The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food (31 page)

When I pressed him about the role of all the other birds, filter-feeding ones aside, there was even more humility in Miguel’s voice. “Ninety percent of the things that happen between the species at Veta la Palma we can’t see,” he said. “But I am absolutely sure they are allies of the system.”

The bottom line is, you must embrace life, which is to say
all
life, not just what you’re trying to grow, or, as Klaas would argue about healthy soil, what you can actually see.

A stock market index, if you know how to read it, provides small indicators for the direction of the market’s overall resiliency. There are equivalents in agriculture. Klaas’s weeds, for instance, are like an index to soil health. Knowing what the weeds are saying is the first step in correcting an imbalance, and perhaps the first step to better food as well.

Could birds serve the same purpose? Before meeting Miguel, I would have said no. My earliest memory of any kind of bird consciousness is eating dinner on a porch in Cornwall, Connecticut, at the home of my childhood friend Jon Ellis. Jon’s father, an avid gardener, had memorized a catalog of birdsongs. During dinner, whenever a bird chirped or whistled, Mr. Ellis would raise an eyebrow or hold up a finger and announce the species. “Warbler,” he would say periodically throughout the meal, or “blue jay.” It didn’t matter if we were in the middle of a heated debate or in the silent spaces between bites of food: if there was a song, Mr. Ellis identified the bird. More than anything at the time, I thought this was funny. Later, Jon would use the technique to impress girls (though he made up the names of the birds). But
looking back, I realize Mr. Ellis had a point to make. He wanted to show us that knowing about the natural world is a more enjoyable way to be in the world.

Like most chefs, I’ve always thought of myself as concerned about the environment. Carlo Petrini, the founder of Slow Food, once said, “
A gastronome who is not an environmentalist is stupid,” and I think he’s right. Our first role as chefs is to identify the best ingredients. We know that delicious ingredients come from good farms, which, almost by definition, means farms that promote healthy environments. How could they not? A badly managed farm will not produce consistently good food. That makes chefs gastronomes and, by definition, environmentalists, too.

But a place like Veta la Palma broadens the definition of “environmentalist” (and “chef”) even further. It makes you realize that healthful ecologies are determined in large part by the ecologies that surround them. How is your land healthy if the water feeding it is not clean? Every farm is intimately linked to the larger ecosystem—to what Leopold called “the land” and what we call the environment. When you farm “extensively,” you’re taking in the world.

Birds are the bellwether of that environment. In the same way that phytoplankton can tell us about the state of the oceans and the climate, and weeds, as Klaas showed me, can tell us about the condition of the soil, birds can tell us about the state of . . . just about everything. They live everywhere, after all—in farmland and meadows, in forests, and in cities. And also in between. Few species thrive in such disparate ecologies, which makes birds perhaps the most sensitive environmental barometers we have. And birds, by almost every measure, are in great decline.

Today, birds’ biggest threat, especially in Western countries, isn’t from hunting or predation. Their greatest foe is unrelenting, intensive agriculture. Fertilizers, pesticides, modern seed varieties, and mechanization have radically transformed the landscape, which means birds have less food (there are fewer insects and seeds from weeds), and their living and nesting habitats
have become smaller and scarcer (natural preserves for animals and uncultivated land have disappeared, crops are harvested in rapid succession, and birds have nowhere to move).

Since 1980,
bird populations on farms in Europe alone have decreased by 50 percent. And though there’s been some improvement among the most endangered species, especially in North America, the outlook for the future is grim: more intensive agriculture, more habitat loss, fewer birds.
*

Grimmer still is the challenge birds face due to overfishing. Studies have shown that the health of
seabird populations is tied to the abundance of prey—an obvious connection—but the recent damage is difficult to comprehend: almost half of the world’s seabird populations are in decline.

The destruction of animal populations, especially bird populations, was happening
long before industrialized agriculture. You don’t need technology to destroy nature after all (as the history of fishing demonstrates). But nature writer Colin Tudge sees the destruction from a historical perspective. He calculates that there were once 150,000 species of birds and that of those, 139,500 went extinct over the course of 140 million years. That’s an average of one species of bird lost every thousand years. “In contrast,” Tudge writes, “modern records show that
the world has lost at least eighty species of birds in the past 400 years—one every five years.”

Tudge’s predictions are substantiated by other scientists like Miguel Ferrer, a leading Spanish ornithologist who believes global climate change will wreak havoc on flight patterns. Ferrer estimates that twenty billion birds
have already changed their migrating habits due to climate change, a trend that “has
a knock-on effect on almost everything they do, from breeding habits to feeding habits to their genetic diversity, which in turn affects other organisms in their food chain.” Eduardo’s geese and their waning instinct to gorge in the fall are just one example.

Jonathan Rosen, in his book
The Life of the Skies
, reminds us that there is no such thing as a single farm. As all bird-watchers in America know, most migratory birds need Central and South American forests to migrate to in the winter, woods and fields (and farms) to land on somewhere in the north, and, still farther north, regions hospitable to nesting in:

The birds of Walden, local as they seemed to Thoreau, might have flown a thousand miles or more to get there. They are like a story told by one part of the world about another part of the world. Which is why backyard birding is a kind of misnomer after all. Birds are like castles in the air that Thoreau said we must now put foundations under. This is how birdwatching, which grows out of books but can never be satisfied by books, creates environmentalists. If we don’t shore up the earth, the skies will be empty.

Our plates may be a little emptier, too. I won’t ever fully understand birds’ relationship to good food. But it is clear, as Miguel said, that they are allies of the system.

If you want evidence, just look at the pink bellies of those thirty thousand flamingos, who, it turns out, shouldn’t even be at Veta la Palma in the first place. They brood in Málaga, in the town of Fuente de Piedra, 100 miles from the farm, because there they find the right soil to build their nests. Every morning they fly to Veta la Palma, and every evening they make the journey home to Málaga, back to their newborns. The males go together one day, and the females make the flight the next.

How are they able to find the farm? Miguel told me that scientists have
studied the flight pattern and what they’ve discovered is that the flamingos follow the yellow lines of Highway A-92, the most direct route connecting Veta la Palma and Málaga.

Moved, I asked Miguel why the flamingos would fly hundreds of miles each day. “Miguel, do they do this . . . for the children?”

He looked at me, confused. The answer was apparently obvious. “They do it because the food’s better.”

N
EARLY
TWENTY
YEARS
AGO
,
on a busy early summer afternoon, David Bouley appeared in the kitchen of Bouley restaurant with a large UPS delivery under his arm. He was excited. Brian Bistrong, one of the sous chefs at the time, described the scene to me not long after I started working there: “He was smiling from one end of the kitchen to the other, talking a mile a minute.”

Bouley enjoyed lecturing his cooks. I remember these sessions fondly. They often happened over black spicy shrimp and peanut noodles in Chinatown while waiting for the Fulton Fish Market to open. It was a kind of culinary catechism—a mixture of anecdotes and old kitchen wisdom—meant to inspire and instruct. Which was why, as he removed a bundle of newspaper-wrapped fish from the box, a tight circle quickly formed around him.

Bouley introduced the fish. They were Copper River salmon from Alaska, prized for their rich, fatty flesh and famous for traveling thousands of miles in the ocean, only to return to their birthplace along the river. By the time they enter fresh river water, they don’t eat at all, focused as they are only on reaching their home to spawn. Bouley explained that the flavor of Copper River salmon depends on the fat, and the amount of fat depends on when they’re caught. The best time to get them is just as they return to the river, when their bodies, like Eduardo’s geese in late fall, are saturated with fat (the better to fuel their arduous swim upriver). Bouley had arranged for the salmon to be shipped overnight, something that was rarely done back then.

“By the time the fish got to us, it had been out of the water for like sixteen hours,” Brian told me.

Having unwrapped the salmon, Bouley laid the still-shimmering, clear-eyed fish in a row on the table. The cooks went back to work, but he stood over the fish, rocking on his heels. Bouley had seen a lot of incredible fish in his lifetime—he’d worked across from a docking port in Hyannis, chartered planes from Maine for fish just out of the water, and at this point in his career had the best seafood in the world delivered to his kitchen door. Still, he examined the salmon as if they were ancient scrolls.

Brian described Bouley’s lips moving silently, his body a kind of divining rod. “We just looked on like it was the most amazing thing,” he told me. “Because it was.”

Chefs obsess about fresh fish. Fish have twenty-four charms, so the saying goes, and they lose one every hour. Which is why it’s difficult to comprehend, even for those chefs old enough to remember, that distinguishing the very freshest of fish is a new idea in America. By definition, fresh fish, which is to say seafood that isn’t dried or smoked or frozen, has been available to chefs—and, to a lesser extent, to the general public—in many parts of the country for more than fifty years. But by today’s standards it wasn’t particularly fresh
-tasting.

“I could always choose from a very large selection,” Alain Sailhac, a four-star chef in the 1970s and now the executive vice president of the International Culinary Center, told me. “This was never the problem. The problem was there were no standards. I’d order, let’s say, snapper, and some days the snapper was very fresh, very delicious, and then other days, oh my God, you wouldn’t have believed it, so mediocre. You never knew what would arrive.”

The widespread availability of superior-quality seafood today makes it easy to forget how impossible it was to obtain only forty years ago. Large distribution networks didn’t exist, overnight options weren’t available, and Americans ate less seafood. (Today our annual consumption averages about
fifteen pounds per person—over 20 percent more than forty years ago.) It’s a chicken-and-egg question: was there less seafood because there was less demand, or was there less demand because seafood didn’t taste all that fresh?

How to define “fresh” was at least part of the problem. Fish was fish. The industry didn’t differentiate gradations of quality. Dave Samuels, the fourth-generation owner of Blue Ribbon Seafood, a highly regarded supplier to high-end restaurants, told me that until the early 1980s, even the fishing industry didn’t really grade fish. “There was always ‘top of the line’—the stuff they caught last on boats before they headed in to dock. They got a couple cents more for this, but by and large these guys were catching cod and flounder and all the rest of it and just figuring out how to get it into a can.”

In 1986, the Portland Fish Exchange, in Portland, Maine, became America’s first display auction of fresh fish and seafood. Before this, the large fish distribution centers—Gloucester and New Bedford, Massachusetts, to name two of the most famous—held blind auctions. Fish buyers simply bought fish in bulk.

“Picture the Pit in Chicago,” Samuels said, referring to the famous Chicago trading floor. “They were bidding on a commodity, that’s all.”

Few seafood distributors have the historical perspective of Dave Samuels, but most agree that over the past few decades the industry has undergone the greatest transition since the advent of longline fishing. “My childhood is one blur of my father saying, ‘How am I going to get rid of all this fish?’” Samuels told me. “Which is pretty much all I was saying when I took over in the early ’80s. And then, poof, the world turned upside down. All of a sudden people were willing to pay more for better quality. Now all I think about is how to service the unbelievable demand for quality. We went to bed in the Dark Ages and woke up in the Enlightenment. The whole market changed.”

There were many reasons for the change—better fishing technology, an increasing awareness of seafood’s health benefits, and greater exposure to cultures and cuisines that celebrate fresh fish. But among all these influences, nothing compares to the work of just a few chefs who very nearly alone upended the seafood industry, perhaps none more completely than Gilbert Le Coze of Le Bernardin, in New York.

Le Coze, like Jean-Louis Palladin, trained under the great pioneers of nouvelle cuisine, chefs like Paul Bocuse, Alain Chapel, and the Troisgros brothers, who stressed lightness and simplicity—modernizing classic French gastronomy in the process—and successfully established direct connections with farmers and foragers. And, like Palladin, Le Coze’s most enduring legacy was to embrace America’s natural resources—to see the potential in what the American landscape could offer, which in turn dramatically transformed the supply. Palladin and Le Coze defined what they were looking for and then found it. For Le Coze, that meant going to the fish.

“I’ll never forget the first morning Gilbert came to the Fulton Fish Market,” Samuels told me. “He was walking through the stalls, and his eyes were bulging out of his head—a kid in the biggest candy store he’d ever seen.” It was 1986, and Le Coze and his sister, Maguy, had just opened Le Bernardin, a seafood-only restaurant they transplanted from Paris. Le Coze’s knowledge of seafood dated back to his days watching his fisherman grandfather and working in his father’s small hotel restaurant on the coast of Brittany.

“Finally he gets to my stall,” Samuels remembers, “and we’re being introduced, and he totally ignores me, sticking his nose right into a large bin of skate. He dove right in. The skate had just gotten off the boat, so fresh it’s still covered in slime, but he looks it over and says it’s crap, it’s no good. He starts shaking his head no, and I was like,
Who the fuck’s this guy?
”

After a few minutes of inspecting more fish, Le Coze came to another bin of skate, caught by a different fisherman but looking identical to the first, and again stuck his nose close to the surface. He raised his head with a large smile and began waving his hands. “He thought the second bin of skate was incredible. Why? I have no idea why. He didn’t speak a word of English. But he
was so emphatic. He was smiling and laughing and asking me if I could get him more of this skate here, in the second bin. I told him sure, whatever he wanted, but I had no idea if I could get more skate like the second bin, because I had no idea what he was talking about. It was skate, for God’s sake! I was selling it for pennies a pound. It seems crazy to say now, but until that moment I had never considered there could be a difference.”

Soon Le Coze was visiting the fish market after every dinner service. “I remember one day he was bouncing all around,” Maguy Le Coze told me. “He said, ‘Maguy, we will not have to ship fish from Europe!’ I thought he was talking crazy.
Every
chef in New York imported from Europe. It went without saying. If you didn’t import your fish, you didn’t serve fish. But this is what he wanted. We opened the doors with monkfish, skate, and sea urchin—no one knew what they were.” (Maguy became the intermediary. “When we opened, my brother wanted two things from me: to keep the reservation book at eighty guests per night—not one more—and to work the room to convince guests to eat rare fish,” she said. Her confidence, and her salty charm, won over a skeptical New York public.)

Not long after Le Bernardin opened, Le Coze was arguing that the selection of fish was better in America. From a biological point of view, he was right. The continental shelf stretches the length of the Eastern seaboard, much of it over 60 miles wide: one continuous edge effect. The number of habitats is enormous. Compare this with France, or even the West Coast of the United States, where the shelf suddenly drops off into the Pacific Ocean, and you can understand Le Coze’s amazement. He’d never seen so many fish.

Le Coze purchased seafood no other chefs thought to buy. He’s credited with creating the market for black sea bass and monkfish—his personal favorites—as well as skate and sea urchin. In those days, these fish were considered too lowly and flavorless for refined cuisine. So was tuna. As Samuels explained, in the 1960s and ’70s, bluefin tuna was hacked up with an ax and canned for tuna fish or made into cat food—at least until Japanese sushi chefs came to New York and began paying more for tuna that was killed and processed the right way. Le Coze was the first high-end French chef to offer raw
tuna on his menu. He is the father of the tartare and carpaccio craze that spread around the country in the 1980s and ’90s.

“It’s a funny thing,” Bill Telepan, the thoughtful New York chef and onetime protégé of Le Coze, said to me recently. “People assume Le Coze was influenced by sushi. It’s the other way around. He influenced sushi—at least its becoming so quickly accepted. There were sushi restaurants all over New York in the ’80s, but they never really caught on until Le Coze came along and devoted an entire section of his menu to ‘simply raw.’ Chefs around the country were suddenly serving raw fish. Sushi’s success is a mainstream progression of what Le Bernardin introduced.”

In the beginning, the chef’s demands put some suppliers off. “Very little was good enough for him,” Samuels said. “We didn’t really need his business, so it was easy to laugh him off. But you know what? He knew more than we did.” So Samuels began calling his fishermen, explaining what Le Coze wanted them to do with the fish on the boats—how to bleed fluke, for instance, and how to chill bass and monkfish. He had specific instructions for gutting fish. He knew what time of year he wanted which fish and explained what kind of fat he was looking for. The fishermen started to care, because a market developed that paid them to care.

Samuels’s most distinct memory of Le Coze is from his first dinner at Le Bernardin. He sat down to a glass of Dom Pérignon and never received a menu. Instead Le Coze sent out a parade of different fish courses. Samuels can still remember the cod course. “It was our fish, which my grandfather and father sold, but it was like I was meeting it for the first time. It was so white. It was moist and delicate. I took a few bites and turned to my wife. I said to her, ‘This guy is going to change the world.’”

By the late 1980s, Jean-Georges Vongerichten and David Bouley had followed Le Coze to the market, seeking the same quality and further expanding the supply. They became loyal customers of Dave Samuels.

“These guys took the football and ran with it,” Samuels says. “Especially Bouley. He was such a fanatic about knowing where the fish were being caught—not whether it was Atlantic halibut or whatever, but
where
in the Atlantic. His influence on other chefs is enormous.” Bouley learned about how temperature, ocean currents, and time of year affected flavor. And he remembered every detail. “You know those people who can’t remember your name but recall the lyrics to every song they’ve ever heard, even if they’ve only heard it once?” Samuels asked me. “Bouley was like that. He never forgot a fish.”

Bouley would soon make his own connections with fishermen, sending waiters and cooks to the docks to buy from them directly. Fishermen came to anticipate Bouley’s little red pickup truck full of cooks snoozing as they waited for the boats to land. And Bouley began identifying where the fish were coming from on his menu. You didn’t choose between salmon or squid—you chose between Copper River salmon and Rhode Island squid.

“I’d always been a fishmonger, just trying to get my catch to market before it went bad,” one fisherman on Cape Cod told me. “Then Bouley shows up and does a little freak-out over my stuff, and suddenly his cooks are coming
to me
. Other chefs start calling
me
. One day I see the menu and it says, ‘Cod, line-caught by a Chatham day-boat fisherman’ or something like that. Hell, that was me—the fisherman. I felt like a prostitute who suddenly gets called a
lady of the night
.”