The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food (57 page)

“The maintenance of soil fertility is the real basis of health”
:
Howard,
Agricultural Testament
,
39.

Artificial manures
 . . . “lead inevitably to artificial nutrition”:
Howard,
Agricultural Testament
,
37.

“innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes”
:
E. O. Wilson,
Biophilia
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 1.

more antioxidants and other defense-related compounds
:
See Brian Halweil, “Still No Free Lunch: Nutrient Levels in U.S. Food Supply Eroded by Pursuit of High Yields” (Washington, DC: The Organic Center, September 2007), 33; and Charles M. Benbrook, “Elevating Antioxidant Levels in Food Through Organic Farming and Food Processing,” Organic Center, State of Science Review, January 2005.

“more complex than we can think”
:
Frank Egler,
The Nature of Vegetation: Its Management and Mismanagement
(Norfolk, CT: Aton Forest Publishers, 1977), 2.

“Imagine a wonderfully balanced Italian main course”
:
Thomas Harttung, “Sustainable Food Systems for the 21st Century” (Agrarian Studies Lecture, Yale University, New Haven, CT, October 2006).

“substitute a few soluble elements”
:
Coleman,
Winter Harvest Handbook
,
197.

mycorrhizal fungus
:
See David Wolfe,
Tales from the Underground
, and Albert Bernhard Frank, “On the Nutritional Dependence of Certain Trees on Root Symbiosis with Belowground Fungi (An English Translation of A. B. Frank’s Classic Paper of 1885),”
Mycorrhiza
15 (2005): 267–75.

“subterranean-impaired”
:
Wolfe,
Tales from the Underground
,
6.

“industrial organic
 . . . shallow organic”:
Pollan,
Omnivore’s Dilemma
, 130; Coleman,
Winter Harvest Handbook
,
205–7.

“To be well fed is to be healthy”
:
Albrecht,
Soil Fertility and Animal Health
, 45.

“You are what you eat eats, too”
:
Pollan,
Omnivore’s Dilemma
,
84.

correlation between recruits
 . . . and soils:
See Steve Soloman,
Gardening When It Counts: Growing Food in Hard Times
(Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers, 2005), 19.

nutrient declines
 . . . “biomass dilution”:
See Donald R. Davis, “Declining Fruit and Vegetable Nutrient Composition: What Is the Evidence?”
HortScience
12, no. 1 (February 2009); Donald R. Davis, “Trade-offs in Agriculture and Nutrition,”
Food Technology
59 (2005); Donald R. Davis et al., “Changes in the USDA Food Composition Data for 43 Garden Crops, 1950–1999,”
Journal of the American College of Nutrition
23, no. 6 (2004), 669–82; and David Thomas, “The Mineral Depletion of Foods Available to Us as a Nation (1940–2002),”
Nutrition and Health
19 (2007): 21–55 (Thomas traces similar trends in the UK).

840 million people suffer from chronic hunger
:
“The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2013: The Multiple Dimensions of Food Security,” Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Rome, 2013.

“If we humans have this same basic tendency”
:
John Ikerd, “Healthy Soils, Healthy People: The Legacy of William Albrecht” (The William A. Albrecht Lecture, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, April 25, 2011).

“The sedentary lifestyles of many Americans”
:
Ikerd, “Healthy Soils, Healthy People.”

equivalent to eating about forty-four pounds of pasta
:
Lee Klein, “Foie Wars,”
Miami New Times
, July 13, 2006.

Palladin was smuggling
:
See Stewart Lee Allen,
In the Devil’s Garden: A Sinful History of Forbidden Food
(New York: Ballantine Books, 2002), 236.

The French tradition of foie gras
:
For more on the history of foie gras, see Mark Caro,
The Foie Gras Wars: How a 5,000-Year-Old Delicacy Inspired the World’s Fiercest Food Fight
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009); Michael Ginor with Mitchell A. Davis,
Foie Gras: A Passion
(Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 1999); and Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat,
A History of Food
(Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2009), 385–94.

“The goose is nothing”
:
Charles Gérard,
L’Ancienne Alsace à Table: Étude Historique et Archéologique Sur L’Alimentation, Les Mœurs et Les Usages Épulaires De L’Ancienne Province D’Alsace
, 2nd ed. (Paris: Berger-Levrault et Cie, 1877). Quoted in Caro,
The Foie Gras Wars
, 35–6.

thirty-five million Moulard ducks
 . . . eight hundred thousand geese:
Caro,
The Foie Gras Wars
, 33.

“This cannot be called foie gras”
:
Graham Keeley, “French Are in a Flap as Spanish Force the Issue over Foie Gras,”
The Guardian
, January 2, 2007.

“Nothing is more stupid than a cow”
:
Alan Richman describes a similar diatribe in his article “A Very Unlikely Fish Story: Brother and Sister from Brittany Open Restaurant, Hook New York,”
People
, August 4, 1986.

“take half, leave half” rule of grazing
:
Grass farmer Joel Salatin refers to this as the “law of the second bite.” See Pollan,
Omnivore’s Dilemma
, 189. In chapter 10,
“
Grass: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Pasture,” Pollan has an excellent discussion of grass farming and its history
.

“taste the misery”
:
Garrison Keillor, “Chicken,”
Leaving Home: A Collection of Lake Wobegon Stories
(New York: Penguin Books, 1990), 45.

“The challenge of cooking in America”
:
Eric Asimov, “Jean-Louis Palladin, 55, a French Chef with Verve, Dies,”
New York Times
, November 26, 2001.

“it trickles down to everybody”
:
Thomas Keller, quoted in Dorothy Gaiter and John Brecher, “The Genius That Was Jean-Louis,”
France Magazine
, Winter 2011–12. For more on Jean-Louis Palladin’s influence, see Justin Kennedy, “Raising the Stakes: Jean-Louis Palladin Pioneered Fine Dining in D.C.,”
Edible DC
, Summer 2012.

mimic what bison herds had been doing
:
See Allan Savory with Jody Butterfield,
Holistic Management: A New Framework for Decision Making
, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1999).

Restaurants, after all, are named
:
Rebecca L. Spang,
The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 1. For more on the history of restaurants, see Elliott Shore, “Dining Out: The Development of the Restaurant,” in
Food: The History of Taste
, ed. Paul Freedman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); and Adam Gopnik,
The Table Comes First: Family, France, and the Meaning of Food
(New York: Knopf, 2011).

“locked up, cloistered in his smoke-filled basement”
:
Paul Bocuse, quoted in Nicolas Chatenier, ed.,
Mémoires de Chefs
(Paris: Textuel, 2012), 21 (translated from French).

“a stifling, low-ceilinged inferno of a cellar”
:
George Orwell,
Down and Out in Paris and London
(1933; rev. ed., New York: Mariner Books, 1972), 57.

la nouvelle cuisine française
:
For more on nouvelle cuisine, see Chatenier, ed.,
Mémoires de Chefs
;
Alain Drouard, “Chefs, Gourmets and Gourmands: French Cuisine in the 19th and 20th Centuries,” in
Food: The History of Taste
, 301–31; and
David Kamp,
The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation
(New York: Broadway Books, 2006).

“Down with the old-fashioned picture of the typical bon vivant”
:
Julia Child, “La Nouvelle Cuisine: A Skeptic’s View,”
New York
, July 4, 1977.

“extends on either side of the borders of simplicity and artifice”
:
Paul Freedman, “Introduction: A New History of Cuisine,” in
Food: The History of Taste
, 29.

“the bigness of modern agriculture”
:
Berry,
The Unsettling of America
, 61.

ancient Egyptians observed how wild geese
:
See Caro,
The Foie Gras Wars,
24–7.

The story of the chicken in this country
:
See Steve Striffler,
Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of America’s Favorite Food
(New Haven, CT: Yale Agrarian Studies Series, 2007); Donald Stull and Michael Broadway,
Slaughterhouse Blues: The Meat and Poultry Industry in North America
(Stamford, CT: Cengage Learning, 2003); Roger Horowitz,
Putting Meat on the American Table: Taste, Technology, Transformation
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); and Janet Raloff, “Dying Breeds,”
Science News
152, no. 14 (Oct. 4, 1997), 216–8.

Mrs. Cecile Steele
:
Donald Stull and Michael Broadway,
Slaughterhouse Blues
, 38.

Arthur Perdue went into the poultry business
:
See Melaine Warner, “Frank Perdue, 84, Chicken Merchant, Dies,”
New York Times
, April 2, 2005.

“The barnyard chicken was made over”
:
Striffler,
Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation
, 46.

first poultry company to differentiate its product with a label
:
See Stull and Broadway,
Slaughterhouse Blues
, 47.

“He had a weird authenticity”
:
“Frank Perdue: 1920–2005,”
People
, April 18, 2005.

sales of chicken rose by nearly 50 percent
:
See U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “Poultry Production,”
Ag 101
, www.epa.gov/agriculture/ag101/printpoultry.html.

cost-effective way to feed the troops
:
Horowitz,
Putting Meat on the American Table
,
119.

about $18,500 per year
:
See Jill Richardson, “How the Chicken Gets to Your Plate,” La Vida Locavore, April 17, 2009, www.lavidalocavore.org/showDiary.do?dia ryId=1479.

“protein paradox”
:
Paul Roberts,
The End of Food
(New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), 208–12.

thirty-three minutes a day preparing food
:
Karen Hamrick et al., “How Much Time Do Americans Spend on Food?” Economic Information Bulletin no. 86 (Washington, DC:
US Dept. of Agriculture, November 2011). See also: Michael Pollan, “Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch,”
New York Times Magazine
,
August 2, 2009.

By the end of the 1990s those numbers had completely reversed
:
See Striffler,
Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation
, 19.

“It’s easy to cook a filet mignon”
:
Thomas Keller, “The Importance of Offal,”
The French Laundry Cookbook
(New York: Artisan Books, 1999), 209.

tripled its production of chickens
:
See Roberts,
End of Food
, 71.

falsely low prices
:
See “China Launches Anti-Dumping Probe into US Chicken Parts,”
China Daily
, September 27, 2009; and Guy Chazan, “Russia, U.S. Are in a Chicken Fight, the First Round of New Trade War,”
The Wall Street Journal
, March 4, 2002.

Jalisco’s poultry workers
:
See Peter S. Goodman, “In Mexico, ‘People Do Really Want to Stay,’”
Washington Post,
January 7, 2007.

Jamón ibérico
’s significance
:
For this point and more on
jamón ibérico
,
see Peter Kaminsky,
Pig Perfect: Encounters with Remarkable Swine and Some Great Ways to Cook Them
(New York: Hyperion, 2005), 66.

The
dehesa
system originated
:
See Vincent Clément, “Spanish Wood Pasture: Origin and Durability of an Historical Wooded Landscape in Mediterranean Europe,”
Environment and History
14, no. 1 (February 2008): 67–87.

“Any person caught chopping down”
:
Quoted in Clément, “Spanish Wood Pasture.”

“immeasurable gift”
:
Wendell Berry, “The Agrarian Standard,”
Orion Magazine
, Summer 2002.

“The bottom layer is the soil”
:
Aldo Leopold, “The Land Ethic” (1948), in
A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There, 2nd ed.
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 215.

“an extension of ethics”
:
Aldo Leopold, Foreword,
A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There,
viii–ix.