The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food

by Dan Barber

  The whiter flour became, the greater the demand. To be fair, that’s been the history of wheat for thousands of years. But for all its efficiency, steel couldn’t match the old-school grindstone in two key respects. In fully removing the germ—that vital, living element of wheat—and the bran, the roller mill not only killed wheat but also sacrificed nearly all of its nutrition. While the bran and the germ represent less than 20 percent of a wheat kernel’s total weight, together they comprise 80 percent of its fiber and other nutrients. And studies show that the nutritional benefits of whole grains can be gained only when all the edible parts of the grain—bran, germ, and endosperm—are consumed together. But that’s exactly what was lost in the new milling process.

  There was another cost as well, just as devastating. Stone-milled flour retained a golden hue from the crushed germ’s oil and was fragrant with bits of nutty bran. The roller mills might have finally achieved a truly white flour, but the dead, chalky powder no longer tasted of wheat—or really of anything at all. We didn’t just kill wheat. We killed the flavor.

  THE PRAIRIE

  Our nation’s prairie became collateral damage along the way.

  What did I know of the prairie before I developed an interest in wheat? Nothing, really. I doubt that I would have been able to locate it on a map. I definitely didn’t know that at one point, not that long ago, our country was more than 40 percent open prairie, a lush expanse of grassland that extended from Missouri to Montana and straight down to Texas. And even if I had known these things, I couldn’t have said why it mattered to a chef.

  Then I met Wes Jackson. Wes is the folksy and eloquent cofounder of the Land Institute, in Salina, Kansas, where he leads research into how to breed grain crops—wheat in particular—so that they can be planted once and harvested year after year. Domesticated wheat—the wheat we eat—is an annual crop, which means that every year new seed is sown.

  If it were to instead become perennial, like wheat grows in the wild—if it could be “native to its place,” as Wes likes to say—agriculture’s worst offenses, like plowing and the need for chemical fertilizers, could be avoided.

  In 2009, Wes and I attended a food conference in California as part of a panel about the future of food. When asked by the moderator to describe his work, Wes simply said, “I’m solving the ten-thousand-year-old problem of agriculture.” To his mind, agriculture’s problem is not mega-farms or feedlots or chemical fertilizers. The problem is agriculture itself.

  On the walk back to the hotel that evening, I asked him about the possibility of his perennial wheat appearing anytime soon, a question I later learned annoys Wes, because he hears it so often. But he only cranked up his slow prairie drawl and said, not immodestly, “If you’re working on a problem you can solve in your own lifetime, you’re not thinking big enough.” He said he wanted to show me what he meant.

  I followed him to his room, where he handed me a cardboard shipping tube. “You are the first to see this,” he said. I must have had a look of Why me? because he added, “We shipped them here the day they arrived. I knew I wouldn’t sleep tonight if I didn’t have a nice, long look-see.” I started uncorking the tube. He stopped me. “Go ahead and roll it out, but do it in the hallway. It won’t fit in the room.”

  I unfurled the photographic banner onto the hallway carpet. It was twenty-two feet long and reached down the corridor, past the doorways of two other rooms. Wes bent down and evened out the crinkles. On the left was a life-size profile of perennial prairie wheat, showing the plant both above and below the soil. Aboveground, the stalks, leaves, and seed head took up less than half the photograph. Belowground, the wheat’s root system was at least eight feet long—a Rapunzel-like tangle of thick fibers anchored deep in the soil.

  I stepped back. The roots merged into what looked like the trunk of a sequoia tree, only growing down instead of up. “That’s nature investing—digging into the soil, seeking nutrients and moisture,” Wes said as I studied what once had been the underbelly of the prairie.

  To the right of this, a photo showed another patch of wheat, above and below ground. But this was modern wheat, the kind that’s planted each year and, as Wes reminded me, “occupies sixty million acres of real estate in this country alone.” Aboveground, the wheat was a much shorter copy of its perennial cousin. But belowground, the roots were wispy, thin hairs, barely an arm’s length in depth. Compared with the perennial, they looked laughably anemic, needle threads next to those dreadlocks. Such are the roots that blanket the prairie and fill those bags of white flour dumped into the bin in front of my office. I was looking at the roots of my cuisine.

  “Those wimpy little things,” Wes said, smiling. “There’s your problem right there.”

  Until the 1800s, almost everyone who visited the Great Plains thought the problem was the prairie itself. The massive land area was called the Great American Desert, which, from the perspective of people accustomed to things like trees, is a forgivable first impression. But also a mistaken one.

  In fact, there was plenty of aboveground diversity in the prairie. Add to the grasses the surrounding two hundred or so broadleaf flowering plants, the forbs, shrubs, and sedges, and what you had was a kaleidoscope of natural variety—a richly purposeful system in which grass and plant depended on one another to thrive.

  And yet, the true wealth of any prairie exists in the soil, where the majority of the biomass resides (unlike, say, a rainforest ecology, where the richness, or biomass, is mostly above the surface). Wes likes to remind his audiences that the soil’s richness results from a lucky geological break. A few million years ago, glaciers formed in the continent’s far north. Frozen rivers stripped northern Canada to hard rock and dumped ancient dirt on top of the already rich soil of this country’s midsection. As fierce prairie winds distributed the dirt, it was the grasses that clung to it, holding it long enough to consolidate the mass into soil. The rich root systems absorbed nutrients from the soil and knit the soil together.

  For the prairie, this was the greatest insurance policy against erosion and extreme weather fluctuations. The weather in the Plains was—and still is—unpredictable, fierce, and destructive—desertification on the one hand, flash floods on the other. The root systems’ ability to store energy and nutrients ensured that the prairie grass could always grow back quickly. And the grass, in turn, kept the rich soil in place as millions of bison fertilized it over thousands of years, depositing more nutrients into the soil’s natural fertility bank.

  We’ve been drawing from the account ever since the first settlers tried to dig in with their plows, an effort that, from above (or, more to the point, from below), must have appeared comical. The root systems were so dense, the plows snapped and clogged. Looking at the entangled roots of just one small patch of perennial wheat made it easy to see why. One square yard of prairie turf can contain twenty-five miles of these massively thick roots; the coal-black topsoil can run to a depth of a dozen feet. (Wes reminded me, with glee, that the average topsoil on the East Coast is closer to six inches.)

  In 1837, an Illinois blacksmith named John Deere solved the problem by inventing a cast-steel plow that could cut through the deep roots and rip up the grass for planting. Like the roller mill, the steel plow arrived at a fortuitous moment—just at the time when thousands of “sodbusters” were crashing deep into the Plains. President Abraham Lincoln sweetened the deal in 1862 by signing the Homestead Act, which promised 160 acres of free land to anyone who could claim and cultivate it for five years.

  Biologist Janine Benyus, in her book Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature, describes the misplaced heroism of the settlers who worked to replace perennial prairie grass with annual wheat: “A Sioux Indian watching a sodbuster turn the roots skyward was reported to have shaken his head and said, ‘Wrong side up.’ Mistaking wisdom for backwardness, the settlers laughed as they retold the story, ignoring the warning shots that fired with each
popping root.” The more you learn about the destruction of the prairie, the more difficult it becomes to see a modern wheat field as a thing of beauty, in the same way it is hard to see beauty in a clear-cut forest.

  The new wheat didn’t exactly thrive on the Great Plains at first. Varieties grown in the East did poorly with less rain and extreme variations in temperature. Disease was common. So were low yields and outright failures. It wasn’t until the 1870s, when hard winter wheat, the drought-resistant “Turkey Red” introduced by Mennonite immigrants, replaced the traditional soft wheat, that it took hold. Hard wheat suited the new steel roller mills as well, making the now assembly-line-like refining process even more efficient.

  Wes’s banner in the hallway blocked a couple on the way to their room. “Good evening, folks,” Wes said cheerfully. “We’re making an analysis of our nation’s depleted capital. Care to join us?” The couple smiled uncomfortably and shuffled alongside the two root systems.

  Wes pointed to the annual wheat. “Of course, this wheat won out. Sixty million acres of puny roots that we need to fertilize because it can’t feed itself. Puny roots that leak nitrogen, that cause erosion and dead zones the size of New Jersey.” Wes smiled beatifically, gums and all. “This wheat won out, but what you’re looking at is the failure of success.”

  By the early 1900s, westward expansion amounted to a twenty-million-acre experiment.

  And the wheat kept growing. When Europe ran out of wheat during World War I, the American government stepped in, guaranteeing wheat prices. The Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909 followed, doubling the amount of free land to 320 acres per settler, and the wave of settlement became a tsunami. In 1917, a record forty-five million acres of wheat was harvested; by 1919, it was seventy-five million acres. Much of the gain came from plowing marginal land—areas of North Dakota and the southern Plains where soils were thinner and there was less water for irrigation—but for the time being, it didn’t matter.

  Historian Donald Worster argues that by the time the war effort ended, the Midwest’s grain economy had become inseparable from the industrial economy. “The War integrated the plains farmers more thoroughly than ever before into the national economy—into its networks of banks, railroads, mills, implement manufacturers, energy companies—and, moreover, integrated them into an international market system.” The grasslands were remade. There was no turning back.

  So the plows kept plowing until the rain suddenly stopped. The soil, naked, anchorless, and now dry, turned to dust and, in 1930, started to blow. Dust coated everything, consuming surfaces, bed linens, and attic floors (which routinely collapsed under the accumulation). It buried fence posts, cars, and tractors in enormous drifts. And this was only the light stuff. The heavier soil clumps ripped fences apart and whacked down telephone poles as they blew across the landscape. During the worst of these storms, visibility was zero, and vegetables and fruits died from the storms’ electrical charge. The drought ushered in a biblical infestation of insects, which devoured any wheat that survived, and a plague of jackrabbits emerging from their habitats in search of food.

  Klaas remembers his aunts telling him about the Dust Bowl. The storms were so severe that the family would set the dinner table with the plates upside down. By the time they served dinner, the table linen would be imprinted with rings of dust. The family lived with the hardship until the farm itself went under.

  Over the course of the next decade, our country’s midsection heaved hundreds of thousands of years’ worth of incomparably rich soil into the air. Some regions lost more than 75 percent of their topsoil. The decade came to be known as the Dirty Thirties, and it marks one of the worst environmental disasters in our history. In his book The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl, Timothy Egan describes one of the dust storms:

  A cloud ten thousand feet high from ground to top appeared. . . . The sky lost its customary white, and it turned brownish then gray. . . . Nobody knew what to call it. It was not a rain cloud. . . . It was not a twister. It was thick like coarse animal hair; it was alive. People close to it described a feeling of being in a blizzard—a black blizzard, they called it—with an edge like steel wool.

  One of the largest of the storms hit in the spring of 1935—Black Sunday. It didn’t die in the prairie but moved east, gathering strength as it went.

  The following Friday, a scientist named Hugh Bennett stood on the floor of the U.S. Senate, arguing for the creation of a permanent Soil Conservation Service. Even though photos of Black Sunday had appeared in newspapers around the country the same morning, most senators believed they had already done enough for the people of the prairie. Just as Bennett was wrapping up his plea, an aide appeared at the podium and whispered in his ear. “Keep it up,” he said. “It’s coming.” Bennett kept talking. A few minutes later, he stopped talking. The chamber turned dark. A giant copper dust cloud blew through Washington for an hour.

  “This, gentlemen, is what I’m talking about.” Bennett said, pointing to the windows. “There goes Oklahoma.” Eight days later, Congress signed the Soil Conservation Act into law. Some call the incident the beginning of the environmental movement in America.

  The white mushroom cloud, the one that billowed up from the flour bin in the restaurant’s kitchen and slowly drifted toward my office window, could be thought of as the modern manifestation of the Dust Bowl, with all-purpose flour now playing the part of prairie topsoil. Which is to say the degradation of the prairie is still reaching us like it reached Hugh Bennett a century ago, as vital a topic now as it was the day he stood in front of the Senate and argued for reform.

  THE MODERN PRAIRIE

  Writers have spared no ink in making the case that the Dust Bowl era is a parable of man’s hubris. In his essay “The Native Grasses and What They Mean,” Wendell Berry writes, “As we felled and burned the forests, so we burned, plowed, and overgrazed the prairies. We came with visions, but not with sight. We did not see or understand where we were or what was there, but destroyed what was there for the sake of what we desired.”

  This blindness began with our nation’s earliest European settlers, many of whom weren’t themselves landowners in Europe and had little experience farming. If you have a hankering, as I do, for the old days of our young republic, when farming was what farming should be—small, family-owned, well managed and manicured, a platonic paradigm of sustainable agriculture—think again. Today’s industrial food chain might denude landscapes and impoverish soils, but our forefathers did much of the same. They just had a lot less horsepower.

  Even George Washington criticized the exploitative methods of “slovenly” farmers who, spoiled by the abundance of fertile land and natural resources, “have disregarded every means of improving our opened grounds.”

  Colonial farmland was quickly run down. Forests were cleared for coveted virgin land. In his book Larding the Lean Earth, historian Steven Stoll identifies the detrimental precedent that came to define American farming:

  In a common pattern, farmers who had occupied land for only 20 or 30 years reduced the fertile nutrients in their soils until they could no more than subsist. Either that, or they saw yields fall below what they expected from a good settlers’ country and decided to seek fresh acres elsewhere. Forests cut and exported as potash, wheat cropped year after year, topsoils washed—arable land in the old states of the Union had presented the scares of fierce extraction by 1820.

  This attitude only intensified as we pursued Western expansion. As Alexis de Tocqueville noted in his famous study of the country, farmers approached farming with the attitude of capitalists rather than conservationists. “Almost all the farmers of the United States combine some trade with agriculture; most of them make agriculture itself a trade,” he wrote in Democracy in America. “It seldom happens that an American farmer settles for good upon the land which he occupies.” Americans arrived on the prairie to settle the West on
their own terms. We set out to conquer rather than to adapt—unable, or just unwilling, to adjust our sight to the needs of the new ecology. There was so much abundant and enormously productive land available that vigilant soil management became an Old World idea.

  I had understood this, to some degree, for years, but what I hadn’t understood until that evening when Wes and I studied root systems in a hotel hallway was what that blindness had wrought. We didn’t just replace the deep root system of perennials with puny annuals. We replaced the prairie’s ecosystem, one of the most diverse in the world, with 56 million acres of monoculture. Today, almost all the hard wheat grown in the prairie comes from just two varieties, which, in the words of writer Richard Manning, is “a spanning of the scale of genetic possibilities from A to B.”

  Look out on a field in the middle of Kansas or North Dakota and what you see are grain fields so uniform they look like tabletops, the prairie manifestation of a desecrated grave. Wheat, as Klaas describes it—as a social crop, as a community builder, as the story of who we are—no longer really exists. At least not in the way we’re farming it. Or eating it.

  Not long after my evening with Wes, I consulted a map of the United States. I was looking for the breadbasket states—the “Wheat Belt,” as I’d heard it called countless times before, without knowing the coordinates. On the map, it appeared as a thick strip, a belt of land running from North Dakota all the way down to Texas, passing through South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma. Wheat is the primary crop of these six states.

  By chance, I came across another map in my search, a census of population changes in the first decade of the twenty-first century. I put it next to the map of the Wheat Belt, and the comparison was as stark and alarming as Wes’s banner. The census map showed how the same stretch of six states has become shockingly depopulated. The Wheat Belt is emptying out, even as the rest of America grows denser. It is a relentless decline in numbers that began in the Dust Bowl years ago and has never really ended. What makes this population drop so remarkable is that the phenomenon seems almost wholly confined to these Wheat Belt states, indeed that while much of America continues to grow, the former heart of the country’s grain production is today in demographic free fall. In Kansas alone, six thousand towns have vanished in the past eighty years. In many parts, the population is like those wispy annual roots—sparser today than at the end of the nineteenth century, when the census deemed them “frontier.”