The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food (3 page)

Chefs are often asked how their menus are created, especially how new dishes come into existence. Some of us are inspired by a favorite food from childhood, or we’re drawn to rethinking classic preparations. A new kitchen tool may spark an idea, or a visit to the museum. As with anything creative, it’s tough to pinpoint the origin, but whatever the process, the scaffolding for the idea forms first; assembling the ingredients comes later.

We forget that for most of human history, it happened the other way around. We foraged and then, out of sheer necessity, transformed what we found into something else—something more digestible and storable, with better nutrition and flavor. Farm-to-table restaurants promote their menus as having evolved in that order: forage first—maybe with a morning’s stroll through the farmers’ market—and create later. The promise of farm-to-table cooking is that menus take their shape from the constraints of local agriculture and celebrate them.

Blue Hill at Stone Barns was conceived with that promise of further shortening the food chain. David Rockefeller, grandson of patriarch John D.
Rockefeller, set out to preserve a memory—the place where he sipped warm milk from the lid of the milking jug. (The Normandy-style structures were built in the 1930s as part of the family’s old eighty-acre dairy farm, twenty miles north of New York City.) He was also intent on making a tangible tribute to his late wife, Peggy, who raised breeding cattle on the farm and founded the American Farmland Trust to curb the loss of productive farmland.

Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, along with the restaurant Blue Hill at Stone Barns, opened in the spring of 2004. Mr. Rockefeller donated the land and funded the renovation of the barns into an educational center, a place that he and his daughter Peggy Dulany envisioned would promote local agriculture with programs for children and adults. He also funded a working farm. Vegetables and fruits are managed by Jack, who oversees a 23,000-square-foot greenhouse and an eight-acre outdoor production field. The animals—pigs, sheep, chickens, geese, and honeybees—rotate around the more than twenty acres of pasture and woodlands, under the direction of Craig Haney, the livestock manager.

Take the harvests from the Stone Barns fields just outside the kitchen window, or from farms within a radius of a hundred or so miles, and incorporate them into the menu. How much more farm-to-table can you get?

But during that summer evening, the shortsightedness of the system—and perhaps the reason farm-to-table has failed to transform the way most of our food is grown in this country—suddenly seemed obvious. In just the first few minutes of a busy dinner service, we had already sold out of a new entrée of grass-fed lamb chops.

For much of that month, I had been preparing the waiters for the farm’s first lamb—a Finn-Dorset breed fed only grass. The waiters learned about Craig’s intensive pasture management, about how the sheep were moved twice a day onto the choicest grass, and how the chickens followed the sheep
to help ensure even better grass for the next time around. It was among the more interesting things happening on the farm, if not the most delicious.

To honor the addition of lamb to the menu, we carefully sketched out a new dish, which included roasted zucchini and a minted puree made with the skins. I visited the farmers’ market on an early-morning sweep to supplement whatever zucchini Jack promised to harvest.

That night, the waiters (convincing as waiters tend to be when they get their hands on a good story) succeeded in selling the lamb chops to each one of those first tables, sometimes to every diner at the table. There are sixteen individual chops per lamb. We had three animals, so forty-eight chops were ready for roasting, three to a plate. After months of work, years of grass management, a four-hour round-trip to the slaughterhouse, and a butcher breaking down the animals with the patience and skill of a surgeon, we had sold out in the time it takes to eat a hot dog.

Craig’s lamb chops were replaced with grass-fed lamb chops from another farm. Diners, unaware of what they were missing, were happy. So where was the problem? A year into the life of Stone Barns, the farm’s harvests were better than expected, the restaurant was busier than we’d anticipated, and our network of local farmers was expanding. With my sudden qualms about our tactics, I might have been accused of looking for the hole in the doughnut.

And yet, the night of the lamb-chop sellout, I began to think that the hole in our doughnut was the menu itself, or our Western conception of it, which still obeyed the conventions of a protein-centric diet. Sure, our meat was grass-fed (and our chicken free-range, and our fish line-caught) and our vegetables local and, for the most part, organic. But we were still trying to fit into an established system of eating, based on the hegemony of the choicest cuts. By cooking with grass-fed lamb and by supporting local farmers, we
were opting out of the conventional food chain, shortening food miles, and working with more flavorful food. But we weren’t addressing the larger problem. The larger problem, as I came to see it, is that farm-to-table allows, even celebrates, a kind of cherry-picking of ingredients that are often ecologically demanding and expensive to grow. Farm-to-table chefs may claim to base their cooking on whatever the farmer’s picked that day (and I should know, since I do it often), but whatever the farmer has picked that day is really about an expectation of what will be purchased that day. Which is really about an expected way of eating. It forces farmers into growing crops like zucchini and tomatoes (requiring lots of real estate and soil nutrients) or into raising enough lambs to sell mostly just the chops, because if they don’t, the chef, or even the enlightened shopper, will simply buy from another farmer.

Farm-to-table may sound right—it’s direct and connected—but really the farmer ends up servicing the table, not the other way around. It makes good agriculture difficult to sustain.

We did away with the menus a year later. Instead diners were presented with a list of ingredients. Some vegetables, like peas, made multiple appearances throughout the meal. Others, like rare varieties of lettuce, became part of a shared course for the table. Lamb rack for a six-top; lamb brain and belly for a table of two. No obligations. No prescribed protein-to-vegetable ratios. We merely outlined the possibilities. The list was evidence that the farmers dictated the menu. I was thrilled.

And then, after several years of experimenting, I wasn’t. My cooking did not amount to any radical paradigm shift. I was still sketching out ideas for dishes first and figuring out what farmers could supply us with later, checking off ingredients as if shopping at a grocery store.

Over time, I recognized that abandoning the menu wasn’t enough. I wanted an organizing principle, a collection of dishes instead of a laundry list of ingredients, reflecting a whole system of agriculture—a cuisine, in other words.

The very best cuisines—French, Italian, Indian, and Chinese, among others—were built around this idea. In most cases, the limited offerings of peasant farming meant that grains or vegetables assumed center stage, with a smattering of meat, most often lesser cuts such as neck or shank. Classic dishes emerged—pot-au-feu in French cuisine, polenta in Italian, paella in Spanish—to take advantage of (read: make delicious) what the land could supply.

The melting pot of American cuisine did not evolve out of this philosophy. Despite the natural abundance—or, rather, as many historians argue, because of the abundance—we were never forced into a more enlightened way of eating. Colonial agriculture
took root in the philosophy of extraction. Conquer and tame nature rather than work in concert with nature. The exploitative relationship was made possible by the availability of large quantities of enormously productive land.

Likewise,
American cooking was characterized, from the beginning, by its immoderation—large amounts of meat and starch that grossly outweighed the small portions of fruits and vegetables. None of it was prepared with special care. In 1877, Juliet Corson, the head of the New York Cooking School, lamented the wastefulness of American cooks. “In no other land,” she wrote, “is there such a profusion of food, and certainly in none is
so much wasted from sheer ignorance, and spoiled by bad cooking.” A real food culture—that
way
of eating—never evolved into something recognizable, and where it did, it was not preserved. Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, the great gastronome who famously said, “Tell me what you eat: I will tell you who you are,” would have found that difficult to do here.

With few ingrained food habits, Americans are among the least tradition-bound of food cultures, easily swayed by fashions and influences from other countries. That’s been a blessing, in some ways: we are freer to try new tastes and invent new styles and methods of cooking. The curse is that, without a golden age in farming, and with a history that lacks a strong model for good
eating, the values of true sustainability don’t penetrate our food culture. Today’s chefs create and follow rules that are so flexible they’re really more like traffic signals—there to be observed but just as easily ignored. Which is why it’s difficult to imagine farm-to-table cooking shaping the kind of food system we want for the future.

What kind of cooking will?