Why Chef Dan Barber Turned His Restaurant Into a Food Processing Facility

With 30% of independent farms facing the prospect of bankruptcy, a shuttered farm-to-table restaurant is trying to help

Photo courtesy of resourcED

Of the many industries that have been struck by the Covid-19 pandemic, the restaurant industry has perhaps been hit the hardest. Delivery-focused operations that rely on cheap, simple ingredients may be better-positioned to ride out the worst of the pandemic, but restaurants that rely on sourcing and preparing local, quality ingredients to serve to in-house diners had to shut down and lay off employees almost overnight, as restaurateur Tom Colicchio told Marker in March. But what happens to the farm side of the farm-to-table equation when the tables are closed?

That’s the question author and chef Dan Barber set out to answer, along with his brother and business partner David. A week after their pioneering farm-to-table restaurants Blue Hill NYC and Blue Hill at Stone Barns shut down in March, they started a program called resourcED, aimed at assessing the impact of the pandemic upon the kinds of small, independent farms they work with, and finding ways to support them, including a new produce box delivery program. Marker spoke with the brothers about how the pandemic has affected the food supply…