The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food

by Dan Barber

  This is one of the reasons conventional salad lettuce—iceberg lettuce from the Salinas Valley of California, for example—often tastes of virtually nothing. It’s almost all water, and the nitrates saturate the water, leaving no room for the uptake of minerals.

  Thomas Harttung, another of the Fertile Dozen farmers at Laverstoke and founder of the largest organic farming group in Europe, has compared it to cooking: “Imagine a wonderfully balanced Italian main course full of herbs and other fresh ingredients. You then drop the salt bowl into it—rendering it totally inedible. The other taste notes ‘die.’” Industrially produced grains, vegetables, and fruits taste of almost nothing because the nitrates have crowded out the minerals.

  To bypass the network of living things is to deprive the plant’s roots of the full periodic table of the elements the soil provides. But it also deprives the soil organisms of their food source. When Klaas said the number of organisms in his fistful of dirt was greater than the population of Penn Yan, he added, “That’s a lot of community life to feed.” He meant it as an obligation. “What kind of soil life are we going to promote in our fields, and what kind of flavor are we going to get in our mouths, if we feed soil life garbage?”

  Why limit the hand that feeds you? As Eliot Coleman once said, “The idea that we could ever substitute a few soluble elements for a whole living system is like thinking an intravenous needle could administer a delicious meal.”

  A SUBTERRANEAN VIEW

  Late one afternoon the following November, Jack finished his carrot tutorial by excavating a three-foot ditch in the vegetable field next to the fall crop of mokums. We climbed into the trench to examine a cross-sectioned wall of black dirt. It reminded me of the glass-enclosed ant farms I studied in seventh-grade biology. But in the dim light, this soil looked both exposed and secretive. Jack, my subterranean escort, pointed with a small stick to the exposed earth, hoping to illustrate once more how flavor starts in the soil.

  “You should see this, because everyone talks about the chemistry of soil, or the biology,” Jack said, running his hand along the wall, “but without the right physical structure, say goodbye to chemistry and biology. Nothing works.”

  The root systems created what appeared to be small highways and back roads, allowing organisms the freedom to move around. It brought to mind the interior of a well-made loaf of bread—moist, textured, and filled with irregular bubbles. The miles of white, wispy root hairs clenching the dirt in Jack’s trench looked like the strands of gluten in bread that allow it to expand in the oven. Unhealthy soil, by comparison, resembles cake mix—dry and packed down, with no spaces for air to circulate or organisms to maneuver. (No wonder Klaas advocates for rotations of spelt; its large, deeply penetrating root systems create space for the community to thrive.)

  Pointing again with the stick, Jack circled the narrow areas around the roots, the rhizosphere. It’s the soil’s most competitive environment, where organisms thrive in densities up to one hundred times greater than in other parts of the soil. The roots, sensing nutrients in the area, drill into the soil to take advantage of the rich possibilities for nutrition. In healthy conditions, the mycorrhizal fungi and the root tissue literally bind together, forming an unbeatable partnership that allows the root to reach even deeper into the earth, extracting what the soil has to offer.

  “You can look at plants that produce mycorrhizal fungi like you look at oil companies,” Jack said. “These companies invest the heavy costs of searching for oil if they believe it’s a region rich with resources. The roots work like that. It’s an incentive economy.” He said plants will spend as much as 30 percent of their energy to build these fungal root extensions in order to tap into the tiniest spaces in the soil and get the nutrients there.

  It turns out that the mechanism is a prerequisite for great wine. I learned this from Randall Grahm, the iconoclastic winemaker of Bonny Doon Vineyard, in Santa Cruz, California. “Mycorrhizae are microbial demiurges—they bring minerals into the plants,” he told me. “What does that taste like? Persistence. The best wines are powerfully persistent. You breathe out your nose and you taste the wine over again, or you leave the bottle open for a week and the wine still tastes alive. Persistence doesn’t fade, and it doesn’t oxidize. That’s from the minerals.”

  Jack got his finger into a nook of soil to show where the minerals are retrieved. “Here’s where they suck out the phosphorus, or the copper or zinc, and all that comes up into the root with some stored water from the soil.” He shook his head. “Brilliant, right? But you see what I’m saying? It’s not just chemistry or biology down here. It all works if the physical structure is welcoming to the organisms and the fungi. At the end of the day, the plant’s just looking for a good dinner, but he’s got to be able to get to the table.”

  Peeking my head out of the ditch, I saw the final minutes of golden light bathing the upper stretches of the vegetable field. I remembered the fall afternoon eight years earlier (nearly to the day, and the hour) when Eliot Coleman galloped back and forth across the land and sensed—correctly, as it turned out—a deep layer of organic matter below our feet.

  “In a healthy system,” Jack said, waving his hand to indicate all the vegetation above us, “everything you’re looking at has a corresponding weight of roots and organisms belowground. Everything.”

  A corresponding weight? It seemed almost impossible to imagine. As ecologist David Wolfe says, human beings are “subterranean-impaired.” We’re unable to see what’s underneath us. It took a visit to the control room (and, as I stood in the ditch, a nematode’s view of the underworld) to change how I looked at a landscape: what we see aboveground—the plants, trees, wildflowers, shrubs, and grasses—is mirrored by root systems belowground. I suddenly thought back to Wes Jackson’s image of perennial wheat, with its iceberg-like proportions. It’s not green and lush and filled with sunlight, nor does it inspire painters or poets or picnics, but nature’s underworld is at least half of the story.

  0.0: THE INDUSTRIAL CARROT

  Back in the kitchen, Jack brought out his refractometer to test another batch of mokums. They scored well again, with Brix readings between 12 and 14. Someone pulled a case of stock carrots from the refrigerator. Grown in Mexico, these workaday carrots are large, uniform, and fast-growing, which makes them cheap fodder for vegetable and meat stocks.

  I asked Jack if adding soluble nitrogen to his mokum carrots would make them grow faster. “No way. You’d just end up burning the shit out of everything,” he said. “Adding Synthetic N is like adding a bomb—I mean, bombs are N, the same ingredient, so think what happens if you were to drop a bomb in the middle of a community of soil organisms.”

  “So let’s say I’m a mycorrhizal fungus . . .”

  “Kiss your ass goodbye,” Jack said, chopping the air. “Gone, goodbye. N is ammonia, as in ammonia. It’s burning, like the stuff you wash your floors with, only it’s double, triple that in strength. If you’re fungi, you’re hightailing it out of there.”

  The Mexican carrots were from a large organic farm, an example of what Michael Pollan calls “industrial organic” and Eliot Coleman once described as “shallow organic.” Such farms eschew chemical fertilizers and pesticides and technically abide by organic regulations, but they use every opportunity to operate in the breach. They grow in monocultures, they look to treat symptoms instead of causes, and, to cut to the real offense, they don’t feed the soil.

  “Carrots like these are all grown in sandy soils,” Jack told me. “It’s sand, water, and fertilizers.” Organic fertilizers are the tools of the shallow organic farmer’s trade. Like chemical fertilizers, they are applied in a soluble form, feeding the plant but not the soil.

  Jack squeezed the juice and read the refractometer. “Whoa,” he said.

  “What did you get?” His expression had me imagining the Mexican carrot registering 20.9.

  He shook the refractomet
er, squeezed more juice, and stared at the monitor. “Holy cow . . . zero.”

  “Zero?”

  “Zero point zero,” he said, flashing me the screen. “There’s no detectable sugar.”

  “I didn’t know a zero-sugar carrot was possible,” I said.

  Jack was silent a moment, holding the carrot up to the light as if it were a lab experiment. “Neither did I.”

  He said the Brix discrepancy could be attributed to several factors. Mokums were bred for outstanding flavor, for one thing, giving them a hereditary leg up on the Mexican organic variety, which was likely conceived for high yields or better shelf life. So comparing the mokum with the Mexican vegetable wasn’t actually comparing carrots with carrots. And then there’s the mokum’s stress response, in this case to the cold snap we were experiencing. Freezing temperatures kick-start a carrot into converting starches to sugars. This neat physiological trick raises the internal temperature and prevents ice crystallization, helping the carrot survive another day. The Mexican carrots, in contrast, hadn’t lived a day under a balmy sixty degrees.

  But none of these excuses could disguise the essential difference between the two carrots. Jack’s carrots were satiated with nutrients; the others were starved. By afternoon’s end on this chilly fall day with Jack, I’d come to another paradigm-shifting realization about soil. Until then, I had held on to a remarkably simple misconception about conventional agriculture: that chemical farming kills soil by poisoning it (which it can) and that ingesting chemicals is unappetizing and harmful (which it probably is). But both miss the larger point if you’re after a 16.9 carrot. Chemical farming—and bad organic farming—actually kills soil by starving its complex and riotous community of anything good to eat.

  “To be well fed is to be healthy,” Albrecht said. And he meant more than eating fruits and vegetables. He wanted to know what the fruits and vegetables were eating as well. (As Michael Pollan observed, you aren’t just what you eat. “You are what you eat eats, too.”)

  Albrecht would not have been surprised by a 0.0 carrot, since he warned that soil microbes “dine at the first table” and should therefore have their plates filled with minerals. If not, plants couldn’t be truly healthy. Nor could we.

  In 1942, Albrecht proved his point. Just before World War II, when most Americans ate food grown close to where they lived, he came across Missouri’s military draft records and discovered a correlation between recruits considered unfit for military service and soils lacking in minerals. Drawing a line across a map of Missouri, Albrecht overlaid the clusters of rejected men. His hunch, that the washed-out soils of the southeast, close to the Mississippi River, would produce men of inferior physical capabilities, while the relatively drier (and therefore mineral-rich) soils of northwest Missouri would produce men of better health, proved to be exactly correct. Approximately four hundred men out of one thousand from the southeast were rejected for the draft, while only two hundred of a thousand from the north were. And, as Albrecht predicted, the area in between, where the soil was in fair condition, rejected three hundred recruits.

  Alarmed by declining soil fertility at the end of World War II, Albrecht warned that our nation’s future was at risk. He called for a major national initiative to restore the health and fertility of America’s soils. Instead we went in the opposite direction, by industrializing agriculture. Not surprisingly, vegetables and fruits (and grains, milk, and even animal products) suffered. In the past fifty to seventy years, many vegetables have shown nutrient declines of anywhere from 5 percent to 40 percent.* Researchers now refer to large-scale “biomass dilution”—plants that have such low concentrations of certain nutrients that they do not adequately nourish the people who eat them.

  I was once a member of a panel on sustainable food, where I made the point that these declines in nutrient density, especially in the mineral content of soils, were connected to a host of diet-related diseases. A nutritionist in the back of the room took me to task: Foods may have lost some of their trace minerals, he conceded, but because our bodies need so little of these to survive, we excrete those minerals anyway. Trace minerals—zinc, selenium, and copper—are named as such because we don’t need a lot of them.

  “Instead of talking about the real issue here—how our modern diets include the wrong foods in bad proportions,” he said, “you’re bemoaning a food system that’s succeeded in producing a plentiful, cheap supply of fruits and vegetables—fresh, frozen, canned, and even processed—by sacrificing a few minerals we pee out at the end of the day. I don’t know what you’re complaining about, and I suppose neither do you.”

  There was some truth to his critique. In a country where the leading dietary sources of energy are abundant carbohydrates and fats, within a world where 840 million people suffer from chronic hunger, it is difficult to get too worked up about food lacking in micronutrients. A carrot puffed up on nitrates and water is still a carrot with nutritive and caloric benefits. To compare it with a 16.9 mokum is to admit an embarrassment of riches.

  But to say we need only a specific amount of certain micronutrients is exactly the kind of reductionist dietary advice that got us into trouble in the first place.

  Several years after the nutritionist asked his question, I met with Joan Gussow, former chairwoman of nutrition education at Columbia University, who helped me with the answer. Joan is a longtime analyst and critic of the industrial food system and the woman who famously said, “I prefer butter to margarine because I trust cows more than chemists.” She, too, was one of the Fertile Dozen at Laverstoke and served as part of the brain trust that guided the opening of the Stone Barns Center.

  She affirmed that soil minerals are the building blocks of human nutrition, and at the core of healthy eating. “We’re focused for some reason on single nutrients, on specific, magic bullets for our health,” she told me. “But it’s the mixture of foods—we call them diets, by the way—where the real nutrition comes from.”

  How would she have answered the nutritionist in the audience? She would have asked a question of her own: How did he know that we need only this much of X and this much of Y, and that we excrete the rest? After all, these days we’re no longer concerned only with preventing deficiency diseases, like scurvy, which can be conquered with a magic bullet such as vitamin C.

  Now, she said, “we’re talking about degenerative disease, and degenerative disease takes a long, long time to develop. There are no magic bullets. There are only diets that appear to equate eating with a healthy life.”

  The Western diet does not appear to be one of them. Of the diet-related diseases that have spiked in the past century, the obesity epidemic would seem to have been impossible to predict. And yet, in the 1930s, Albrecht came close. He knew that cows grazing from well-mineralized soils ate balanced diets. But when kept in a barn and fed a predetermined grain ration, they never stopped eating, overindulging in a vain attempt to make up with sheer volume for what they weren’t getting in their food. Albrecht believed our bodies would likewise stuff themselves for the same reason. Starved of micronutrients, he said, we will keep eating in the hope of attaining them.

  Of course, obesity is influenced by many different things, but John Ikerd, a professor emeritus of agriculture and applied economics at Albrecht’s alma mater, the University of Missouri, argues that Albrecht’s conclusions about mineral depletion and obesity have never seriously been considered.

  “If we humans have this same basic tendency as other animals, as Albrecht suggested, whenever our food choices are limited, we may well consume more of some nutrients than we need in an attempt to get enough of others to meet our basic nutritional requirements,” Ikerd once said. “The lack of a few essential nutrients in our diets might leave us feeling hungry even though we have consumed far more calories than is consistent with good health.”

  Ikerd cites a damning statistic: from 1900 to 1950, Americans’ physical activity decreas
ed, as did their caloric consumption. In the second half of the century, they became even less active but ate more. “The sedentary lifestyles of many Americans obviously contribute to the growing epidemic of obesity,” he conceded. “However, excessive eating and the resulting excessive weight also contribute to sedentary lifestyles. Many Americans may overeat because their food leaves them undernourished. . . . The human species obviously didn’t evolve that much over 100 years, but the food system most certainly did.”

  The connection between depleted soils and obesity is rarely considered. And though scientists now see how well-mineralized soils beget healthy plants, there is still too little knowledge about how plants use those minerals.

  “No one understands the mechanism for synthesizing minerals into molecules—no one,” Joan told me. But this synthesis is, nonetheless, key to healthy plants and healthy people. “Foods are an evolving mix of metabolizing molecules. Diets represent a whole range. To separate the nutrients out of a diet is to render them—nutritionally, anyway—completely useless.” Which is what most nutritionists do. They look at a vegetable or a fruit or a piece of bread and break it down into vitamin components: this gives vitamin A, this provides calcium, this contains the United States Recommended Daily Allowance of folic acid.

  Albrecht did not. He worked backward from his observation of healthy people. “Rather than assuming what a healthy diet should be, he looked at healthy people and figured out what made them healthy,” Klaas told me. “He could almost always trace it back to healthy soil.”

  When Joan said that diets represent the whole range of synthesizing molecules, she may well have been talking about how a plant creates flavor. Flavor, as Jack had pointed out, isn’t about individual minerals. It isn’t calcium or manganese or cobalt or copper. Flavor is the synthesis of all these things. The more minerals available for the plant to synthesize, the more opportunity there is for better flavor.