The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food

by Dan Barber

  Instead of writing with puzzlement at the asparagus blitzkrieg, Jonathan Gold celebrated what he misinterpreted as intent. “What does it mean to be a farm-oriented restaurant in New York City?” he wrote as the opening line for the review, describing Blue Hill as a true representation of farm-to-table cooking. Farm-to-table is now a much abused descriptor, but back then the review pithily defined who we were, before we even knew who we were.

  Farm-to-table has since gone from a fringe idea to a mainstream social movement. Its success comes with mounting evidence that our country’s indomitable and abundant food system, for so long the envy of the world, is unstable, if not broken. Eroding soils, falling water tables for irrigation, collapsing fisheries, shrinking forests, and deteriorating grasslands represent only a handful of the environmental problems wrought by our food system—problems that will continue to multiply with rising temperatures.

  Our health has suffered, too. Rising rates of food-borne illnesses, malnutrition, and diet-related diseases such as obesity and diabetes are traced, at least in part, to our mass production of food. The warnings are clear: because we eat in a way that undermines health and abuses natural resources (to say nothing of the economic and social implications), the conventional food system cannot be sustained.

  Fixtures of agribusiness such as five-thousand-acre grain monocultures and bloated animal feedlots are no more the future of farming than eighteenth-century factories billowing black smoke are the future of manufacturing. Though most of the food we eat still comes from agriculture that’s mired in this mind-set—extract more, waste more—the pulse of common sense suggests this won’t last. It will, in the words of the environmental writer Aldo Leopold, “die of its own too-much.”

  Farm-to-table—whose enthusiasts are called artisanal eaters and locavores—took root as the new food movement’s answer to the conventional food system. It was also, undeniably, a reaction against a global food economy that erodes cultures and cuisines. It’s about seasonality, locality, and direct relationships with your farmer. It’s also about better-tasting food, which is why chefs have been so influential in broadening the movement. Most chefs support the farmers’ market for the same reason that most doctors are drawn to prenatal care. As someone whose job it is to address the end result, how can you not care about the beginning? A growing number of chefs have joined the ranks of activists advancing the agenda of changing our food system.

  The idea of chef as activist is a relatively new one.

  It was the nouvelle cuisine chefs of the 1960s who, breaking with an onerous tradition of classic French cuisine, stepped out of the confines of the kitchen and launched modern gastronomy. They created new styles of cooking based on seasonal flavors, smaller portions, and artistic plating. In doing so, they established the authority of the chef, giving him a platform of influence that has only continued to expand.

  Fifty years later, chefs are known for their ability to create fashions and shape markets. What appears on a menu in a white-tablecloth restaurant one day trickles down to the bistro the next, and eventually influences everyday food culture. After Wolfgang Puck reimagined pizza in the 1980s at his fine-dining restaurant Spago, in Los Angeles—smoked salmon instead of tomatoes; crème fraîche instead of cheese—gourmet pizza spread to every corner of America, eventually culminating in the supermarket frozen food aisle. We now have the power to quickly popularize certain products and ingredients—in some cases, as with certain fish, to the point of commercial extinction—and increasingly we do, with dizzying speed and effect. But we also possess the potential to get people to rethink their eating habits.

  Which is where farm-to-table chefs have been most effective. Today the message has gone viral, highlighting the perils of our nation’s diet and exposing the connections between how we eat and our heavy environmental footprint. We raise money for school lunch programs and nutrition education and shed light on the real costs of processed and packaged food. Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America are on our cookbook shelves, as much for reference as for inspiration. In Berry’s words, we understand that eating “is inescapably an agricultural act, and that how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used.”

  And yet, for all the movement’s successes, and the accompanying shift in popular consciousness, the gains haven’t changed, in any fundamental way, the political and economic forces shaping how most of the food in this country is grown or raised.

  Nor, for that matter, have they changed the culture of American cooking. Americans have more opportunities to opt out of the conventional food chain than ever before (farmers’ markets are ubiquitous; organic food is widely available) and more information about how to do it (innumerable cooking shows and easy access to a world of online recipes), but the food culture—the way we eat, which is different than what we eat—has remained largely unaffected.

  How do we eat? Mostly with a heavy hand. For a long time, the prototypical American meal has featured a choice cut—like a seven-ounce steak or a boneless, skinless chicken breast or a fillet of salmon—and a small side of vegetables or grains. The architecture of this plate has shifted little throughout the years. It’s become a distinctly American expectation of what’s for dinner, seven days a week, every week of the year, protein-centric proof that our nation can produce staggering amounts of food.

  And it persists even among the most forward-thinking farm-to-table advocates. That much became clear to me on a summer night just a year after we opened Blue Hill at Stone Barns. Standing in the kitchen a few minutes into the beginning of service and staring down at a collection of newly sauced entrées ready for the dining room, I experienced what I think ranks as a revelation. I started asking myself a series of questions that took a turn toward abstraction. Among them was: Is a restaurant menu really sustainable?

  Chefs are often asked how their menus are created, especially how new dishes come into existence. Some of us are inspired by a favorite food from childhood, or we’re drawn to rethinking classic preparations. A new kitchen tool may spark an idea, or a visit to the museum. As with anything creative, it’s tough to pinpoint the origin, but whatever the process, the scaffolding for the idea forms first; assembling the ingredients comes later.

  We forget that for most of human history, it happened the other way around. We foraged and then, out of sheer necessity, transformed what we found into something else—something more digestible and storable, with better nutrition and flavor. Farm-to-table restaurants promote their menus as having evolved in that order: forage first—maybe with a morning’s stroll through the farmers’ market—and create later. The promise of farm-to-table cooking is that menus take their shape from the constraints of local agriculture and celebrate them.

  Blue Hill at Stone Barns was conceived with that promise of further shortening the food chain. David Rockefeller, grandson of patriarch John D. Rockefeller, set out to preserve a memory—the place where he sipped warm milk from the lid of the milking jug. (The Normandy-style structures were built in the 1930s as part of the family’s old eighty-acre dairy farm, twenty miles north of New York City.) He was also intent on making a tangible tribute to his late wife, Peggy, who raised breeding cattle on the farm and founded the American Farmland Trust to curb the loss of productive farmland.

  Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, along with the restaurant Blue Hill at Stone Barns, opened in the spring of 2004. Mr. Rockefeller donated the land and funded the renovation of the barns into an educational center, a place that he and his daughter Peggy Dulany envisioned would promote local agriculture with programs for children and adults. He also funded a working farm. Vegetables and fruits are managed by Jack, who oversees a 23,000-square-foot greenhouse and an eight-acre outdoor production field. The animals—pigs, sheep, chickens, geese, and honeybees—rotate around the more than twenty acres of pasture and woodlands, under the direction of Craig Haney,
the livestock manager.

  Take the harvests from the Stone Barns fields just outside the kitchen window, or from farms within a radius of a hundred or so miles, and incorporate them into the menu. How much more farm-to-table can you get?

  But during that summer evening, the shortsightedness of the system—and perhaps the reason farm-to-table has failed to transform the way most of our food is grown in this country—suddenly seemed obvious. In just the first few minutes of a busy dinner service, we had already sold out of a new entrée of grass-fed lamb chops.

  For much of that month, I had been preparing the waiters for the farm’s first lamb—a Finn-Dorset breed fed only grass. The waiters learned about Craig’s intensive pasture management, about how the sheep were moved twice a day onto the choicest grass, and how the chickens followed the sheep to help ensure even better grass for the next time around. It was among the more interesting things happening on the farm, if not the most delicious.

  To honor the addition of lamb to the menu, we carefully sketched out a new dish, which included roasted zucchini and a minted puree made with the skins. I visited the farmers’ market on an early-morning sweep to supplement whatever zucchini Jack promised to harvest.

  That night, the waiters (convincing as waiters tend to be when they get their hands on a good story) succeeded in selling the lamb chops to each one of those first tables, sometimes to every diner at the table. There are sixteen individual chops per lamb. We had three animals, so forty-eight chops were ready for roasting, three to a plate. After months of work, years of grass management, a four-hour round-trip to the slaughterhouse, and a butcher breaking down the animals with the patience and skill of a surgeon, we had sold out in the time it takes to eat a hot dog.

  Craig’s lamb chops were replaced with grass-fed lamb chops from another farm. Diners, unaware of what they were missing, were happy. So where was the problem? A year into the life of Stone Barns, the farm’s harvests were better than expected, the restaurant was busier than we’d anticipated, and our network of local farmers was expanding. With my sudden qualms about our tactics, I might have been accused of looking for the hole in the doughnut.

  And yet, the night of the lamb-chop sellout, I began to think that the hole in our doughnut was the menu itself, or our Western conception of it, which still obeyed the conventions of a protein-centric diet. Sure, our meat was grass-fed (and our chicken free-range, and our fish line-caught) and our vegetables local and, for the most part, organic. But we were still trying to fit into an established system of eating, based on the hegemony of the choicest cuts. By cooking with grass-fed lamb and by supporting local farmers, we were opting out of the conventional food chain, shortening food miles, and working with more flavorful food. But we weren’t addressing the larger problem. The larger problem, as I came to see it, is that farm-to-table allows, even celebrates, a kind of cherry-picking of ingredients that are often ecologically demanding and expensive to grow. Farm-to-table chefs may claim to base their cooking on whatever the farmer’s picked that day (and I should know, since I do it often), but whatever the farmer has picked that day is really about an expectation of what will be purchased that day. Which is really about an expected way of eating. It forces farmers into growing crops like zucchini and tomatoes (requiring lots of real estate and soil nutrients) or into raising enough lambs to sell mostly just the chops, because if they don’t, the chef, or even the enlightened shopper, will simply buy from another farmer.

  Farm-to-table may sound right—it’s direct and connected—but really the farmer ends up servicing the table, not the other way around. It makes good agriculture difficult to sustain.

  We did away with the menus a year later. Instead diners were presented with a list of ingredients. Some vegetables, like peas, made multiple appearances throughout the meal. Others, like rare varieties of lettuce, became part of a shared course for the table. Lamb rack for a six-top; lamb brain and belly for a table of two. No obligations. No prescribed protein-to-vegetable ratios. We merely outlined the possibilities. The list was evidence that the farmers dictated the menu. I was thrilled.

  And then, after several years of experimenting, I wasn’t. My cooking did not amount to any radical paradigm shift. I was still sketching out ideas for dishes first and figuring out what farmers could supply us with later, checking off ingredients as if shopping at a grocery store.

  Over time, I recognized that abandoning the menu wasn’t enough. I wanted an organizing principle, a collection of dishes instead of a laundry list of ingredients, reflecting a whole system of agriculture—a cuisine, in other words.

  The very best cuisines—French, Italian, Indian, and Chinese, among others—were built around this idea. In most cases, the limited offerings of peasant farming meant that grains or vegetables assumed center stage, with a smattering of meat, most often lesser cuts such as neck or shank. Classic dishes emerged—pot-au-feu in French cuisine, polenta in Italian, paella in Spanish—to take advantage of (read: make delicious) what the land could supply.

  The melting pot of American cuisine did not evolve out of this philosophy. Despite the natural abundance—or, rather, as many historians argue, because of the abundance—we were never forced into a more enlightened way of eating. Colonial agriculture took root in the philosophy of extraction. Conquer and tame nature rather than work in concert with nature. The exploitative relationship was made possible by the availability of large quantities of enormously productive land.

  Likewise, American cooking was characterized, from the beginning, by its immoderation—large amounts of meat and starch that grossly outweighed the small portions of fruits and vegetables. None of it was prepared with special care. In 1877, Juliet Corson, the head of the New York Cooking School, lamented the wastefulness of American cooks. “In no other land,” she wrote, “is there such a profusion of food, and certainly in none is so much wasted from sheer ignorance, and spoiled by bad cooking.” A real food culture—that way of eating—never evolved into something recognizable, and where it did, it was not preserved. Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, the great gastronome who famously said, “Tell me what you eat: I will tell you who you are,” would have found that difficult to do here.

  With few ingrained food habits, Americans are among the least tradition-bound of food cultures, easily swayed by fashions and influences from other countries. That’s been a blessing, in some ways: we are freer to try new tastes and invent new styles and methods of cooking. The curse is that, without a golden age in farming, and with a history that lacks a strong model for good eating, the values of true sustainability don’t penetrate our food culture. Today’s chefs create and follow rules that are so flexible they’re really more like traffic signals—there to be observed but just as easily ignored. Which is why it’s difficult to imagine farm-to-table cooking shaping the kind of food system we want for the future.

  What kind of cooking will?

  In a roundabout way, I was confronted with that question not long ago. A food magazine asked a group of chefs, editors, and artists to imagine what we’ll be eating in thirty-five years. The request was to sketch just one plate of food and make it illustrative of the future.

  It brought out dystopian visions. Most predicted landscapes so denuded that we will be forced to eat down the food chain—all the way down, to insects, seaweed, and even pharmaceutical pills. I found myself sketching out something more hopeful. My one plate morphed into three, a triptych tracing the recent (and future) evolution of American dining.

  The first plate was a seven-ounce corn-fed steak with a small side of vegetables (I chose steamed baby carrots)—in other words, the American expectation of dinner for much of the past half-century. It was never an enlightened or particularly appetizing construction, and at this point it’s thankfully passé.

  The second plate represented where we are now, infused with all the ideals of the farm-to-table movement. The steak was grass-fed, the carrots were
now a local heirloom variety grown in organic soil. Inasmuch as it reflected all of the progress American food has experienced in the past decade, the striking thing about the second plate was that it looked nearly identical to the first.

  Finally, the third plate kept with the steak-dinner analogy—only this time, the proportions were reversed. In place of a hulking piece of protein, I imagined a carrot steak dominating the plate, with a sauce of braised second cuts of beef.

  The point wasn’t to suggest that we’ll be reduced to eating meat only in sauces, or that vegetable steaks are the future of food. It was to predict that the future of cuisine will represent a paradigm shift, a new way of thinking about cooking and eating that defies Americans’ ingrained expectations. I was looking toward a new cuisine, one that goes beyond raising awareness about the provenance of ingredients and—like all great cuisines—begins to reflect what the landscape can provide.

  Since the best of them coevolved over thousands of years, tethered to deep cultural traditions and mores, how does one begin building a cuisine? In other words, how does the Third Plate go from imaginable to edible?

  That question was not the starting point for this book; it is something that has evolved in the writing of it. I started, instead, with farmers, and with experiences like that Eight Row Flint polenta that challenged my assumptions as a chef and taught me, again and again, that truly delicious food is contingent on an entire system of agriculture.