Dan Barber and the Rise of the Honeynut Squash

Dan Barber has a thing for seeds. He was nerding out about them on a recent Saturday at the Food Tank Summit, a conference aimed at bringing together some of the biggest leaders in food to discuss the problems and possible solutions of today’s troubled food system. Barber sat down onstage with journalist Jeff Gordinier as among the last but surely most anticipated speakers at the summit.

The Chef

Dan Barber made his name as a chef—first at Blue Hill restaurant in New York City, then presiding over the kitchen and fields at the idyllic Blue Hill at Stone Barns in Tarrytown, NY. His restaurants collectively hold three Michelin stars and he appears in the hit Netflix series Chef’s Table, but he’s also passionate about agriculture, biodiversity, and breeding more flavorful crops. That’s what led him to urge Michael Mazourek to develop the pint-sized, big-flavored honeynut squash—the vegetable that kicked off the conversation at his Food Tank panel.

The Breeder

Mazourek, a vegetable breeder at Cornell university, was visiting the kitchen at Stone Barns in 2009 when Barber challenged him: “why don’t you breed a butternut that tastes good?” His gripe was that the butternut, that voluptuous, khaki-colored staple of supermarket shelves, was watery and disappointingly bland. Flash forward to 2015. Working with Barber, Mazourek had developed and brought to market the honeynut: a shrunken-down, concentrated version of the butternut. The honeynut’s tan skin conceals a brilliant orange flesh so sweet and flavorful it needs no embellishment in the roasting—plus it’s lighter in water and richer in beta carotene than butternut squash.

A Tasty New Variety

The honeynut’s rise has been precipitous. They’ve carved out a presence at Whole Foods and Costco. On a recent Wednesday at Union Square farmers market, nearly every squash-growing farm displayed the cute cucurbits. According to Barber at Food Tank, Blue Apron this year purchased 2.3 million pounds of them for its meal kits—up from 1.89 pounds in 2017.

Subversion Through Seeds

But it’s not just about the taste, it’s political too. Out of the honeynut’s success Barber, Mazourek, and seedsman Matthew Goldfarb launched the company Row 7 last year. Their website’s homepage announces “A Seed Company Dedicated to Deliciousness,” but as Barber explained at the conference, it’s also dedicated to disrupting the status quo. Today, consumers and chefs have access to far fewer varieties than in the past, and those that dominate the market have been mostly bred for efficiency in yield and transportability—not actual flavor. Barber further explained that seed companies are incentivized to breed weak plants that need lots of inputs to thrive—not so great on the gustatory or environmental fronts. Mega corporations in large part control what gets to consumers, and according to Barber, “Big seed and big chemical are the same thing.” It’s all part of the industrialization of our food.

By nurturing collaborations between seed growers and chefs, Barber stated that his goal is to “upend the idea that [big agribusiness] can dictate and own the seeds.”

Gordinier chimed in: “Seeds are punk rock.”