The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food (25 page)

I prepared a salad next, with Regina dei Ghiacci, one of the oldest
varieties of iceberg lettuce that Jack had been able to secure the seeds for. “This is what iceberg should taste like,” I said, handing a leaf of the dark green lettuce to Bob. “It’s been dumbed down to white, tasteless nothing—but this is what it used to be.”

Bob smelled the lettuce as if it were a fine wine, and then chewed it thoughtfully. “A little bitter,” he said.

“That’s right—tell them that. Tell them this is the mother of iceberg, full of flavor, bitter and sweet, and the kind of variety we’re really excited about reintroducing.”

I sent Bob out to the table with the salads and looked down at the order, tapping my pencil against my forehead. I saw I needed four more courses to complete the meal. I had planned on serving an egg from the farm, followed by Craig’s chicken and a taste of his Berkshire pork. I was still missing a fish course.

Our fish supplier had phoned the day before, excited by a particular piece of bluefin tuna belly he was holding—if I was interested. A highly migratory fish, bluefin run in local waters near Long Island just once a year. On a whim, I convinced myself it was worth the expense to show off this magnificent fish to our diners. It had arrived that morning.

Bob appeared with the clean salad plates and a boastful smile. “You’re killing them, chef,” he said. “Killing.” We were busy now, backed up with orders from the dining room. Captains lined the expediter’s pass to discuss their tables. I needed to decide on a fish course and move on, so I committed to the tuna belly.

The belly cut was from the midsection (the
toro
), one grade removed from the area closer to the head, the
o toro
, or
great
toro
,
which is the most expensive piece of fish in the world. You wouldn’t be blamed for comparing it to the finest
jamón ibérico
: densely rich, with an equally stupefying penetration of sweet fat. Laying the belly across the cutting board, I sliced off a small piece and popped it in my mouth.

I’ve often described
toro
as buttery rich, a description I considered apt
until I read Jeffrey Steingarten’s much more evocative account of eating bluefin belly: “At first it was
like having a second tongue in my mouth, a cooler one, and then the taste asserted itself, rich and delicately meaty, not fishy at all. The texture is easier to describe—so meltingly tender as to be nearly insubstantial, moist and cool, not buttery or velvety as people sometimes say. Have you ever tasted a piece of velvet?”

I cut into a small, well-marbled section of the belly that had a deep, almost purple-red color. As I portioned it into long strips, the fat melted on my fingers. I seared the tuna quickly in a pan, plating it on a simple stew of spring onions and peas. The fish was the star, but I wanted the farm on the plate, too. I brought it to the expediting table. “Bob, this is local bluefin toro,” I said.

“Hell, yes, it is!” he yelled, his face pink with excitement.

I looked Bob in the eye. “Local bluefin,” I repeated, “with early summer vegetables from the farm.”

Bob departed with the dishes. He returned several minutes later, sullen and confused, but feigning an air of nonchalance. “They’re deep in conversation,” he offered, and then abruptly left the kitchen. By the time he reappeared, with six tuna plates—the vegetables were picked at around the fish and mostly eaten, accentuating the untouched tuna—I knew what was wrong.

There are times when a plate of food is allowed to leave the kitchen that should never have even been plated. A terribly overcooked steak, a congealed sauce, a mess of wilted greens—these slips happen in the rush of service, and although (or maybe because) the offending plates are rarely returned, chefs sleep a little less soundly. Call this slip an error of judgment rather than an error in execution. Or just call it moronic. Even though I tried to blame Bob—had he said anything strange or offensive to make them lose their appetite? “Like what?” he asked me innocently—I knew I had been the lone architect of this little disaster. You don’t wear the high ideals of sustainability on your sleeve—you don’t gloat about saving old, forgotten seeds of lettuce—and then serve a plate of bluefin.

Because, like beluga sturgeon and Chinook salmon, bluefin tuna are going extinct.

In the mid-1990s, ocean conservationist Carl Safina wrote an epic ode to the bluefin, following it throughout the world’s oceans and documenting its demise. It was a landmark book, hailed as a call to action on par with Rachel Carson’s
Silent Spring
,
the transformational exposé about the effects of pesticides on the environment.

I read
Song for the Blue Ocean
as a line cook at David Bouley’s eponymous restaurant in New York City. I didn’t read it because I was a burgeoning environmentalist; I read it because I was working under Bouley. Along with a loose tribe of other chefs like Jean-Louis Palladin, Gilbert Le Coze, and Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Bouley is credited not just with reimagining fish cookery, which had remained classic and tired even among nouvelle cuisine chefs, but, more important, actually reinventing how fresh fish was handled, from the moment it was caught to the time it was delivered to the restaurant. Inspired by his obsession, I began reading cookbooks devoted to seafood, and then books about fishing and the oceans.
Song for the Blue Ocean
was the most memorable because it presented convincing evidence of the wholesale destruction of an entire species, one that was largely avoidable. The destruction had come about for many reasons, but none was more critical than the demand for tuna—especially the demand for
toro
—created by chefs.

Not so long ago, the bluefin’s story was one of unfathomable abundance. That changed with the international trade in seafood, made possible by advances in refrigerated air cargo. Once the Japanese (with the support of their booming 1980s economy) could reach across the world to satisfy their insatiable appetite for tuna, a fishing bonanza followed. The American sushi craze brought even greater demand, abetted by advances in fishing and
distribution.
Atlantic tuna populations dropped by up to 90 percent. Safina’s evidence was overwhelming: if we continued plundering the ocean for bluefin tuna, there would be nothing left within a generation. I knew all of that—or at least enough to know better—and yet I had gone ahead and served it in my kitchen.

I rushed through the final courses as Bob relayed their waning enthusiasm (“I’m not going to lie to you, Chef: cat’s got their tongue”), and when it was finally over I invited the table back to see the kitchen. The only one to accept was Caroline Bates. She had barely arrived at the expediting table when she said, “I’m shocked you serve bluefin.”

I had anticipated the charge and planned on simply apologizing, explaining the phone call from my supplier, the craziness of the service, and my lapse in judgment. I planned on being overly contrite.

“It was
local
tuna,” I blurted out instead. Odd as it was to justify serving a fish that was near extinction, I dug in. “Off Long Island,” I said, with an air of
You know, Caroline, I’m not sure you’re aware . . .

She looked at me, puzzled. “What do you mean?”

“Bluefin are headed south down the Atlantic,” I said. (Which was true.) “These large schools become available for local fishermen.” (Which was mostly true.) “See, there are certain times of the year, when large schools are running, when it’s acceptable to catch them.” (Mostly not true.)

“Really?” She looked skeptical now. “I don’t think that’s true.”

“Yeah, it’s true. There’s an ocean conservationist by the name of Carl Safina, who’s a renowned expert on tuna. He told me,” I explained. (Not true.)

“Carl?” she said, with a laugh. “I just spent a few days with Carl for a major story I’m working on about chefs and seafood sustainability. I really don’t think he said that.”

I like to think I remained admirably steadfast as Bates stood at the other side of the expediter’s table and shook her head. What was I clinging to? I think it was that Safina had argued, quite convincingly, that if a fishery is well managed and regulated, one ought to be supporting the small-scale fishermen whose livelihoods depend on catching within sanctioned quotas. But he wasn’t referring to tuna.

I stood silently, replaying the words “a major story I’m working on about chefs and seafood sustainability.” There was the usual kitchen commotion around us, but with the added sting of the expediter yelling for the waiters to “pick up the tuna belly for table 41! Pick up the
tuna
!” followed by Bates’s exasperation as the glistening pieces of bluefin—the majestic, hauntingly delicious, and nearly extinct fish—were whisked to the dining room in front of her.

I spent much of that summer marinating in fear of the
Gourmet
article. It was cold comfort to know of other New York chefs serving bluefin, or that nearly every good sushi restaurant in America goes through copious amounts of
toro.
They were not part of a nonprofit education center devoted to the future of sustainably produced food.

The article ran that fall under the title “Sea Change,” and while Bates did not name me, she did mention bluefin as every chef’s “guilty pleasure,” admitting that she, too, used to indulge but had since changed her mind (just like me!) after reading Carl Safina’s
Song for the Blue Ocean.

I went back and reread parts of Safina’s book after the article came out, stopping at a section very near the end that, nearly a decade earlier, I had underlined extensively (and forgotten about completely). Safina makes reference to Aldo Leopold, whose writing had helped me understand the
dehesa
and
tierra
,
the Spanish word for “land” (meaning more than just the ground we stand on). Back when Leopold defined this philosophy as the “land
ethic”—what he called land and we call the environment—it was a novel idea. Over the next half century, it became the very heart of conventional environmental thinking, and Safina called for extending it even further, to “below the high-tide line.” Explaining this new “
sea ethic,” he writes, “Simply by offering the sea’s creatures membership in our own extended family of life we can broaden ourselves without simplifying or patronizing them. With such a mental gesture—merely a new
self-
concept—we may complete the approach to living on Earth that began with the land ethic.”

Safina ends
Song for the Blue Ocean
with a thought that I also underlined: “The promise: that any
honest inquiry into the reality of nature also yields insights about ourselves and the dramatic context of the human spirit.”

He was right. After some honest inquiry into the reality of nature, I
did
gain some insight about myself, forced on me as it were, and it wasn’t flattering. Even though Safina’s writing had been affecting and instructive to me as a young cook—introducing me to the power of the chef to create demand for certain foods and demonstrating how profoundly these demands shape ecologies—I had become, somehow, the very person Safina warned against: the consumer who considers the ocean “other.”