The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food (23 page)

“CONTROL!” he screamed. It sounded as if his throat were coated in broken glass. “I can wake up and walk over and see how they’re doing. Eduardo makes a big lie, a big, big lie, I’m telling you. Why? I’ll tell you why. Geese in the wild—that’s why.”

“But I saw it,” I said.

Izzy ignored me. “Geese in the wild!” He threw his head back and laughed severely. “Do you want to know what? Geese die. They die here. They die there. They die of laughter. They die if they’re sad. They die if you touch them.” With his index finger he reached out and touched me on the shoulder. “Die,” he said.

“So, okay, capisce, it works like this, this is what Mr. Eduardo says: he says they eat acorns, yes, right, lots of acorns, and they eat some yellow grass, and they go free—free like this,
la, la, la
,
in the forest.” Both of Izzy’s arms were in the air, and he danced on his toes like a ballerina. “Like this, you know, in the wild, and the geese, they are HAPPY.” Izzy smiled a broad, fake smile, hands still in the air. “And they laugh, they listen to Schubert, and then one day . . . foie gras!”

He called out to a farmer standing next to us. “Hey, guess what? Let me tell you what. Do you know you can turn a goose’s liver yellow if you feed it yellow? Yes! You can! Feed it yellow something and poof—the liver is yellow.” The farmer looked confused. “Yes, true.” Izzy went on, “And did I tell you? One time I feed my chicken popcorn. And do you know what? When I go to cook this chicken in the pan, it flips, on its own.
Flip, flip.
I go to cook, and like this.” He turned his hand back and forth in the air to imitate a chicken breast flipping over. “It flips. Like this.
Flip!
”

Between Izzy’s accusations and the geese’s persisting ennui, I was not feeling optimistic about the fate of our “field gras.” In fact, I was suffering from my own ennui when Lisa called one afternoon to inquire about how the
experiment was going. Why not fly Eduardo to Stone Barns, she suggested when I shared my bleak predictions. He could inspect the geese and also pay a visit to Izzy at Hudson Valley Foie Gras. (She was curious, as was I, to see Eduardo’s reaction to a more conventional approach.)

I wrote Izzy and asked if he might be open to the idea. “Of course, come and see our small operation,” he wrote. “Having Señor Eduardo here will be interesting.” He followed up with a phone call, adding that he had one condition: Would the
señor
be kind enough to bring a sample liver for all of us to see? I asked him if he wouldn’t want to taste them as well? “I want to see them. Sure, taste too, why not?”

Three weeks later, Eduardo left his farm at 3 a.m. and drove through the darkness to the Seville airport, where he boarded a flight to New York City, with a stopover in Lisbon to change planes. As he passed through customs, security guards demanded that he open his refrigerated bag. They took one look at the contents and, according to Eduardo, went into high alert, yelling at the bewildered farmer for not carrying proper documentation and threatening to arrest him. “They treated me like a terrorist,” Eduardo said. “And it was just a couple of livers.” They eventually let him on the flight, but not before making him throw the livers in the garbage.

Eduardo and Lisa arrived at Stone Barns early the next morning. I first spotted them in the courtyard, standing off to the side. Eduardo smiled politely as I explained the history of the barns. After a few minutes, Lisa turned to me. “I really think he just wants to see the geese.”

We met up with Craig and Padraic and walked to one of the pastures. “This is it. You’ve got the land. This would be perfect,” Eduardo said, his head tilted back, admiring the tall trees of the woodland surrounding the pastures. “Not only geese. You could have monkeys living in these trees!”

Behind me, I heard Craig say, “Don’t give Dan any ideas.”

Kneeling at the sight of the geese, Eduardo beckoned just as he had that first morning in Extremadura.
“Hola, bonita! Hola!”

Despite his affection for the birds, his diagnosis for our project was far
from optimistic. The fence surrounding the flock had to go. The geese were spoiled, he said simply. Craig and Padraic looked on, befuddled by the complaint.

“If you want to raise Rambo,” he said, “he cannot be coddled and fussed over.” He went on. We suffered, he said, from our anthropomorphic tendencies: humans (perhaps especially Americans) will gorge on unlimited calories, but geese won’t. At least not if they’re pampered. We fed the geese grain twice a day, expecting that when the weather turned cold they’d gorge on the corn in preparation for the long winter.

“But what’s winter to a goose that’s had food delivered to him for six months?” he asked. “Geese are too smart for this. Why gorge when they know the next meal is coming? They cannot be tamed. They have to feel wild to kick-start that instinct for gorging.”

Eduardo pointed to the woods, insisting that the answer to fattening the geese lay in foraging the forest, not only the pasture. “You can have a great liver. Once the weather changes, they’ll eat compulsively. Boom, boom,” he demonstrated, pecking the air.

Craig explained that there were some acorns in the forest, but not like in the
dehesa.
Eduardo waved his hand. “The problem is not what you feed it. The problem is convincing it that it’s wild. If you create the right environment, the fattiness will take care of itself.”

We set off to see Izzy. Craig and Padraic and several Blue Hill chefs came along as well. I watched Eduardo in the backseat as he wiggled his legs in excitement. (I later learned he had never been to America, and rarely traveled anywhere outside of Spain, which explained some of his enthusiasm for the perfunctory drive.)

Passing a group of tall trees, Eduardo craned his neck, turning around in his seat to get another look at the thick woodlands. “Wow,” he said to Lisa,
reiterating what he saw as our ecological advantage. “If I had a farm here, I’d make really good foie gras.”

Arriving in the small town of Ferndale, New York, we pulled into Hudson Valley Foie Gras and parked our cars across from a row of long, white barracks. Izzy came out to greet us, introducing himself to Eduardo.

“Welcome, Señor Sousa,” he said warmly. “I am happy to have you.” He put his hand on Eduardo’s shoulder. “But please, not a word about geese around here. I don’t want to hear even the word!” I watched as Eduardo listened intently. “Every time one comes around, something bad happens. Every time. I’m telling you—every time. I once bought twelve hundred geese. Then the barn collapsed. Twelve hundred geese, and I only got six livers.” Eduardo smiled and laughed, agreeing by way of a thumbs-up sign.

We began the tour with Marcus Henley, the farm’s operations manager, who led us into a narrow building swarming with young ducks. He pointed to a wire rise on one side of the room. “We keep their water on top of that, and their feed on the other side, so they get exercise,” he said. “Just like on your farm, Eduardo.” Lisa and I looked at Eduardo, who raised his eyebrows up and down like Groucho Marx.

By the time we arrived at the gavage room, we’d met plenty of happy workers (so far as I could tell), seen clean conditions (Marcus told us proudly that, should any indication of pathogens become present, “we can blow the whistle and immediately lock the whole place down”), and observed ducks that proved Izzy’s conviction that he didn’t torture his animals.

Even in the gavage room, where the controversial twenty-one days of force-feeding takes place, I found the ducks comfortable, in a sleepy, after-brunch, Sunday-afternoon kind of way. Eduardo looked on impassively as a woman inserted a tube deep into the throat of a bird and poured in the grain. She worked with military precision. The exercise lasted five seconds or so, and then she moved on to the next duck in line.

I had imagined this moment for weeks. Here was Eduardo, the
representation of two centuries’ worth of free-ranging fowl, face to face with the insult to history—the process many animal activists call torturous and inhumane. How would he react? With outrage? Or tears? I envisioned him tackling Marcus, throwing open the doors, and shepherding the ducks back into nature. Instead he only shrugged his shoulders.

“The feeding is not a problem.” He shook his head at the idea that the ducks were experiencing pain. “The problem is that the ducks don’t even know they are ducks.” And that was that. No drawn-out philosophical observations or shrill diatribes. Just the facts. The ducks lacked self-awareness.

Marcus walked over. He must have misread the expression on our faces as disapproval. “We need to be very careful here about anthropomorphizing,” he said, looking at me. “And we need to be very, very careful not to extend our own preferences.”

I didn’t bother correcting him. It occurred to me that in focusing on the cruelty of gavage, we make ducks and geese human, and their treatment becomes intolerable. But this more than misses the point. What’s intolerable is the system of agriculture that it reflects.

On the drive home, I watched Eduardo press his wide smile against the passenger-side window. He whistled and pointed at the packed parking lot of a shopping mall, the wonder of the drive-through bank, the thick forest interrupted by the valley’s iconic pastures. He kept turning around to make sure I hadn’t missed it.
“Mira, mira, mira,”
he said—look, look, look—in exactly the same way he had pointed out a goose about to home in on an acorn.

I realized then that Eduardo’s work has a lot to do with creating a consciousness—not only in his geese, but in us, too. To taste his foie gras is to kick-start a chain of understanding about the geese (their natural instincts), the ecology that supports them (the
dehesa
), and the centuries-old culture
that supports the whole system (the Extremaduran way of life and its varied cuisine).

Our modern way of eating supports the opposite. It dumbs down nature. It makes a duck liver—or a loin of lamb, a chicken breast, or a cheeseburger—taste the same whether you’re in Scarsdale or Scottsdale, in June or January. Which, in a way, dumbs us down, too. I saw that soon after we left Hudson Valley Foie Gras, as we drove past a fast-food drive-through. It was lunchtime; cars idled in the line to order, inching forward together like widgets moving down an assembly line. The people in the cars waited in silence, their heads facing forward. No one looked any more, or less, excited about their impending meal than the ducks who had just been lined up in front of me, or, for that matter, than the geese at Stone Barns I had brought grain to a few weeks earlier.