The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food

by Dan Barber

  On this particular day, he held two big handfuls of bunched carrots, their green tops waving in the air like pom-poms. It’s hard not to be taken by Jack’s electric good cheer in moments like these—showing off a new variety, or a perfectly ripe vegetable. You’d think such displays would happen often in a kitchen that’s connected to a working farm, but the truth is that we tend to ignore one another, the farmers and the cooks, precisely because we’re so close. The morning harvest arrives, it gets organized in the receiving room and stored in the coolers, and by the end of dinner service it’s gone.

  “We’re sort of like a marriage,” Jack once said. “We need to do one of those date nights every week just so we can actually talk.”

  Jack placed the carrots on a cutting board and took a step back, allowing us to admire his work. The last time he’d displayed his wares like this, it was an exotic variety of ginger, and before that an “extra dwarf” bok choy that fit into my palm. But carrots? They were always growing—in the field during the spring and summer and in the greenhouse most of the winter and spring. They were usually good carrots, sometimes exceptionally good, but did they deserve such swagger?

  “Sixteen-point-nine, pal,” he finally said. “Sixteen-point-freakin’-nine.”

  “Sixteen-point-nine?” I repeated, not understanding.

  “Brix,” Jack said, removing a small handheld refractometer from his pocket as evidence. Refractometers, which look like high-tech spyglasses, are popular tools for measuring the Brix, or amount of sugar present, in a fruit or vegetable. They’ve been used for years to verify levels of sweetness in grapes, helping winemakers determine ideal harvest times.

  But Brix also indicates the presence of healthy oils and amino acids, proteins, and—this is key—minerals, those ingredients that Albrecht recognized were so critical for flavor. A 16.9 reading means the carrots were 16.9 percent sugar—and bursting with minerals. It’s an extraordinarily high number, which Jack made sure I understood, even as the cooks, being cooks, drifted away to get back to work.

  “Off-the-charts high,” Jack said, watching me take a bite. He wasn’t kidding. The variety, mokum, had been shown to reach a Brix of 12, a fact Jack discovered before his visit to the kitchen. So the astonishingly delicious mokum carrots I tasted that day were, in fact, off the charts.

  ON JACK ALGIERE

  Jack grew up on a farm tucked away at the end of a mile-long driveway along the Pawcatuck River in southern Rhode Island. In the mornings, his mother would open the kitchen door to shoo her son into the forest and fields, not to return until dinnertime. His carefree explorations gave him a passion for nature that the biologist E. O. Wilson, who enjoyed the same kind of childhood, calls “biophilia”—an “innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes.”

  By the time Jack graduated from high school, he had decided to farm for a living. That summer, he worked in a large greenhouse close to home, growing vegetables, shrubs, trees, and a variety of flowers, all started from tissue cultures rather than seed.

  “That’s how greenhouses generally work,” he explained to me. “You grow five thousand plants that are carbon copies of one another.” Genetic uniformity like this—a super-monoculture, essentially—under a closed roof is extremely susceptible to plant disease, which is why organic farming in greenhouses is so rare.

  Jack saw the failings of the system up close. “One morning I went to water the geraniums,” he told me. “I noticed a tiny black spot on one of the stems, which means you’re about to be in major doo-doo.” The black spot was made by a type of mold. And because of the crop’s uniformity, Jack knew that none of the plants would have a natural defense against it. By noon that day the black spots had covered all the stems.

  Jack consulted with the farm’s owner, Bud Smith. “Bud was traveling at the time, but he had me go to this closet where we kept the full arsenal of chemicals and load up the strongest fungicide they had. I remember he said: ‘Jack, don’t fuck with this stuff.’ If Bud was saying that, this had to be toxic as all hell.” Bud had him wear a special protective suit and instructed him to seal the openings with duct tape.

  “I caught a glimpse of myself as I walked out to the greenhouse. Like a space monster,” Jack said. And then he sprayed—four entire houses filled with geraniums. “By the time I had finished spraying the first half of that first house, I was weeping. And I wept again inside when we realized the chemical had failed,” Jack said. “The geraniums that survived looked really weird and ended up going to a local cemetery’s urns, if you can believe the irony. But the memory of spraying stayed with me. It’s the closest I’ve felt to being in the middle of a battlefield during a totally senseless war. I walked out of there and said to myself, I don’t want to be doing this. And do you know what? I never did it again.”

  He intended to quit but was torn by his respect for Bud’s great talent as a greenhouse grower. So Jack went to Bud’s office to talk to him. “I walked in and saw Bud sitting at his desk, looking up at me,” Jack said. “He knew. He absolutely knew what had happened. It was the first time I’d ever seen an adult look vulnerable. So instead of quitting, I blurted out, ‘Isn’t there another way?’ I realized at that moment that Bud didn’t want to be spraying chemicals—he hated it, actually, and so does every farmer farming conventionally. All Bud said was, ‘What can I do? The customer wants geraniums, a lot of them, and they’ll only pay so much.’”

  Jack convinced Bud to let him take over a few of the greenhouses and convert them to organic. “I made a million and a half mistakes,” he said, “but converting those greenhouses totally changed my life. Without the license to try—to see that it could really work, organically—I probably would have quit farming altogether.”

  Realizing he needed to learn more, Jack studied horticulture at the University of Rhode Island. During his second year of studies, he had another epiphany. “The departments, the professors—they were all there acting as enablers, keeping the chemical industry going because someone somewhere had determined it was worth keeping alive,” he said. “It was as if I was in school to learn how better to kill the geraniums instead of how to prevent the fungus.”

  Then he discovered the library’s collection of agriculture books, which included works by Sir Albert Howard and Rudolf Steiner. “I read them and it clicked,” he said. “I mean, it all just came together. Steiner was crying out to farmers in the mid-1920s, basically saying, ‘Don’t be fooled by chemicals!’ He really spoke to me, because that’s exactly what I was trying to say to Bud: Don’t be fooled by all of this. I didn’t know enough at the time to know that I was right, but when I read Steiner I suddenly took on a kind of confidence I had never experienced before.”

  When Amigo Bob contacted him about the job at Stone Barns, Jack and his wife, Shannon, were happily farming someone else’s land in Connecticut. He took the job mainly for the chance to bring together the ideas of Howard and Steiner on a farm of his own design, one that connected the soil to everything around it—the flora and fauna, as he likes to say, but also the culture of the place.

  The project didn’t start off well. “Literally just before Stone Barns is to open, on my first day of work, 9 a.m., I drive up to the gate at the entrance to the farm and I find myself behind a large herbicide-spraying truck,” Jack told me. “Spray the Problems Away Inc. or something like that. We sit there, both of us waiting for the gate to open, and I’m thinking, Who’s this guy? So I honk my horn and get out of the car. ‘Excuse me,’ I say to the guy. ‘What are you doing here today?’ He looks at me all confused and says, ‘I’m here to spray,’ just like that. I’m thinking, wait a second, this is supposed to be a freakin’ organic farm, right? The gate opens and we both drive in, the chemical truck and me, and I’m banging the dashboard, screaming, ‘This can’t be fucking happening.’ I had just left a great job, moved with my wife to a place where we didn’t know a soul, and the first minute of the first day on a fa
rm I’m about to spend—oh, I don’t know, the next forty years—is going to get showered with an herbicide.

  “We pull up to the offices, and I tell the guy to hang out a second. There are like three hundred people running around in construction hats, but no one to deal with this. Finally I get to the head of the construction company and ask about the chemical guy with the big truck. He consults his work sheet for the day. Sure enough, right there on the schedule is a 9 a.m. appointment to spray Rodeo in the pond between the future greenhouse and the future outdoor vegetable field. Supposedly there was an outbreak of phragmites, an invasive grass, and since the Stone Barns Center hadn’t officially formed yet, these construction guys were just doing what they needed to do. It was like I was walking into the Wild West.

  “I said, forget it. This is going to be an organic farm. If the guy sprays this stuff, game over. The head of construction looks at me, sympathetic, even though he has absolutely no idea what Rodeo is or how toxic it could be for the farm, or even that I’m barely ten minutes into the first hour of the first day of my new job. I got ready to send the chemical guy home when the construction head discovers that the Rodeo spray, and a whole schedule of spraying for the next month, had already been contracted for. Thirty-five thousand dollars. Done, papers signed. I left and called James [Ford, the founding executive director of the Center], and he and I hatched a plan right there. The chemical company could keep their money, but they wouldn’t spray. And that’s what happened: $35,000 to do essentially nothing. I keep thinking, even to this day, what if I had showed up late for work?”

  SOIL AND FLAVOR

  The 16.9 mokums lasted only a few services, but the small harvest left a big impression. Which is why, the following week, early on a frigid January morning, I stood with Jack in front of a row of future 16.9’s incubating in the rich soil of the greenhouse. He had offered to explain to me in detail how the carrots had come to be so delicious.

  The 23,000-square-foot greenhouse was calm and quiet, save for the soft hum of the overhead fans. Jack wore a look of pride as he surveyed the rich black soil that spanned the building. The soil came from the excavation of the Stone Barns parking lot, which partly explains Jack’s fondness. After the construction crews unearthed the virgin soil, Jack rescued it from the dumpster. Then he created a recipe for the highest-quality compost, mixing it in to build up the soil’s organic matter. He applies a wheelbarrow of his compost to every new row of vegetables.

  I was familiar with the power of compost (what I understood of it) and impressed by the quality of Jack’s personal blend. So I had a sense of how, after several years of building fertility, the soil could now nurture a carrot with a Brix of 16.9. But how exactly?

  Jack pointed to the soil. “There’s a war going on in there!”

  “War” seemed a funny way to put it. The process had always struck me as extremely cooperative: Leaves and needles and grasses eventually die, forming a brown carpet of carbon on top of the soil. Herbivores (such as cows) and birds (chickens) periodically disturb the surface, allowing soil organisms (worms) to reach up and pull this organic material deeper into the dirt, where it—along with other material such as dead roots—is broken into nutrients available to the plants.

  Jack went on to explain this war, which is when my understanding of the soil organisms’ shared objective—the notion that everyone works together for the betterment of the soil community—became more complicated. There is a whole class system. First-level consumers (microbes), the most abundant and minuscule members of the community, break down large fragments of organic material into smaller residues; secondary consumers (protozoa, for example) feed on the primary consumers or their waste; and then third-level consumers (like centipedes, ants, and beetles) eat the secondaries. The more Jack explained it, the more it started to sound like a fraught, complex community. Organisms within each level may attack a fellow comrade (say, a fungi feeding on a nematode—or vice versa), or any of the tiny eaters can, and often do, turn on their own kind.

  All of this subterranean life, Jack explained, is forced to interact—“cooperatively, yes, but also violently and relentlessly to maintain the living system.”

  To call this war may be a little extreme. When I ran Jack’s analogy by soil scientist Fred Magdoff, he likened the process to a system of checks and balances. “To me there is real beauty in how it works,” he said. “When there is sufficient and varied food for the organisms, they do what comes naturally, ‘making a living’ by feeding on the food sources that evolution provided. Sure organisms eat one another, but is that war? We eat carrots, but are we declaring war on carrots? What you have is a thriving, complex community of organisms.”

  Which is precisely what we want for better-tasting food. The result of all this activity—combat or cooperation, you choose—is that insoluble molecules are broken down and rearranged into forms accessible to plants. It’s a process analogous to coffee making. Imagine, a farmer once told me, the difference in taste between a cup of coffee dripped through whole beans and one dripped through beans that have been broken apart into micro-granules.

  Some of these microscopic nutrients combine to form phytonutrients, chemical compounds that are the building blocks of taste. “Like let’s say calcium,” Jack said. “Taste doesn’t come just from calcium—not directly, at least. It comes from a more complex molecule that gets eaten, taken apart, and put back together in a different way. The plant takes this, and all the other molecules, and catalyzes them into phytonutrients. Taste doesn’t come from the elemental compounds. It comes from the synthesis.”

  Phytonutrients—like amino acids, esters, and flavonoids—are key to the flavor of the mokum carrot, or whatever vegetable, grain, or fruit you’re growing, Jack said. He crouched low to the ground to smooth out an uneven patch of soil. “And, not unimportantly—actually, most importantly,” he continued, “phytonutrients are vital to building the immune systems of plants. They are part of the building blocks for vigor.”

  When insecticides and fungicides are used, they usurp the plant’s natural defenses, which means the plant produces fewer phytonutrients. Studies show that organic fruits and vegetables typically contain between 10 and 50 percent more antioxidants and other defense-related compounds than are found in conventional produce.

  Some scientists suggest it’s one of the reasons organic food tastes better than conventional food. As soil biologist Elaine Ingham explained to me, “Phytonutrients are the building blocks for all of the flavor compounds. A lot of those flavor compounds are quite complex, and it takes quite a bit of energy and requires quite a diversity of building blocks in order to make them. So you have to have a plant with really good nutrition for those flavors to be expressed. It’s not all that simple to have something that tastes really good. It’s a lot easier to get something that has sweetness to it, but those really subtle complex flavors? You really have to have a healthy plant to have that.”

  I thought of Klaas and the velvetleaf—his soybean crop’s resistance was not only a sign of healthy soil but a promise of great flavor as well.

  “That’s just it,” Jack said when I mentioned Klaas’s work. “The development of flavor, and the health of the plant, are the same freakin’ thing. You don’t get one without the other. If I treat the soil’s microorganisms right, if they have everything they need to prosper, they’ll do the work for me. At that point you just need to put it on the plate, basically.”

  As we left the greenhouse, Jack acknowledged that the precise mechanics of flavor creation are still mysterious. He realized this many years ago, after experimenting with brining olives. At first he chose distilled vinegar, which, when used as a brine, produced a predictable olive—delicious, but uniform in flavor. “Then I used a live vinegar,” he said, “and after six months to a year, with all the fungi and bacteria in there, some olives would turn out sweet like fruit, some smoky, some had a roasted flavor almost. It was wild! The same
thing is true for soil. You have different things going on, catalyzing new flavors, reaching the full potential and expression of the plant. It’s the action that’s important. But who really knows what the hell is going on in there?”

  The admission took me by surprise, if only because Jack always seemed to know exactly what was going on in there. But eventually I realized he had it just right. I thought of Sir Albert Howard, who, writing in 1940, could not have named the full roster of microorganisms. Nor would he have known a phytonutrient if he saw one. Nor could he have described the chemistry behind well-composted soils—even though he was a chemist, and the father of compost. He didn’t need to. I suppose that, like Jack, Howard was fine with not knowing. Where there is a bit of mystery, respect—even awe—fills the void.

  A little ignorance keeps us from wrongly thinking it’s possible to manipulate the conditions for every harvest. It’s humbling to not know the how, and in the end it’s probably a lot healthier. In the words of ecologist Frank Egler, “Nature is not more complex than we think, but more complex than we can think.”

  If a great-tasting carrot is tied to the abundance of soil organisms, a bad-tasting carrot comes from the absence of soil life. Which is the big distinction between organic and chemical agriculture. The nutrients in compost are part of a system of living things. They are constantly absorbed and rereleased as one organism feeds on another, so they’re continuously available as plants need them. The supply to the plant comes in smaller quantities than it does with fertilizer, but it comes in a steady stream. It’s slow release, versus one heavy shot of chemicals. The disparity is enormous.

  To administer the heavy shot, soil is bypassed. Synthetic fertilizer, in soluble form, is fed directly to the plant’s root. “It’s a fast system,” Jack said. “Whoosh! Water and nutrients are just flushing through. You can get your crops to bulk up and grow very quickly.”