What's New

A nonprofit dedicated to Ideas Worth Spreading, TED hosts a variety of conferences worldwide with the goal bring together people from the Technology, Entertainment, and Design realms. Many of the performances at TED are then uploaded to their website so all can enjoy the enlightening insights of the masters of various fields. Recently, Chef Dan Barber’s talk “How I Fell In Love With A Fish,” was posted, offering a unique, informative, and simultaneously entertaining approach to fish as they appear in the culinary world.

Opening with the accepted belief that fish farming will be part of the future, Chef Barber’s talk dually exposes the good and bad of the fish farming industry. After discovering the “sustainable” fish he had been serving in his restaurant were relying on chicken pellets for thirty percent of their diet, Chef Barber discontinued the fish claiming it then “tasted like chicken.”

Chef Barber then describes a vastly different experience at a fish farm in southwest Spain called Veta La Palma, which has completely reversed the ecological destruction from a former Argentinean beef farm. Run by a biologist named Miguel, the farm is simultaneously a system that is completely self-renewing, whose diverse animals are healthy enough to earn the label of a bird sanctuary, and one that purifies the water which comes from a polluted river and drains to the Atlantic.

Chef Barber’s message throughout the speech seems most clear in his last few minutes, where he addresses the question “How do we feed the world?” His answer is to break this question down first to how do we feed ourselves, “or better, how can we create conditions that enable every community to feed itself?” Barber advocates for a reliance on ecological system based on relationships among nature, to restore rather than deplete. This he says, is the only way to ensure a “delicious future.”