The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food (53 page)

Of all the insights and observations I’ve gained from farmers, breeders, and chefs during the research for this book, I can’t help dialing back, again and again, to the one that sits with me most heavily.

It was after I told Wes Jackson about Klaas’s farm, arguing that it was a good example of sustainability. Wes didn’t buy it. “It won’t last,” he said. And just like that, he rejected not only Klaas’s work but also a generation of farmers looking to transition their farms in similar ways. As much as I longed to dismiss him as an old crank, I had the nagging suspicion that he might be
right. History shows that at some point, good farming unravels with just a few shortsighted decisions.

The vagaries of our country’s food preferences don’t help. Even with the farm-to-table movement running high at the moment, we’re still guilty of reducing sustainability down to what we buy for dinner. Rarely do we imagine the whole picture, which means that rarely are we forced to realize that a truly sustainable food system is not simple. It is not built on one or two principles of farming, and it does not produce merely one or two good things to eat.

That whole picture might look like my rooftop view of the
dehesa.
With its two-thousand-year history of diverse farming and its carefully cultivated landscape, even Wes acknowledges that the
dehesa
has lasted, and actually thrived, over generations.

The Skagit Valley is perhaps another exception, if Steve Jones continues to have something to do with it. His work with farmers and his creation of the Bread Lab is about building a community around the right kind of farming and baking.

I bet his vision will endure. But then in a funny sort of way, the time I spent with Steve only underscored Wes’s argument. Working together, farmers, chefs, and breeders can become part of a complex web of relationships that supports the health of the land. And yet, as Steve understands (and the
dehesa
got me to see), those relationships don’t last without a permanent food culture to sustain them. Few farmers have a Steve Jones to connect the pieces.

Let me put a finer point on this, closer to home. Klaas has the opportunity to create something just as important and as lasting as what Steve created. But missing from his story are crops ingrained into people’s culture through good cuisine. That’s something only I, along with other chefs and home cooks, can provide.

And it was clear I wasn’t doing a very good job. If the chef’s role is like that of a musical conductor, our goal is to create harmony—to avoid amplifying one section of the orchestra at the expense of others. As successful and enlightening as my wheat experiments had been, they were still too
single-minded, too focused on promoting only one product of Klaas’s farm. I had yet to address the countless “bycatch” crops—the millet, flax, soy, buckwheat, rye, and dozens of other grains and legumes—that made his whole wheat so delicious. And, of course, now there were more additions to consider, such as dairy. Working with these crops seemed like an opportunity—and, the more I thought about it, an obligation—to support the land’s long-term ecological health.

The same was true of my relationship to Stone Barns, and to the countless other farms that supplied Blue Hill. Like any farm-to-table chef, I supported these systems by purchasing the daily harvests. But by privileging only the ingredients I wanted to cook instead of championing a whole class of integral yet uncelebrated crops and cuts of meat, I had ignored what was really required to produce the most delicious food.

In order for these farms to last, to be truly sustainable, I needed to learn to cook with the whole farm.

What does whole farm cooking look like?

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that whole farm cooking is what peasants around the world figured out thousands of years ago. They did not choose their dietary preferences by sticking a wet finger up to the prevailing wind, as we do today. They never had that kind of freedom. Instead, they developed cuisines that adhered to what the landscape provided.

Take the cooking of Extremadura, with its regional variations of
migas—
a traditional dish of fried old bread that might include a lowly cut of braised rib meat from their famous pigs. It’s a plate as economical as it is delicious. Here in the United States, Hoppin’ John, Lowcountry cuisine’s combination of rice and field peas with a brassica like collard greens (and a small taste of pork) is based on the same logic. The dish is an ode to soil fertility: the cowpeas provided the soil with enough nitrogen to grow the rice, and the collards usually took up whatever salt was left over from the seawater that flooded into the
basin. There are too many other culinary examples to count, but all of them took their shape and form from what the local landscape could offer.

Not long ago, I sketched out a vision for a Third Plate with a similar ethic in mind: a “carrot steak,” flattened and roasted to resemble a juicy sirloin, with braised beef shank (an underutilized part of the animal) playing a supporting role as a sauce. I meant to invalidate our Westernized, meat-centric conception of a plate of food. As a first stab at the future of good cooking, it wasn’t bad. But it was merely one entry in a possible menu—a hit single without an album to sustain it.
What would a meal look like?

In a nod to the Mennonite belief that you begin raising a child long before it’s born, I set out to create a menu that Blue Hill will serve a generation from now. I wanted it to be in the spirit of my rooftop view of the
dehesa
, built around the sum of what a farm, or network of farms, can offer. It was a playbook for a new cuisine, one designed to create demand for soil-improving crops and enlarge our sense of what is delicious.

I was picturing specific plates of food, yes, but beyond that, it was an exercise in imagining how the view outside my kitchen window would change as these new ideas took root on our menu.

It will look something like this:

M
ILKY
O
AT
T
EA
AND
C
ATTAIL
S
NAC
KS

How do you begin a meal?

Ángel León doesn’t start with fish. He starts with bread, infusing it with a homemade brew of plankton. It’s a first bite with a larger idea: without plankton, there won’t be any fish left in the sea.

Like Ángel, I’ll begin with a larger idea—two of them, actually. The first will take the form of tea made from an infusion of milky oats. Milky oats are baby oats, very nearly mature but still soft and sweet. Klaas, like many farmers, grows oats as a cover crop, mowing them down before maturity so they can enrich the soil and become fertility for the next crop.

Without restoring fertility to the soil, delicious food is not possible. Which is really the message of the milky oats. I’ll cook with just the tip of the plant, the immature oat, full of sweet oak milk that makes an aromatic infusion. The rest will remain in Klaas’s field to profit the soil.

It’s a “take half, leave half” equation, just as with Eduardo’s geese. Eduardo explained how the birds eat half of his olives and figs and leave half for the harvest. “The geese are always quite fair,” he told me. We will be, too.

If this works—which means if the tea is delicious and memorable—we may well create a market for cover crops, incentivizing more growers to incorporate them into their farms. But more important, we’ll create a consciousness about feeding the soil that feeds us.

The second idea will take the form of something wild. It came to me when a forager showed up at the kitchen door with young cattails—native plants that grow next to ponds and lakes. Cattails are a filtering plant, which is why they’re so important next to water sources. They act like a sponge, absorbing chemical run-off from the soil and reducing water contamination. You don’t want to eat cattails originating from polluted places in the same way you wouldn’t want to eat mullet feeding from a polluted pond. Their flavor reflects the health of the environment.

We’ll scrape the cattails and sauté their mossy skins in butter and lemon juice. Like scrambled eggs—runny, rich, uncomplicated, perfect—they’re a nice way to start any meal. They say: relax, you’re about to eat food that’s been grown in healthy soil.

Milky oats are agriculture’s improvement crop; cattails are nature’s wild equivalent. Creating something delicious out of both makes food the measure
through which we better understand nature. It defines cuisine around cooking with the whole farm.

The meal will formally begin with a slice of our whole wheat brioche, which will taste even better than it does now.

How is that possible? If you’re thinking that the superior bread will be about improved versions of Barber wheat, you’re correct—sort of. Because by 2050 we’ll be baking our bread with Blue wheat, a delicious, nutrient-rich, disease-resistant variety developed for Blue Hill.

Here’s what happened: Barber wheat matured and went through several years of selection—all under the watchful eye of Steve Jones in his Bread Lab—and eventually became a much better version of itself by marrying with a wild wheat relative (which happened to have an attractive blue beard).

“A hundred years ago, breeders never stopped innovating,” Steve told me. “We shouldn’t either.” More lab work, more selection, and the resulting Blue wheat tastes like roasted nuts, with a bright, grassy finish.

Steve sketched out his vision for the wheat in 2013 when he came to visit Stone Barns. I confess I had a larger plan in mind when I persuaded Steve to fly to New York. I wanted to grow wheat at Stone Barns, closer to home, instead of leaving it entirely in Klaas’s hands. It was a crackpot idea; cultivating wheat in Jack’s eight-acre vegetable field is like trying to fit a car-manufacturing plant into a tortilla factory. Then again, I knew from my time with Steve that our conception of wheat as a monoculture crop, much like our expectation of beef as a seven-ounce portion of steak, urgently needed to be turned on its head. What better place to do it than in Pocantico Hills, New York, thirty miles from midtown Manhattan?

But during Steve’s tour, Jack had a more practical concern: Where exactly do you plant the wheat?

Steve had the answer. Several, even. After just a few yards, he pointed to an empty patch of land just opposite the greenhouse, suggesting it as a good spot for wheat. Passing a grassy area in front of the restaurant, he bent his large frame and broke a momentary silence with, “What about wheat over there?” A few feet later, another spot. “Or here?” And then he’d tap my shoulder, point again, and murmur under his breath, “Wheat would look pretty damn good there, too.” After wrapping my head around the image of wheat planted in rows like zucchini, I looked at Jack, who takes suggestions about what to plant about as well as a host receives decorating advice from an overnight guest. He seemed skeptical. But then Steve removed a plastic vial from his pocket, filled with dark bluish gray seeds, and handed it to Jack. He apologized for the muddy color.

“We’ll fix that. Pretty soon, blue like this,” Steve said, pointing to Jack’s shirt. “Flavor is great. And the antioxidants are off the charts. Literally never seen anything like it.” He added that the wheat wasn’t genetically engineered or patented by the university, and would be open to public use.

And that was that. Jack planted Blue wheat in the fall. Our brioche has been blue ever since.