Taco Tuesday 4/5/16
Music didn’t suddenly disappear from existence on Monday. But I kind of did. I was traveling, but fear not! Musical Mondays will return very soon. Probably as soon as next week. In the interim, time continues its forward march. And, to form, today is already Taco Tuesday. Yum.
Awhile ago, on the FBook, I shared a link to an episode of the “Chef’s Table” on Netflix. The episode centered around the chef, Dan Barber. Dan Barber, to me, is the restauranteur equivalent of Michael Pollan.
As I established earlier, I really like Michael Pollan. In case you missed it, I recommend watching any or all of “Cooked” on Netflix (A four episode documentary, 1 hr an episode). Even more I recommend reading “Cooked,” the book by the same name goes much more in depth. Mr. Pollan authored a number of other books, including “Omnivore’s Dilemma,” which I think all schools should teach and all earthlings in general should read.
So, if you find Michael Pollan even slightly as interesting, as I do, then I feel like Dan Barber puts some similar thoughts into practice in his restaurants.
Dan Barber puts a lot of emphasis on the idea of responsibility. Now I hate when the ideas of responsibility and kindness are conflated. Your kind acts are not “responsible” acts, they are nice acts. But, in a way, I guess they are responsible too.
Shoot. I just used a thought about what Dan Barber does to sink my own concept of responsibility. See, it’s easy to extend responsibility only to your immediate actions. In fact, I think you should at the least do that. However, you're a person, I’m a person, we’re all people. So even if we’ve never met, if you believe that your actions have even minor consequences, a “butterfly effect,” then every person alive, or still to live, will receive some effect from what you do.
In Dan Barber’s terminology, your actions deposit or withdraw from a collective bank. The account does not belong to just you, it belongs to each person alive. Dan Barber believes that crop rotation equals depositing in the bank. People eat lots of wheat. Farm land needs crop rotation in order to replenish minerals and grow wheat. Otherwise the farm suffers significant soil depletion. By creating a demand for the necessary crops for rotation one human encourages a farmer to rotate crops. That rotation equals the best wheat for all people. With a little longer, big picture view, it’s responsible to everyone, including yourself, to rotate crops. So it’s good selfish to be responsible. I suggest being good selfish and learning about Dan Barber.
