The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food

by Dan Barber

  To get a handle on what kind of cooking best supported this, I needed to uncover something more basic: What kind of farming is this? Local? Organic? Biodynamic? I learned that it goes beyond labels. It requires something broad to explain it. Lady Eve Balfour, one of the earliest organic farming pioneers, said that the best kind of farming could not be reduced to a set of rules. Her advice was prescient. She lived before organic agriculture became defined by just that—a set of rules—and before farming methods were used as marketing tools. The farming that produces the kind of food we really want to eat, she believed, depends “on the attitude of the farmer.”

  That’s frustratingly vague advice, and yet I came to understand Lady Balfour’s idea when I heard one farmer speak about the ultimate goal of good farming. “We need to grow nature,” he said, and in doing so he revealed more than an insight. He was articulating an attitude, a worldview, and he might well have been speaking on behalf of all the farmers in this book.

  To grow nature is to encourage more of it. That’s not easy to do. More nature means less control. Less control requires a certain kind of faith, which is where the worldview comes into play. Do you see the natural world as needing modification and improvement, or do you see it as something to be observed and interpreted? Do you view humans as a small part of an unbelievably complicated and fragile system, or do you view us as the commanders? The farmers in this book are observers. They listen. They don’t exert control.

  It’s hard to label these farmers, because it’s hard to label an attitude, which was Lady Balfour’s point. When King Lear asks the blind Gloucester how he sees the world, Shakespeare has him say, “I see it feelingly.” The farmers in this book see their worlds feelingly.

  If the future of delicious food is in the hands of farmers who grow nature and abide by its instructions, we ought to become more literate about what that means. By and large, we tend to calculate sustainability based on the surface level of agriculture. We take what is measurable (increases in the use of pesticide and fertilizers, inhumane conditions in animal feedlots) and push alternatives (buy organic, choose grass-fed beef). These things are easy to quantify. They are things you can see.

  The farmers in this book farm one level down. They don’t think in terms of cultivating one thing. If your worldview is that everything is connected to something else, why would you? Instead, they grow nature by orchestrating a whole system of farming. And they produce a lot of things—delicious food, to be sure, but also things we can’t easily measure or see. I learned this lesson many times, whether in wetlands or pastures. I was introduced to the kind of jam-packed diversity, both above and below ground, that I had read about but never really understood. It changed dramatically, and not only from farm to farm but from field to field. Each living community was vast, complex, and critical to the health of the whole system.

  Had I been given a tour of Blue Hill Farm’s fields during that summer of corn—or any monoculture field anywhere in the world, really—I would have discovered little to write about. Monocultures do that. They impoverish life and all its fantastic little ecosystems. They depopulate landscapes.

  I confess I kept getting pulled into visiting the farms in this book because I was in pursuit of how an ingredient was grown or raised—whether it was flint corn, whole wheat, a fattened goose liver, or a fillet of fish. I went in search of answers to practical questions. A core finding of my experiences was that I was asking the wrong questions. Each time I tried to parse the specifics of how something was grown, I was instead pointed in the opposite direction: to the interactions and relationships among all the parts of the farm and then, with more time, to the interactions and relationships embedded in the culture and history of the place.

  I was learning what John Muir, the American environmentalist, observed a century ago: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” Or rather, I was relearning what I’d discovered with that summer of corn, which supplanted the natural contours of the farm, stripped away the community of farmers, tractors, and hay bales—what Wendell Berry called the “culture” in agriculture—and left me without much of a summer.

  Science teaches us that the answer to understanding the complexity of something is to break it into component parts. Like classical cooking, it insists that things need to be precisely measured and weighed. But interactions and relationships—what Muir called hitching, and we call ecology—cannot be measured or weighed. I found, for example, that the health of an aquaculture farm in southern Spain is connected to how we treat our soil, and that how we treat our soil determines, to a considerable extent, how we grow our grain, especially wheat, which is impossible to separate from how we choose our bread.

  What we refer to as the beginning and end of the food chain—a field on a farm at one end, a plate of food at the other—isn’t really a chain at all. The food chain is actually more like a set of Olympic rings. They all hang together. Which is how I came to understand that the right kind of cooking and the right kind of farming are one and the same. Our belief that we can create a sustainable diet for ourselves by cherry-picking great ingredients is wrong. Because it’s too narrow-minded. We can’t think about changing parts of our system. We need to think about redesigning the system.

  A good place to start is with a new conception of a plate of food, a Third Plate—which is less a “plate,” per se, than a different way of cooking, or assembling a dish, or writing a menu, or sourcing ingredients—or really all these things. It combines tastes not based on convention, but because they fit together to support the environment that produced them. The Third Plate goes beyond raising awareness about the importance of farmers and sustainable agriculture. It helps us recognize that what we eat is part of an integrated whole, a web of relationships, that cannot be reduced to single ingredients. It champions a whole class of integral, yet uncelebrated, crops and cuts of meat that is required to produce the most delicious food. Like all great cuisines, it is constantly in flux, evolving to reflect the best of what nature can offer.

  And its realization will rely, at least in part, on chefs. They will play a leading role, similar to that of a musical conductor. The chef as conductor is an easy comparison: we stand at the front of the kitchen, cueing the orchestra, cajoling and negotiating, assembling disparate elements into something complete. I’m not the first to make the association. And yet there’s a deeper, more interesting level of work related to the job of conducting, and it may inform the role of the chef for the future. This is the behind-the-scenes work, the preconcert study that investigates the history of the composition, its meaning and context. Once that’s been determined, a narrative takes hold, and the job of the conductor is to interpret that story through the music. One could say that a cuisine is to a chef what a musical score is to a conductor. It offers the guidelines for the creation of something immediate—a concert, a meal—that will also ultimately be woven into the fabric of memory.

  Today’s food culture has given chefs a platform of influence, including the power, if not the luxury, to innovate. As arbiters of taste, we can help inspire a Third Plate, a new way of eating that puts it all together.

  That’s a tall order for any chef, not to mention eaters, but it’s an intuitive one as well. Because, as the stories in this book suggest, it always takes the shape of delicious food. Truly great flavor—the kind that produces plain old jaw-dropping wonder—is a powerful lens into the natural world because taste breaks through the delicate things we can’t see or perceive. Taste is a soothsayer, a truth teller. And it can be a guide in reimagining our food system, and our diets, from the ground up.

  PART I

  SOIL

  See What You’re Looking At

  CHAPTER 1

  ONE MORNING late in the spring of 1994, Klaas Martens finished spraying pesticides on his cornfield. He went to lift the sprayer to put it away, but he couldn’t pick it up. Which was stra
nge, because Klaas had been lifting the sprayer the same way for many years. He tried again, and again he could not lift it.

  “My right arm just wouldn’t work,” he told me one night more than twenty years later as we sat around his kitchen table. “Less than an hour before, I could loft a bale of hay one-handed over my head.”

  “He could,” his wife, Mary-Howell, said. “He absolutely could. It’s my first memory of falling for Klaas. We had just started dating, and I remember coming to the farm to visit. I walked up to the barn and from the distance I could see Klaas towering over everyone, grabbing one-hundred-pound bags of grain feed and tossing them, literally, like they were feathers. I didn’t know someone could be so strong.”

  Klaas, looking shy, reached across the table for the homemade butter, which Mary-Howell keeps in a white bucket that’s frequently passed during meals. He gently dug his spoon in deep.

  “I started having muscle spasms,” he continued, dropping a mound of the butter on a slice of Mary-Howell’s homemade bread. “Terrible spasms that went up and down the right side of my body.”

  “I remember standing there by the stove when he walked in the house with his big, protective Tyvek suit still on—we called it the ‘zoot suit’—and green plastic gloves,” Mary-Howell said. “I knew something was wrong.”

  “I think I said, ‘Something is really wrong,’” Klaas said, softly.

  “I thought something wasn’t right weeks before,” Mary-Howell said. “I was out in the yard on a beautiful June afternoon with our son—our daughter was on the way—and I smelled something I didn’t like.”

  “It was 2,4-D,” Klaas said, referring to the chemical herbicide commonly used to control weeds.

  “It was, yes, absolutely it was 2,4-D, but I remember smelling it in a different way. It usually smelled like freshly cured leather. Now for some reason the smell had undertones of raw flesh.”

  Mary-Howell looked across the table at Klaas. “So he goes to an orthopedic surgeon. And get this: it was June—spraying time—here was a grain farmer, and the doctor thought nothing of the dead arm. He just sent Klaas home with a handful of muscle relaxers and painkillers.” Mary-Howell got up to clear the dishes and turned around at the sink. “By this point I didn’t need a doctor to tell me what was happening. My husband was being poisoned.”

  Klaas, along with his sister, Hilke, and two younger brothers, Jan and Paul, was raised on a farm down the road.

  Their father arrived at Ellis Island from Germany at the age of fourteen. This was 1927, and with him were his grandmother and six siblings. (His parents—Klaas’s paternal grandparents—had already passed away.) Wary of mounting political turmoil, they had sold their farm and fled Europe in search of a new future in America. After World War I, Germans were not allowed to own land in the eastern United States, so the family moved to North Dakota and leased land to grow wheat. The crop failed, and in 1931, alarmed by the worsening conditions of the Dust Bowl, they moved again, to a dairy farm in Bainbridge, New York, where they finally prospered. But there were too many siblings and not enough land.In 1957, Klaas’s father and his young wife broke away from the family and moved their dairy cattle to Penn Yan, a small town in the Finger Lakes region. Klaas was two years old at the time. They earned a profit the first year, then earned still more as new agricultural technology swept onto their farm. Improved grain varieties, including hybrid corn and a high-yielding wheat, and, more important, the widespread use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, boosted yields beyond anything they could have imagined. As Klaas grew older and assumed more responsibility on the farm, he watched one record-shattering harvest after the next. “My father would stand at the grain bin and just scratch his head,” he told me. The yields, which more than doubled in one year, fueled explosive profits. It was a magical time.

  “Everything was happening so fast, we got drunk on yields,” Klaas said. “It was like a drug addiction. The first year, there was an incredible response from the chemicals, but we didn’t notice that it kept taking more and more chemicals to get the same yields.”

  Weed resistance soon followed, which called for more chemicals, which led to even more stubborn weeds. Within a few years, Klaas was applying combinations of different herbicides to get rid of weeds they had never seen and didn’t know existed. Klaas’s father wasn’t happy, and though profits remained strong (thanks to Klaas’s increasingly creative chemical cocktails), he was skeptical that yields could be sustained. Convinced that his children’s future was at risk, he encouraged each of his sons to experiment with new sources of income on the farm. Klaas saw it as an opportunity to pursue his “lifelong hankering” to grow bread wheat.

  “Up until that point, we focused only on animal feed,” he said. “I really wanted to grow grain that fed people directly.”

  He didn’t feel good about the inefficiencies of feeding grain to animals. Which is a fair concern—it takes roughly up to thirteen pounds of grain to produce one pound of beef, for example. Klaas didn’t want to farm in a way that put more pressure on limited resources. And he wanted to grow wheat that Mary-Howell, by now his wife, could use to bake her bread. Still, to his brothers, this seemed an absurd venture. At the time, farmers in the Northeast grew only pastry wheat, which was easier to cultivate.

  Undeterred, Klaas grew a test plot. And it worked. The harvest was exceptional. But then he confronted a larger problem: Who was going to buy bread wheat from upstate New York? No distributors handled it locally, because no one else was growing it locally. But Klaas found a Mennonite neighbor who offered to buy it.

  “They were thrilled to have local wheat for their bread,” he said. The neighbor talked to Klaas about the wheat’s flavor and baking quality. “It reinforced the idea that I wanted to grow grain for people, not for cows.”

  Klaas’s father died in 1981, and, after several years of disagreements and difficult harvests, Klaas and his brothers decided to divide the land. The process was not easy. Klaas credits the story of Abraham and Lot for giving him the wisdom to make a deal. The Bible tells of Abraham traveling to Canaan with his nephew, Lot. With limited grazing land, it soon became clear that there wasn’t enough for both of them to raise their respective herds. Abraham, fearing conflict, proposed that they settle separately. As the eldest, he had the right to choose whatever land he wanted, but instead he allowed Lot to make the first choice. Lot chose the beautiful, rich valley, while Abraham was left with the rugged hills and little drinking water.

  After hearing the story one Sunday in church, Klaas stopped demanding what he felt was a fair and equitable distribution of the land. He took less than his third, including fields that were in poorer condition and not as productive. It was the same land—now thriving—that Klaas and Mary-Howell’s house stands on today.

  For dessert, Mary-Howell served rhubarb cake, which was so light and airy, I was sure it had been made with cake flour. It wasn’t, Mary-Howell told me, in a voice that suggested she wasn’t surprised I had guessed wrong. In fact, the cake was made with whole wheat flour—a variety called Frederick, grown on the farm and hand-milled in her kitchen that morning. She pointed to a tiny old mill no larger than a toaster oven, next to the microwave.

  Each bite of cake brought a whiff of wheat. Just as the sweetness of the sugar and the vegetative tang of the rhubarb made the cake delicious, the wheat itself was unmistakably present, and it made a prosaic dessert richly textured and interesting.

  “We were scared,” Mary-Howell said, continuing with the story of Klaas’s numb arm. “I mean, here we were, completely on our own, just the two of us, and Klaas can’t use his right arm.”

  I asked when they stopped using chemicals. “That day,” they said.

  While interest in organic agriculture had already begun to grow by the early 1990s, organic grain farming was still essentially unknown. “We literally had no one to turn to,” Mary-Howell said. “There were tons of suc
cessful organic vegetable farmers. And there were some good organic dairies, to be sure. The organic market was booming. But grains? We didn’t know one farmer.”

  “Which is when people started planning our auction,” Klaas said. Mary-Howell laughed and accused him of exaggerating. “Oh yes, indeed,” he insisted. “There was talk at the coffee shop in Dresden. I heard that firsthand. And then there was old man Ted Spence . . .”

  “Oh, God, Teddy . . .” Mary-Howell shook her head.

  “He came over here one day, drove right up to the house,” Klaas said, pointing to just outside their front door. “He rolls down his window and yells, ‘Klaas, your dad would be disgusted with the way you’re farming.’”

  “He said that,” Mary-Howell confirmed. “He absolutely said that.”

  By luck, a few weeks later, a local farm paper carried an advertisement from a large mill that wanted to pay for certified organic bread wheat. Sitting at the kitchen table, Klaas and Mary-Howell couldn’t believe the coincidence.

  “It was like a hand from God was reaching down to us,” Klaas said. “We jumped at the chance.”

  THE FERTILE DOZEN

  I first met Klaas in 2005, at a gathering hosted by Jody Scheckter, the controversial former world champion race-car driver known for his erratic driving and for what was perhaps the worst accident in Formula One history. Having turned his attention to organic farming, Jody created Laverstoke, a two-thousand-acre farm in Hampshire, England, that he determined would be the best in the world. Jody being Jody, he really meant the best. So he reached out to Eliot Coleman.