Today, we are happy to bring you our conversation with Daniel J. Philippon, author of The Farmer, the Gastronome, and the Chef: In Pursuit of the Ideal Meal

What inspired you to write this book? 

I’ve long been interested in the relationship between writing and social change, having explored how nature writers shaped the environmental movement in my first book, Conserving Words. As the sustainable food movement took shape over the past decade or so, it became clear that writing played an instrumental role in this movement as well, and I wanted to understand how and why that was the case. By examining the lives and work of three different yet interconnected writers and activists—Wendell Berry, Carlo Petrini, and Alice Waters—I was also able to consider three different aspects of the food system—production, processing, and consumption—as agricultural products made their way from farm to fork, or plow to plate.

What did you learn and what are you hoping readers will learn from your book? 

I learned so many things, and part of the fun of my book for readers (I hope!) is that I invite them along for the ride. Unlike a lot of academic books, in which the authors have to at least pretend that they are experts in their subjects, I set out not knowing what I would find, and my analysis of the three writers I examine emerged organically (so to speak) from my own experiences doing what they did—farming, visiting with artisan food producers, and cooking from the bounty of the farmers’ market, among other activities. So this is a book about the importance of practice as much as it is a book about the value of writing.

What surprised you the most in the process of writing your book? 

How the process of researching and writing the book came to embody one of the main arguments I ended up making, which is that all three of these writers are especially interested in the idea of “utopia as a process.” Yes, each of them has an ideal vision of what a sustainable food system should look like, but it’s not as if they think it will happen overnight. Similarly, I came to see that the book itself need not be perfect, and in fact was better if I let a little imperfection in—if I showed myself failing at certain things, but nonetheless continuing to try to achieve my ideals. It’s a very human response to living in a broken world, I think.

What’s your favorite anecdote from your book?

During my time in Italy, I toured the original Eataly store in Turin with Eataly’s chief food buyer and export manager, who worked with many of the small-scale, artisan producers I was studying. She told me that when one such producer was asked to put a barcode on every product destined for export to the American market, the products all arrived with the word “barcode” written on them in magic marker. As the renegade farmer Joel Salatin memorably wrote to Michael Pollan in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, “Greetings from the non-Barcode people.”

What’s next? 

This project has been such a large part of my life for so long, it’s hard to imagine doing anything else. And I kind of don’t want it to be over, because it really was incredibly fun to research and write. Fortunately, food is such a rich subject that there’s always something more to explore, and two courses I’m teaching in the fall point to two new directions for me in the study of food writing: one on the culture and politics of simple living, which has a strong food component, and another on imagining environmental futures, which examines the interconnected issues of food, climate, and decolonization. Whether one or both of these will become a book, I’m not sure yet!