The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food (13 page)

Albrecht did not. He worked backward from his observation of healthy people. “Rather than assuming what a healthy diet should be, he looked at healthy people and figured out what made them healthy,” Klaas told me. “He could almost always trace it back to healthy soil.”

When Joan said that diets represent the whole range of synthesizing molecules,
she may well have been talking about how a plant creates flavor. Flavor, as Jack had pointed out, isn’t about individual minerals. It isn’t calcium or manganese or cobalt or copper. Flavor is the synthesis of all these things. The more minerals available for the plant to synthesize, the more opportunity there is for better flavor.

When we taste something truly delicious, something that is
persistent
, it most likely originated from well-mineralized, biologically rich soils. As it turns out, our taste buds may be far more sensitive than any chemist’s tools.

Eliot Coleman would agree. “I’ll never forget the night my wife and I sat down to a plate of carrots we had just harvested from the field,” he told me
once. “We dug in. And then I just stopped, fork in hand. There was a glow to the orange—it was incredible. I mean, it really glowed, like it was lit up. I just had to sit there and look at it.
Something
was going on. How do you prove a glow? A nutritionist would say, ‘
No, a carrot is a carrot is a carrot
.’ A scientist would say, ‘
No difference
.’ But taste the damn
carrot.”

A Gift from
Nature

S
TAND
ON
A
ROOFTOP
somewhere in rural America today (and, increasingly, rural anywhere in the world) and what you’ll see is a large area of land farmed in monoculture. From that vantage, you might say we’ve won the war with nature, the one we’ve waged since the end of World War II, because it appears that nature has surrendered. Uniformity is everywhere. Look out from a rooftop in Blackfoot, Idaho, and you’ll see hundreds of thousands of acres of Idaho russet potatoes. In Immokalee, Florida, you’ll see tomatoes; in Castroville, California, artichokes; in Hereford, Texas, Angus beef cattle; in Sumner County, Kansas, wheat. If you’re in Iowa—anywhere in Iowa—you’ll most likely just see corn and soybeans.

These are, of course, extreme examples, paragons of agribusiness. By growing a heck of a lot of one thing, they make the modern American diet possible. On the other end of the production scale are small farms. They are the kinds of family operations local-food enthusiasts champion—the producers that line the aisles of farmers’ markets or supply a community’s CSA. Relative to five-thousand-acre monocultures and confinement feeding operations, they are, in fact, diverse, with different kinds of vegetables or multiple breeds of animals. But they’re often guilty of specialization, too. They grow vegetables or fruits or small grains, or they raise animals for meat. Almost none incorporate all four. (Klaas’s farm, with its elegant rotations of mixed crops, was an agricultural anomaly; and even it didn’t include livestock.)

And yet, even before I visited Klaas’s farm and stood in a ditch at Stone
Barns with Jack, appreciating his subterranean worldview, I found myself perched on a rooftop halfway around the world, in the Extremadura region of Spain, looking over a very different pastoral scene. It was a snapshot of how farming could sculpt rather than dominate a landscape. Stretched out before me like a chenille bedspread was a network of fields partitioned by thick, low-lying stone walls.

I was looking out at the
dehesa
, a system of agriculture that has existed in this part of Spain for more than two thousand years. Spanning over thirteen thousand square miles of grasslands and oak trees, it’s a landscape that, despite millennia of persistence, would be relatively unheard of today were it not the birthplace of one the world’s most beloved foods:
jamón ibérico.
The dark red, almost mahogany-colored cured ham is the result of a unique breed, the black Iberian pig, paired with a traditional method of free ranging in the famed oak forests that now stretched below me.

I already knew a thing or two about how the
dehesa
’s savanna-like landscape provides the perfect habitat for the pigs—an ideal marriage of wild terrain and controlled design—and on this clear day I could actually
see
it. I could make out how early peasants had selectively cut down the original forest, leaving enormous five-hundred-year-old oak trees spaced intermittently across the landscape. Rooting happily through the dense grasses, the Iberian pigs stumble upon pile after pile of acorns, yielding hams with a sweet, distinctively nutty flavor and incomparable fat.

But what I didn’t know until my bird’s-eye view from the rooftop was that the
dehesa’
s porcine paradise is home to more than just happy pigs. Before me I saw sheep and cows grazing in open pastures. Bisecting the pastures were thick stretches of forest, and off in the distance I could make out areas cultivated for grain—barley, oats, and rye. And I saw small Spanish homes dotting the landscape, too, with vegetable gardens and hanging laundry. It was perhaps the oddest sight of all: real community right there in the middle of the daily commerce of agriculture.

While the
dehesa
is rightly revered for its old oaks and traditional
jamón
,
if not its ineffable place in Spanish identity, I realized I was looking at something even greater. We are told—in abstract, hopeful terms—that small, diverse farming communities are the best alternative to our industrialized food system. But rarely do we actually see them, a rooftop view that is so clear it looks like a blueprint for the future of sustainable agriculture. And perhaps the future of cuisine, as well.

My rooftop realization came at the end of several visits to Extremadura, a region of western Spain whose countryside is largely defined by the
dehesa
. I had not gone there in search of the perfect ham, nor had I gone to investigate a two-thousand-year-old landscape. I went to eat natural foie gras.

If that sounds like an unlikely occupation for a chef, it was. First, because flying to Spain to eat foie gras is as contradictory an idea as traveling to Canada for good barbecue. And second, and perhaps more to the point, because the idea of “natural” foie gras is, in and of itself, a contradiction.

Coveted by gastronomes, demonized by critics,
foie gras
is French for “fat liver,” which is an apt description: prior to slaughter, enormous amounts of grain are funneled down a bird’s esophagus, more grain in the span of a few weeks than most ducks and geese see in a lifetime. The glut of food causes the liver to swell to up to ten times its normal size. For a 175-pound person, it’s
equivalent to eating about forty-four pounds of pasta per day. It may sound delicious. But natural? Not so much.

At least that was what I believed, until one day when my brother, David, co-owner of Blue Hill, left on my desk a three-paragraph clipping from
Newsweek
magazine about a farmer in Extremadura named Eduardo Sousa. According to the article, Eduardo produced foie gras without force-feeding. His system, I read, was based on free-range feeding that took advantage of geese’s seasonal instincts. Like any migratory animal, geese have a built-in response to cold: the temperature drops, and they gorge to store up fat in
preparation for migration. The result, in this case, is
naturally
fatty livers—a feat I hadn’t thought possible. I pinned the article to the board in front of my desk, intending to investigate further.

At the time, foie gras was quickly gaining attention from the press—even more so than usual. Chicago had already outlawed the sale of foie gras, and legislation was pending in California and New York.
*
The issue, vehemently argued by animal rights activists (and just as vehemently refuted by foie gras supporters), is that force-feeding, or “gavage”—the requisite part of the fattening, wherein a metal tube is inserted down a duck’s throat to deliver food—is cruel and painful. Watch a Farm Sanctuary video of the weakened, bloated ducks and you can see why the practice is so controversial; it’s not a convincing picture of animal welfare.

And yet, denouncing the product on moral grounds is easy; refusing to cook with it is not. The problem for us chefs, and it’s not a small one, is that foie gras is so delicious. It’s truly, indisputably luscious—fatty and unctuous, capable of transforming even the most humble dish. In other words, foie gras makes chefs look like better chefs.

I first tasted foie gras out of a can.

It was the mid-1970s. My father, a businessman, was approached by two Frenchmen who had an idea for a new children’s board game. Their meeting took place in our living room, and as a house gift they presented a small black can of foie gras. My father brought out the melba toast. He insisted my brother and I stop watching television and acquaint ourselves with the delicacy. One of the Frenchmen removed the gray, wet slab of liver from the can with great fanfare, while the other spoke in near religious terms about the
rich culinary tradition of foie gras, and the superiority of French life. I remember taking a bite. It was awful—the smell, the texture, the whole idea of it—but while the displeasure was short-lived, the perplexing reverence for such a disagreeable food stayed with me.

Twelve years later, I came to see foie gras in a different light. Less than a week into my first apprenticeship at a high-end restaurant in Los Angeles, I discovered that a guest chef, Jean-Louis Palladin, would be preparing a special menu for the evening.

“Who’s Palladin?” I asked Matt, the saucier.

“Chef
Palladin,” he said, with an expression of disbelief. “Chef Palladin is the greatest chef in America.”

He wasn’t overstating it. Palladin was just twenty-eight years old when he became the youngest French chef to win two Michelin stars for his restaurant La Table des Cordeliers in Gascony, an area of southwest France renowned for its Pyrenees lamb, its high-quality sheep’s-milk cheeses, and, most especially, its foie gras. At an age when most chefs are still struggling to define themselves, Palladin had within his grasp the coveted third star, which at the time meant becoming one of the greatest chefs in the world. Instead, he abruptly left France and opened Jean-Louis at the Watergate, in Washington, D.C.

He arrived in 1979, at a remarkably bleak moment for American cooking. The great advances of modern life that large food corporations successfully sold to the American public—frozen, processed, and fast foods, out-of-season produce—had gone from novelty items in the 1930s to established fixtures on our plates by the ’70s. Supermarkets, by this time well established, began competing heavily on price. The pressure to increase slimming profit margins affected not only how food was sold but how it was grown, too—pressure that would mitigate diversity, compromise quality, and forsake flavor for volume. In this new, consolidated era of agricultural efficiency, small farmers were left with few outlets—organized farmers’ markets were just beginning, for example—and without direct access to consumers, many sold their farms to developers and cashed out.

Palladin didn’t arrive at the bleak American culinary scene and call it a wasteland, which was the conventional attitude of most French chefs. “You’d hear it every day back then,” New York restaurateur Drew Nieporent once told me, about his time spent working through the ranks of classic French restaurants. “‘The butter is better in France, the beans are better in France’—it was the tyranny of the superior French product. And it was myth.”

Palladin was one of the first to debunk the myth. He celebrated iconic American products such as Virginia ham and sweet corn, and distilled them through the rigors of French technique, elevating a mere baked potato or crab cake to culinary art. And he showcased more lowly (and often ignored) ingredients, such as barnacles, blood sausages, and pig’s ears.

But the ingredient he most prized, foie gras, was at the time unavailable in America, and illegal to import (unless it came in a can, which it didn’t take an epicurean to reject). Palladin was not deterred. He flew to France and shoved goose livers into the gullets of monkfish, predicting—correctly—that customs agents would avoid inspecting fish for contraband on his return. At the height of the illegal importation,
Palladin was smuggling approximately twenty livers per week and serving them as off-the-menu specials to diners eager to taste the real thing.

His fearlessness made him a chef’s chef, as well as a culinary star. Chefs and food lovers from around the country began making pilgrimages to taste the new American cuisine of Jean-Louis Palladin.