The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food (50 page)

“And
then
you select the one you want,” I guessed.

“We’ll pick nice-looking plants, absolutely, but then we plant them back again.”

“And then what?”

“And then we repeat.”

“Repeat?”

“Right, you keep going. It can get pretty drawn out.”

After several generations of selection, the resulting wheat might be absolutely uniform, a completely “pure” line. But unlike most breeders, Steve keeps some populations intentionally diverse—making selections based on groups of plants in order to retain some natural variety. His reasoning is similar to Glenn’s—the in-built genetic diversity provides an insurance plan for the wheat and allows it to adapt more easily to its environment. It’s a particular concern for Steve, as many of his varieties are intended for other parts of the country.

I asked him how these populations differed from a landrace system.

“Well, for one thing, we’re actively making the crosses,” he told me, whereas landrace systems leave more up to nature. And he’s often doing it with tools that have come around only in the past half-century.

We tend to think of breeders as either old-school guys, who patiently make crosses and wait a lifetime for the new variety they want, or as Monsanto maniacs, who press a button to sequence new plant genes. Steve is somewhere in the middle. He embraces classical breeding but marries it with genome mapping, marker-assisted selection, chromosome painting, and other technologies that enable him to “look inside the guts of the plant” and understand how traits will express themselves, without waiting several generations to see it play out in the field.

I was already imagining a revolutionary new variety of wheat for the following spring. “There has to be a way to get this into my kitchen more quickly,” I said. I told Steve I didn’t want to spare any expense.

“Of course you don’t,” he said, indulging me. “It’s easy to get wrapped up in all the gee-whiz shit, but in the end it all comes down to what goes on out there . . .” He pointed to the field we had just walked through. “Your wheat has to make it in the field, in the elements, through the winter and spring, the droughts and the floods. That takes time. People don’t like to hear that, necessarily, I know. They want and expect technology to cut through reality, but it can’t. Them’s the breaks.”

We stepped out of the greenhouse and back into the eight-acre experimental field. I worried that my namesake, so new to this world, would soon be forced to find its way among all those forty thousand experimental lines. It seemed a fate worse than competitive summer camp.

“There’s always a paternal thing that happens with varieties you develop and put a name to,” Steve said, picking up on my concern. As I collected my things to head back to the airport, he assured me that he would keep an eye out for Barber wheat.

W
ITH
LITTLE
B
ARBER
wheat set to fulfill, if not surpass, my high expectations, I began to wonder what might prevent all bakeries from using it, or any of the other new varieties Steve was shepherding in his field.

Access is one stumbling block, I discovered. There’s only one breeder in the country like Steve Jones. (Really. Just one, which is incredible when you remember that wheat is grown on over fifty-six million acres in the United States.) And farmers like Klaas are hard to find. So there’s still a marginal supply, and it’s expensive.

Paula Oland, the founder of Balthazar Bakery, in New York City, told me price was the reason she ignores small farmers like Klaas. “People will only pay so much for bread,” she said. “We’re at the high end already. The margins are too tight.” To grow the market and bring down the price, more farmers like Klaas are needed, but such farmers will emerge only if they know they have a market to sell into. Which, of course, brings things back to the baker.

Beyond price (assuming bakers can persuade customers to pay more for better-tasting bread), there is the problem of consistency. Like any crop harvested in nature, wheat is unpredictable, influenced by the weather and the local soil conditions. Inconsistency is guaranteed. When Klaas delivered wheat to Blue Hill, we had come to expect the flour to vary from harvest to harvest. Adjusting our recipes to the character of the wheat was manageable for the twenty loaves we baked every day. At that level of production, we’d even learned to appreciate the variances. But if we were baking two thousand
loaves and the flour acted differently with each delivery, we wouldn’t be in business for long.

Which is why almost all bakers buy from large millers. These millers are able to process fifty deliveries of wheat, from fifty different farms, and combine them (a higher-protein batch is mixed with another with lower protein, for instance) to derive highly consistent flour.

Nancy Silverton, the former owner of La Brea Bakery, in Los Angeles, learned to rely on this system because customers returned to her bakery expecting the same loaf every time. “When you buy flour from a good miller, they spec a certain flour for you, with only small variances,” she explained. “They make a flour cocktail that will give you a consistent bread.”

The corner bakery wants consistent bread as much as the industrial behemoth does, and buys flour from the same source. The prerequisite? Flour that acts the same each time it’s mixed with water.

“Look, as a baker, I loved those days back when we never really knew what would come out of the oven,” Nancy told me. “I mean, that is what bread baking was all about for me. But while people understand the change in seasons when it comes to the availability of fruits and vegetables, or the different cheeses at different times of the year, they see bread as more than a staple. People view bread as stability itself. You really can’t mess with that.”

Jim Lahey, of Sullivan Street Bakery, believes the culture of bread bakers—and bread consumers—needs to change. “
I think that the bread community doesn’t participate in the pride and occasion that you see in so many parts of restaurants, where they talk about the sourcing of the ingredients, and the chef goes in the garden and picks the herbs and the people come in and order nice wines from the sommelier,” he once said.

If grapes are soaked with rain one year, the wine tastes different, but people don’t reject it for being different, he told me. “We don’t give that kind of slack to bread. People romanticize bread bakers, but at the end of the day we’re laborers. We’re just above the guys that come out to dry off your car after the wash. We don’t dictate the rules. We obey them.”

The rules are changing. Perhaps too slowly, but the world of wheat—which includes wheat itself, but also farmers, millers, bakers, and breeders—is digging itself out of a rut. At the moment, wheat is like the preacher in George Bernard Shaw’s
Too True to Be Good
,
standing “
midway between youth and age like a man who has missed his train: too late for the last and too early for the next.”

“We know the one-size-fits-all farm—the monoculture behemoth growing ten thousand acres of one variety of wheat—we know that’s passé,” Steve told me, adamant that the green-revolution way of thinking is on its way out. “The emerging paradigm, the future of this, is to grow wheat locally, all over the place, in ridiculously small plots. Hyper-local wheat. That’s where this is headed. But we’re in a strange space right now, because the entire production chain—the fucking entire food chain, really—is still in the old paradigm. There will still be people pushing more of the same. Monsanto isn’t going anywhere soon, and I’m not fighting them.”

Not directly, he’s not. But Steve is fighting for the future of wheat, and he’s doing it on the fringe. That crystallized for me one morning several months after my visit to Washington when I opened an e-mail that he had sent at 4 a.m.

I had come to expect and look forward to these early-morning notes. Steve may spend his days in the lab and the field, but at night—sometimes all night—he experiments with his wheats and bakes bread in his backyard wood-burning oven. He is the most complete insomniac I have ever known. Between the hours of 1:00 and 6:00 in the morning, I’ve received e-mails with subjects ranging from preparing his own malt extract (“Blows my mind, food for the Gods”) to drying his bread starter—a mother dough used to increase flavor—into candy-size bars he rehydrates on road trips (“I get an itch to bake sometimes when I’m traveling and can’t sleep”). He once sent a
long, detailed note titled “Water Boarding My Wheat,” in which he described drowning and starving his new varieties to stress them into sprouting, for an extra pop of flavor. (“I had to set the alarm every two hours—not real popular with the wife.”)

But this particular morning’s e-mail didn’t have any of his usual wry humor. It was exuberant, announcing his decision to build a new laboratory for his life’s work. Steve explained that when he was hired at Mount Vernon, the position included some startup money from the university. But he had asked them to hold the funds for a few years. “I didn’t quite know what I wanted to do,” he wrote. “Now I do.”

Steve recognized that farmers would be persuaded to grow his wheat only if bakers were eager to bake with it. Most bakers were interested; few were eager. Bakers, as I’d already discovered, didn’t want to take risks with flours they didn’t know. And millers were just as conservative—they didn’t seek out wheat that bakers wouldn’t buy. Without demand, Steve could only get so far with farmers.

“How’s that for circular?” he said when I called him later that morning. “Bakers ask for certain flours because they know what they’re getting; millers know what bakers need because that’s what they always ask for, and farmers—well, farmers just get told what to grow, based on demand. And around and around it goes.” To break the cycle, Steve wanted to give everyone involved a better understanding of his wheats and their distinctive qualities.

“Selling flour to most bakers is like selling steel to Chevy and Ford,” he said. “It doesn’t change. Breeders are breeding for a specific type of flour—we throw everything else away. If it doesn’t yield enough in the field, it’s gone. If the volume is not quite right, or the texture is unpredictable, or any of these things are ‘off,’ it’s tossed aside. If the flour comes out a little yellow? Throw it out! Well, I got tired of throwing it out. I’ve wondered—my whole career I’ve wondered—what was in that yellow that I just tossed? Because there was something there, for sure, probably something pretty damn
delicious or terrific for our health. I got tired of doing that. I didn’t want to make steel all my life.”

Instead of asking the university to fund a laboratory filled with scientists analyzing traits and genes, Steve used the money to build a new kind of laboratory, unlike anything that exists in this country, if not the world—a public research space that brings together farmers, chefs, bakers, and breeders to freely experiment with new wheat varieties. He calls it the Bread Lab.

Several months later, I flew back out to Washington to check in on Barber wheat. Steve had just transplanted the first cross to the eight-acre experimentation field, but when I arrived, he didn’t seem interested in baby Barber wheat or any of the forty thousand other lines. He wanted only to show me the Bread Lab, and very nearly ran through the center’s corridors to tour me through the newly completed space.

There were mixers and a large deck oven, just as you might find in a small neighborhood bakery. And then, awkwardly juxtaposed, there were some machines I didn’t recognize, like an alveograph. Steve demonstrated its use, placing a few grams of bread dough into the center of its small, concave dome. Air pressure from the machine inflated the dough into a softball-size bubble, simulating the carbon dioxide gas released during baking. This enables Steve to measure the wheat’s “extensibility”—its ability to hold air bubbles and produce the kind of open, airy texture we expect in a loaf of great artisanal bread. He suddenly reached over and popped the balloon, a large, satisfied smile crossing his face.

“Without this you’re back in the Middle Ages,” he said (a little grandly, but Steve was feeling a little grand).

He gestured toward the next machine. “This one tests for falling number.” Falling number is a measurement of sprouting caused by dampness or rain just before harvest. The sprouting—the beginnings of germination—causes
an increase in alpha-amylase, an enzyme that breaks starches into sugars. To get the falling number, Steve filled a large test tube with a fixed measurement of flour and water, shaking it to form a thick slurry that smelled slightly of stone-milled oatmeal. He inserted a plunger into the tube, then placed the whole thing into a hot-water bath.

“If the starch is present, if it hasn’t been destroyed by sprouting, this plunger thing is going to fall slowly,” he said. Indeed, when he dropped the plunger, it slowly, almost lazily, made its way down the slurry, taking several minutes to arrive at the bottom of the tube. “The starch is adding viscosity, meaning the wheat will make for a nice, sturdy dough,” he told me.

Had the slurry been made with sprouted wheat, the starches would have converted to sugars, and the plunger would have dropped quickly through a thinner liquid. The resulting bread would be sticky and doughy, with poor structure. A low falling number is a large problem for industrial bakeries—if the dough is sticky, mechanical slicers won’t slice the loaves evenly—but it’s also a problem for artisanal bakers. If you’ve ever tried a bread that tastes sweet but has a gummy structure, it’s likely because the flour lost its starch from excessive sprouting. Low falling number is also the enemy of al dente pasta, ensuring a limp noodle no matter how quickly you’ve cooked it.

I wondered about its relevance for a breeder. Wasn’t falling number simply measuring rainfall before harvest? And wasn’t the level of sprouting in nature’s hands?

“Not necessarily,” Steve said. “If we grow a thousand different kinds of wheat side by side and we get a few days of rainfall, we’ll look at how each of the varieties sprouted.” Some sprout more easily in damp conditions. Steve referred to these as precocious. “You just look at them funny and they sprout,” he said. “Others aren’t so easy. There’s a large range.”

But then, if genetics determine sprouting, why not select for wheat that doesn’t sprout, and ensure better bread?

“It’s complicated,” he said. “By selecting just for that, you’re getting rid of a lot of other traits, too. Remember: it’s never one trait. It’s the interaction
of traits that’s important. The key is balance,” he said. “You want balance.” That kind of balance is not a priority for industrial bakeries, which have pushed breeders to select for high-gluten flour geared toward assembly line production. Steve calls it the “Wonder Bread–ification” of bread.

“Basically, fifty or sixty million acres’ worth of wheat has been bred, grown, and sold for high-speed mixing,” he told me. The system is efficient, well established, and built around what Americans are willing to pay for bread.

Steve pointed to still another machine, this one called the NIR, which measures for protein content. Like the alveograph and the falling-number machine, the NIR looked awkwardly out of place, its design perhaps inspired by a low-budget 1960s sci-fi film. “It’s measuring light absorption,” Steve explained. “The higher the absorption, the more protein present in the wheat.”

He poured a handful of Bauermeister, a wheat he developed nearly ten years ago, into a funnel. With the press of a button, it was released into the machine. There was a muffled whooshing sound, and sixteen seconds later Steve read the measurement.

“Ten point five percent. Good number, if you ask me. Not to mention Bauermeister is a sexy wheat—chocolate-like flavor is what they tell me. But bring this to an industrial bread-baking company and they’ll laugh in your face. Ten point five percent is wimpy wheat. Fourteen percent is manly-man wheat. They’d either make this part of a blend or feed it to pigs.”