated movies of small, drifting particles.” This absurd little contrivance revealed something astonishing: if those particles on screen were big enough, the scallops opened their shells, as if to feed.
The facts keep coming: cats can’t taste sweetness, polar bears have glands in their paws that secrete scent and help them navigate, Melanophila beetles have, I quote, “perhaps the most dramatic sex in the animal kingdom, mating as a forest fire burns around them.” But where does this welter of information leave us? Can these facts become greater than the sum of their parts?
Toward the end of his book, Yong permits himself to acknowledge the unspoken truth that’s sounded throughout like a dark chord, casting some disquiet over every delightful titbit of animal trivia. “We are closer than ever,” he writes, “to understanding what it is like to be another animal.” At the same time, through our ecological depredations: “We have made it harder than ever for other animals to be.” It might be worth remembering that the fate of our planet and all its inhabitants lies only with one species, the one we know best – our own.
This episode of The Green Dream was written by Dana Thomas. From Talkbox Productions, with executive producer Tavia Gilbert, with mix and master by Kayla Elrod. Music performed by Eric Brace of Red Beet Records in Nashville, Tennessee. I'm Dana Thomas, the European sustainability editor for British Vogue. You can read my monthly column, also called The Green Dream, in the magazine or online at vogue.co.uk. You can follow me on Instagram and Twitter where my handle for both is @Danathomasparis. Thank you for listening.
