I’ve spent the past year and a half reporting out this three-part investigative series, in which dozens of former Blue Hill at Stone Barns and Stone Barns Center employees allege widespread and systemic mismanagement at these two institutions.
The first story focuses on Blue Hill at Stone Barns, the Michelin-starred restaurant whose chef, Dan Barber, seeks to transform the food system. Former employees allege the restaurant’s working conditions were anything but sustainable eater.com/22996588/blue-…
The second focuses on the farm at the Stone Barns Center for Food & Agriculture, a beacon of regenerative farming, where former employees allege the livestock program has suffered from mismanagement eater.com/23183245/stone…
The third story focuses on the increasingly close relationship between these two organizations, one for-profit and one nonprofit. Stone Barns staffers are concerned about how much money is flowing from Stone Barns to Blue Hill eater.com/23183283/blue-…
One thing that struck me was that these sources had raised many of these issues internally with their own management, at Stone Barns in 2019, and at both institutions during a staff open letter effort in summer 2020.
Both organizations attract idealists who truly believe in their mission to create a better, more sustainable food system and transform how we eat. Many people who spoke for this story say they left these organizations disillusioned.
Over months of reporting, I spoke to dozens of sources, and reviewed hundreds of pages of emails, text messages, photographs, and documents, as well as Blue Hill and Stone Barns’ own public messaging.
We reached out to both organizations with interview requests; these were repeatedly denied. We have exchanged voluminous written correspondence with their representatives, and I spoke to more than 20 former Blue Hill employees who were encouraged to contact me by the restaurant.
Overall for this story, I’ve spoken to more than 75 people. There are few things more important than the future of how we grow and eat food in this country — I hope these rank-and-file workers’ perspectives can shed new light on the challenges moving forward.
Stories like this take time, and support. I’m grateful for my editors Matt Buchanan, Erin DeJesus, and Jesse Sparks; our fact checker Samantha Schuyler; our copy editor Rachel P. Kreiter; our editor-in-chief Stephanie Wu; and our publisher Amanda Kludt
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