The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food (49 page)

Steve stopped and turned to me. “Whenever I’m out here, I’m standing in history,” he said, sounding just like Klaas on my first visit to his farm. Since we were, technically, standing in the middle of a field trial comprised of largely untested varieties, I asked him what he meant. “All these varieties have genes that can be traced to antiquity. So I start to think about the farmer that saved them, or the community that preserved them. Stand in a tomato field and it’s like, ‘Okay, nice red fruit’ or whatever. But you’re really not going to capture any depth.”

I asked how many potential varieties he was tracking; there looked to be a couple thousand. “It’s more like forty thousand,” Steve said.

“You keep track of forty thousand different varieties?” I asked.

“Technically speaking, these are experimental lines, not varieties—not yet anyway,” he said. “But the math is just beautiful with this stuff.” The genetic variation in the field, and the potential for every plant in front of me to be bred again for even greater variety, was limitless, a theme park for extreme diversity.

Steve’s mastery of it all is less conspicuous than the sheer delight he takes in playing the role of a head coach overseeing his young recruits. “Will you look at that right there?” he said, cradling a not-yet-mature seed head from a line he’d been working on for years. Steve is reflexively physical, accentuating his pronouncements with jabs, taps, and touches. I got the sense he viewed the wheats’ successes and shortcomings as his own. “Look how pretty that one is—isn’t that gorgeous? It’s called Red Chief. Not great-quality wheat. But when it’s like that we just keep it, ’cause it’s so pretty. I mean, that’s gorgeous—that yellowish red, that’s just damn pretty.”

Breeders write a kind of playbook for seeds. Different breeders have
different playbooks. Steve’s approach is mainly to create new varieties by marrying desired traits from various genetic lines. He is not controlling the seed’s future as much as he is pushing it in a desired direction. And he can predict, with amazing accuracy, what the next generation will look like. Glenn’s strategy, by comparison, is more freewheeling. He’s not interested in crossbreeding varieties; if he’s pushing anything, it’s to let nature run its course and determine where it wants to go. “Sports” and outcrosses are celebrated. You could say Norman Borlaug followed an entirely different playbook, one rooted in an extreme command and control—to improve yield and efficiency at any cost.

So who has the most winning strategy? “Glenn’s work sounds great,” Steve told me when I pushed him to weigh in on the subject. “I love old ways and old things, but it is a good idea to realize that not all old varieties are good, and that ancient wheat landraces were, and are, highly adapted to their original environments. We use them and recommend them to some degree, but they are agronomically risky. Glenn is adapting them to his environment, but there aren’t many Glenn Robertses in the world.”

It was a point I’d never considered: when chefs advocate for older varieties, the assumption is that we’re advocating for the farmer, too. But Steve was saying
Not so.
Unless the farmer takes the time to adapt the variety to his own environment, there’s often a substantial risk in the form of low yields or poor disease resistance.

When I asked Steve if he saw his own strategy as more in line with Glenn than with Norman Borlaug, he hesitated. “I think I’m broader, actually,” he said. The landraces Glenn works with don’t make yield a priority, he explained. “I don’t apologize for breeding varieties that have good yield, in the same way that I don’t apologize for looking back at older genes. Disease resistance, flavor, functionality—we look at all of it. The idea that you can’t have one without sacrificing another is preposterous.”

“Don’t lower yields mean better flavor?” I asked.

“I know,” Steve said. “Chefs are pretty convinced of that.”

“It’s true of heirloom tomatoes,” I said.

“With wheat, yield and flavor are not in inverse proportion. There’s plenty of room for flavor.” The trade-off between yield and flavor, he explained, happens mainly in crops that, in their domesticated form, contain a lot of water. “A true wild tomato is smaller than a cherry,” he said, offering a pinch of his index finger. Wild foods tend to be more flavorful because they’re not “washed out by water.”

Steve pointed to a section of nice-looking wheat, an old French variety that he used as part of a cross. “That yielded 170 bushels of gorgeous, really flavorful, high-protein wheat last year,” he said. “That’s five tons per acre. Spectacular, right?” In Kansas, he pointed out, the average yield is 1.5 tons per acre.

“When it comes to wheat, the beauty is that you can have your cake and eat it, too,” he said. “And there isn’t one flavor gene—flavor is about an interaction and combination of genes. Thank God for that, right? Otherwise we’d be selecting for just one gene, which would probably spell disaster at some point.”

I asked Steve if nutrition in wheat worked the same way, and he said it did. However, his research has found that
older varieties contained more micronutrients than newer breeds that have come along since green-revolution dwarfs were introduced. The older wheats, he discovered, had as much as 50 percent more calcium, iron, and zinc. “You don’t eat wheat by the acre; you eat it by the slice, and you’d have to eat a whole loaf of bread made from modern varieties of wheat to get the equivalent nutrition in just half a loaf made from the older varieties,” Steve said.

He stopped to talk with one of his graduate students about a new trial. I kept walking. Every few feet revealed wildly different clusters of wheat plants—some dark and nearly mature, and others lightly colored, faintly white, even, with just a hint of a seed head developing. Some were so tall they towered over me like a canopy. The last time I had seen wheat this tall, I was with Glenn, in his test field at Clemson University.

Since Steve was occupied with his student, I phoned Glenn on a whim and described the scene. He was in perfect form. “Hell, yeah, wheat is tall. But you’re focused on the wrong end up,” he said. “It’s the root system that really blows the mind.”

I asked Glenn what he thought about wheat that had been crossbred in a laboratory, rather than in a landrace system like his. “How do I feel about it? I feel great about it. I’d say any way we can bring back nutrition and flavor back into wheat—which is the same damn thing, as every chef knows—any way we can do it, by landraces like I do or by inventing new varieties in a laboratory, like the ones you’re looking at, I’m all for it. Because wheat is fundamental. It’s everywhere in our culture. And if it’s not correct, the culture starts crashing down.”

He paused for a moment. “People always ask me,
Hey, Glenn, how are you going to feed the world with a landrace, mixed-agriculture system?
I tell them I have no idea how to feed the world. No clue. But what you’re standing in over there in Skagit is perhaps one answer to our future.”

When Steve returned to continue our walk, I told him I was starting to rethink my obsession with the wheats of antiquity as the only way to ensure better flavor. In a field of forty thousand exciting new possibilities, how could I not?

“Heirlooms are fine,” he said. “We don’t have to be antagonistic towards them, but we can move beyond them. If you look at an heirloom anything, it’s stopped, genetically; someone took a moment in time and froze it. But that’s not how they were developed in the first place—whether it’s a tomato or a grain or an apple. They were constantly improved.” Steve said he tries to continue that improvement by crossing landrace and heirloom wheats with modern, regional varieties.

“Like the Aragon 03,” I said.

“Right. The question was: Can we improve the flavor of Aragon 03? Can we improve disease resistance for the farmer? Can we improve the nutritional value by, say, upping the iron and zinc? We looked at it, and we doubled it for free just by selecting for it.”

“For free?” I asked.

“‘For free’ means it doesn’t affect the yield,” Steve explained. “And you don’t have to go and pull it out of a jellyfish and put it into wheat. There’s a tremendous amount of variation in the wheat already; some lines have more nutrition, others have less. It’s all about capturing the characteristics you want. This is really no different than what has been practiced for ten thousand years in wheat, adapting lines to your own environment. It’s what everyone did.”

Steve said this kind of work is critical to the renaissance in local grain. “One hundred years ago, Maine had about thirty thousand acres of wheat, all milled and consumed locally. Today there’s basically zero wheat grown in Maine. Zero wheat grown in Vermont, zero wheat grown in New Hampshire. And yet there are suddenly farmers starting to plant small amounts of wheat as part of their rotations—likely because a local market of passionate chefs and bakers are interested in flavorful whole grains.”

The problem, he said, is that these farmers are often, like Klaas, planting very old varieties with low yield—the problem with heirloom anything—or they’re planting conventional varieties with no flavor. “Without a breeder to support the continual betterment of the plant, an alternative to conventional wheat will never establish itself.”

When I later told Klaas what Steve had said, expecting an elegant counterargument, he instead heartily agreed. “That’s just it,” he said. “There aren’t a lot of choices out there. You can’t just call up a seed company and buy old seed—heirloom, landrace, or whatever. Not if you want to plant two hundred acres. Not even if you want to plant fifty acres.”

Klaas explained that, while his and Mary-Howell’s seed business has helped in some ways to fill that niche, they didn’t have the time or the
resources for experimental breeding. I asked him if the answer was to have a Steve Jones–like breeder in his corner of New York state.

“What you need,” he said, “is a Steve Jones in every corner of every state.” Neither of us acknowledged the irony that, when Congress created the land-grant system 150 years ago, it provided the means to do exactly that.

Steve’s greenhouse ran along one side of the eight-acre research field. It had a hospital-like feel—orderly, scrubbed clean, and hushed except for the whirring sound of overhead fans circulating fresh air. Hundreds of newly crossed varieties lined the rows like newborns. Clear baggies covered the seed heads.

We walked through several nursery rooms, each as immaculate as the last, until Steve stopped at a section and pointed to the Aragon 03 cross. It was a beauty. My newborn was surrounded by dozens of other crosses, but I have to say it stood out from the others—tall and well proportioned, with a slight curve at the top of the stalk.

“Barber wheat,” I said to Steve.

“Okay, sure,” he said, smiling. “I was also thinking Jones-Barber, to be honest.”

I thought back to a time, twenty years earlier, when, at the end of a long and brutal internship at a restaurant in the South of France, I visited the local farmers’ market for the first time. I roamed the stalls until I stumbled upon some red-spotted apricots. Stunned by their perfection (and, after sampling one, their incredible flavor), I turned to the elderly French farmer proprietress and blurted out, “
Où sont-ils nés?
” (“Where were these born?”) Here, in Steve’s greenhouse, staring down at Barber (or Jones-Barber) wheat in its incubator, I felt equally moved.

“How was this created?” I asked.

Fairly easily, I found out. It’s surprising how accessible the mechanics of breeding are—even to a chef whose education in biology began and ended in the ninth grade. Steve refers to wheat as the “perfect flower,” which isn’t so much an opinion as a botanical designation. Because it’s self-pollinating, wheat has both male and female parts—anthers, which contain the pollen sacs, and the stigma, respectively. If the first step had been to arrange a marriage between Aragon 03 and Jones Fife, the next step was to designate a male and a female. Steve chose to emasculate the Aragon 03 by removing the anthers, then took the head of the Jones Fife (whose anthers were still intact) and held it in place above the Aragon 03. That may sound antiquated and perhaps sexist, the male lording over the female, but there’s a functional necessity to it: the pollen must fall directly onto the stigma. Steve wrapped a baggie (called a dialysis sleeve, which looks like plastic but breathes) around the two wheats to secure their positioning. The next day, he flicked the baggie “like you would a cigarette butt,” agitating the pollen off the Jones Fife where it fell onto the stigma of the Aragon 03—consummation. Five weeks later, Barber wheat was born, the seed ready to be planted.

“How do you make sure the offspring thrive?” I asked, my paternal instincts kicking in.

“Well, you plant it. The first harvest is your F1, a hybrid that produces 50 percent of each parent,” Steve explained. “Then you plant it again and you get an F2, which is the generation with all the variation. That’s when you can really get into it and know what you’re working with.”

“Which is when you select for the traits you want,” I said.

“First we plant that generation and we grow it out,” he said.