The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food (14 page)

I didn’t know any of this at the time. But when Palladin strode into the Los Angeles restaurant that day, in the manner of someone well accustomed to his own importance, it was hard not to be impressed. Tall and thin, with an impossible mop of curly hair crowning his large head, he barreled through the small kitchen with manic masculinity, thundering directives in a voice so low it sounded as though it came from his kneecaps. Behind oversize glasses, there were fierce, appraising eyes. He never stopped moving, especially in
the throes of preparing a chicken sauce—a rich reduction of chicken necks, feet, and red wine—searing, stirring, whisking, smelling, and, every few seconds, it seemed, tasting.

By 6 p.m., with everything in place and the guests just starting to arrive, Jean-Louis paced up and down the long line of stoves, banging his hand and begging for action. “The orders!” he demanded. The orders came quickly, and suddenly I was introduced to pure high-octane kitchen action.

In the whir of it all, two memories of what he prepared stay with me. One of them I tasted, and one I did not. The one I did not taste was a chicken dish with only its lowliest parts—gizzards, cockscombs, and a cut from the thigh called the “oyster”—all bound together with that sauce. The one I did taste was foie gras and chestnut soup. I thought it was magic.

The French tradition of foie gras began, as one might expect, with peasants. In the rural south of France, the family goose was kept in a box under the domain of the
grand-mère.
Three times a day, she poured warm mash down the bird’s gullet, gently massaging its belly with deep circular strokes. The goose was slaughtered in time for Christmas, reverence by way of ritual.

It was a chef, Jean-Joseph Clause, who in 1778, as the head cook to the governor of Alsace, conceived of “pâté de Contades,” scented with truffles and cooked in a pastry crust. Struck by the flavor, and probably seeking attention from the throne, the governor sent the pâté to King Louis XVI, who claimed it to be “the dish of kings.” The governor remained a mere governor, but Chef Clause was awarded twenty pistols (today’s four stars?), and foie gras became the prize of the culinary world.

Foie gras might have remained one of the country’s most coveted foods—to this day it’s a fixture of the French Christmas table—but, like most traditions, it endured primarily because it changed so dramatically. Two transformations—one technical, one psychological—enabled its survival.
Improved production techniques during the Industrial Revolution—food sterilization, for example, and also corn used for feed instead of barley and millet—ensured standardization and faster weight gain. But the Industrial Revolution also helped to ensure a change in mind-set, subtle as it may have been, whereby animals came to be seen, like almost everything else, as commodities.

“
The goose is nothing,” wrote Charles Gérard in his 1862 study of Alsatian cuisine,
L’Ancienne Alsace à Table,
“but man has made of it an instrument for the output of a marvelous product, a kind of living hothouse in which there grows the supreme fruit of gastronomy.” The goose is nothing; the process is everything. The increasing manipulation of nature and the ability to mechanize food production coevolved.

By the 1960s, the process had become increasingly industrialized, centralized, and—along with the rest of agriculture—specialized. Ducks, not geese, became the favored “instrument,” as they conformed better to the new large-scale operations. Geese are high-strung, sensitive birds, prone to stress; you can certainly fatten a goose liver, but not without considerable care and effort. Ducks are more pliable.

The introduction of a new hybrid duck breed in the 1970s solidified duck livers as the foie gras of choice. Breeders developed a sterile cross between a male Muscovy duck and female Pekin duck, called a Moulard, or “mule” duck. Crosses of different breeds—in any animal, not just ducks—often produce a new generation with better characteristics. The phenomenon, referred to as “hybrid vigor,” yields healthier animals that grow faster and, if you’re lucky, taste much better than either of their parents. For anyone looking to raise animals, hybrid vigor often translates into higher profit—as proved true for the Moulard. The Moulards surpassed both Muscovy and Pekin in their ability to withstand factory conditions. They were more disease resistant and more docile. They were also quicker to gain weight, resulting in larger livers. And with the use of artificial insemination, these ducks could be bred on demand.

For chefs, there was another, more pressing advantage to the new hybrid.
Unlike the finely textured goose and Muscovy duck livers, which rendered much of their fat in a hot pan, the Moulard liver maintained its integrity under heat, allowing for that delicious, crowd-pleasing sear. (Until then, a thick slab of foie gras, roasted as one might a steak, would have been nearly unimaginable.) Farmers didn’t have to watch a simple flu strain wipe out a third of their feathered profit, and chefs didn’t have to stand at the stove while a chunk of their $80 duck liver lost more than half its size in the pan.

By 2007, there were
thirty-five million Moulard ducks bred for foie gras in France, and only eight hundred thousand geese. Today, it’s the way foie gras is produced everywhere in the world—France, the United States, and Hungary (Israel, too, before foie gras production was banned there in 2005). In one tiny corner of Spain, Eduardo Sousa was doing something radically different.

What began in 1812 as a quiet family tradition became headline news in 2006, when Eduardo’s foie gras won the Coup de Coeur award for innovation at the Paris International Food Show (SIAL), beating out thousands of other entries. He was the first non-French foie gras producer in the history of the competition. Asked about it many months later, Eduardo said, “A Spaniard winning for foie gras? That really pissed the French off.”

The French condemned Eduardo’s liver—first accusing him of cheating, and then refusing even to call it foie gras. “
This cannot be called foie gras,” wrote Marie-Pierre Pée, secretary-general of the French Professional Committee of Foie Gras Producers, “because it is strictly defined as a product from an animal which has been fattened.”

In other words, if there’s no force-feeding, there is no foie gras.

For months, the article about Eduardo stayed posted to the corkboard above my desk, mostly forgotten. Foie gras wasn’t always on Blue Hill’s menu, but when it was, I never considered it controversial. Hudson Valley Foie Gras, an
artisanal producer in upstate New York, provided impeccable and consistent livers to the best chefs in the country. For me, as for most of them, the foie gras debate consisted mostly of how best to prepare it.

It wasn’t the mounting political controversy, or a heartrending PETA video, that sparked my conscience. Instead, it was an early July morning I spent with the lambs that finally had me reconsidering foie gras’s place on our menu.

That morning, I walked out to the pasture and watched Padraic, the livestock assistant at Stone Barns, move the one hundred or so sheep to a new paddock of grass. I had thoughts, if not visions, of the Marlboro Man. Padraic is six feet four, with chiseled features and piercing eyes, and as he tipped his cowboy hat up to the sun, I waited for him to open a tin of Skoal or crack a leather whip to keep the sheep and their lambs moving. Instead he called out in a gentle coo, opened the fiberglass fence, and gently waved the first of the lambs onto the new grass. She excitedly trotted to her next meal.

“That a girl,” he said, tapping her on the rump. The rest of the sheep crowded close together and herded themselves into the new paddock, bringing to mind a small bison charge.

Until that moment I thought I knew good lamb. I had sourced plenty from local farmers over the years, and I had roasted enough lamb chops and braised enough shanks to recognize a well-raised lamb when I ate it. What I didn’t know, and—since Klaas had yet to introduce me to William Albrecht—what I’d never stopped to consider, was:
What does a lamb want to eat?

It’s a funny sort of question, but out in the field, watching the lambs excitedly drive to new grass, without being pushed or cajoled, it wasn’t hard to recognize that they actually cared quite a lot about what they ate. You could even call them picky. Just like the cows I once observed with my grandmother at Blue Hill Farm, they moved quickly over certain grasses to get to others—to nosh on clover and mustard grass, avoiding horse nettle and fescue along the way. They resembled hungry, slightly aggressive diners at a
Las Vegas buffet, which is the point, really. Lambs on a grass diet don’t so much get fed as work to feed themselves, and the distinction is not small.

I remember, when I was a young line cook, hearing the famed chef and owner of Le Bernardin, Gilbert Le Coze, explain the inspiration behind his seafood-only restaurant. “
Nothing is more stupid than a cow,” he said, launching into a well-polished diatribe against cud-chewing ruminants. “To just stand there, grazing all day long—there is no spirit to that. But a fish is such a wild creature—that gives him another dimension.” Standing next to Padraic on that summer morning—the baby sheep dancing in circles around their mothers, their eyes bright, their fleeces shiny—it was tough to see Le Coze’s point.

Padraic pointed to a sheep inches away from us that was running the bottom of its muzzle over the blades of grass—a rapid reconnaissance of what’s available for breakfast. The hairs right below the jaw act as a kind of radar for what a ruminant is looking for, and what it’s looking for depends on many factors, including the weather, the time of year, and even the time of day. Like us, they balance their diet, getting enough protein and energy by choosing which plants to ingest (only, as Albrecht’s field experiments proved with cows seventy years earlier, they do a better job of it).

Padraic’s job, under the direction of livestock manager Craig Haney, is to rig the game. It’s to ensure that when the sheep get to a patch of grass—when they finally commit to a bite, and then another—they’re rewarded with rich, nutritious diversity. This is the “
take half, leave half” rule of grazing: flood the pasture with the sheep when the grass is at its perfect point of development—just before its adolescent growth spurt, when it’s tender and full of sugars—but move them out quickly so the grass can recover before the next bout of grazing.

The sheep, of course, have no idea that the grasses have been carefully tended to, that their delicious spread has been painstakingly prepared by seeding certain varieties of grasses, rotating in other animals, and adding natural supplements to the soil. In fact, as I stood there with Padraic, it
seemed clear—for the first time I was seeing, not just tasting, the difference—that much of the pleasure the lambs enjoyed was because of the hunt itself. They needed (and wanted) to work for their meal. Which is perhaps why they looked so purposeful. They weren’t as wild as a fish evading a hook, but their drive gave them another dimension that Le Coze didn’t recognize.

To be fair, Le Coze could have been referring to what we’ve managed
to do
to ruminants over the past several decades. Instead of allowing them to forage, we do the work of foraging for them. We feed them corn and other grains and generally restrict their urges by narrowing their diets. And their activity: in America, most ruminants start out on grass but finish their lives confined in animal feedlots. We dull them. And so, yes, we do sort of make them stupid.

Take Colorado lamb, famous for giving us those uniform and fatty chops. Since fat carries flavor and retains moisture, it’s pretty easy to have a moist and juicy bite of feedlot-finished meat. But as Garrison Keillor said of the modern chicken, you can “
taste the misery” in every bite. Great chefs will tell you the misery you’re tasting is greasy fat. Greasy fat coats your mouth. It’s sweet, soft, and nutty, tasting nothing like the animal you’re eating. And it surrounds a kind of watered-down version of what lamb could be, which is ironic considering the Cadillac-size chops.

The added insult: most lamb recipes instruct you to “remove fat cap and discard.” We do this without thought, as if we’re unpacking groceries. When I was training to butcher meat at a restaurant in New York, part of my job included cleaning forty racks of lamb for dinner service. With each rack, the restaurant’s old French butcher had me pull off the solid inch of fat covering the loin. A small incision near the bone, a quick yank, and the fat layer tore off, like the peel from a grapefruit. On the way to the dumpster to throw out the discarded fat, I thought about the irony. The restaurant paid the highest price for this part of the animal, only to toss 10 percent of it in the garbage? (Since that fat was essentially a mountain of corn feed, wasn’t I really just throwing Iowa in the trash?)

When I asked the butcher why the chef wanted the fat removed, he simply said, “It’s disgusting, so much fat.” He was right. Growing up in France, the butcher had undoubtedly never seen a one-inch cap of fat on a rib of lamb. Feeding an herbivore grain (intensively anyway) is a recent invention, and despite the fact that the practice has become so ubiquitous—and in the case of Colorado lamb, so coveted—it’s not actually delicious.

Farmers like Padraic and Craig, standing in the field shepherding their herd, might look like portraits of America’s lost agrarian past, but, by giving the lambs what they want, they are in fact creating a modern recipe for delicious meat—complex and richly textured, without flab or a greasy aftertaste, and with a flavor that changes throughout the year.