The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food

by Dan Barber

  Compare that with the average restaurant preparation. With foie gras (especially Moulard duck liver) faster and easier to produce, the result has been a radical change in the way we’re able to enjoy foie gras. Most American chefs today lob off a large slab of the liver and sear it in a pan, just as they would a seven-ounce steak (though the fat is so meltingly tender, you can eat it with a spoon). In the words of Thomas Keller, that’s not cooking, that’s heating. The “transcendental act” of good cooking turns out to be more than just culinary. It’s an ecological act, too.

  It took that rooftop view to get me to see something about Eduardo I hadn’t fully considered. His foie gras is so brilliant because of what it owes to the dehesa, a system of agriculture that is almost antithetical to farming as we know it.

  Eduardo’s conviction that “all you need is to give the geese what they want and they will reward you” may sound sentimental, but he is referring to a universal truth about nature. When we allow nature to work, which means when we farm in a way that promotes all of its frustrating inefficiencies—when we grow nature—we end up producing more than we could with whatever system we might replace it with. In a finely tuned system like the dehesa, it gives you jamón and beef and cheese and figs and olives, and enough will be left over to fatten your geese, too, if you let it.

  When Eduardo said that conventional foie gras was an insult to the history of foie gras, he was not speaking about force-feeding. He was commenting on the affront to the natural world, on the destruction of what nature can provide. It is free for the taking, so long as you play by the rules. Playing by the rules means you act quietly on the land—some profits from olives and figs are forfeited for the geese, some geese are sacrificed for the hawks, cattle and sheep share the land with pigs, pigs share the acorns with geese, and so on. Conventional American agriculture mostly does not play by the rules. In its relentless drive for higher yields—more corn, more chemicals, more monocultures—it fixes the game. It de-natures nature. That’s the insult. It makes a mockery of what was a gift.

  Wes is right: we live in a fallen world, and no matter how hard we try—no matter how brilliantly we feed the soil, or how ably we adopt Klaas’s masterful rotations—agriculture itself will always come into some sort of conflict with nature if we seek to control it. But what if we could coexist with natural systems rather than dominate them? What if the model for the dehesa—disrupt nature (flood the system with pigs, strip the cork off the oak tree) but also act with restraint (limit the pigs to whatever the acorn harvest dictates, harvest the cork sparingly and replant trees for future generations)—could become the template for the future of agriculture?

  Looking out over the land, I realized that in front of me was an answer to a question at the core of Aldo Leopold’s land ethic: how do we keep in check our incentive to abuse the land for maximum economic return, and transition from a “conqueror of the land-community” to a “plain member and citizen of it”? We should start, he thought, by erasing any divisions between eating and farming. From my perch, that much seemed obvious. And yet the dictates of the American diet have done exactly the opposite, demanding that the land produce what we most want to eat.

  Our current template for changing the system is to opt out of it: eat seasonal, buy local, choose organic whenever possible. For all the virtues of farm-to-table eating, a rooftop view of the dehesa makes the shortcomings of that ethos easy to see. Our job isn’t just to support the farmer; it’s really to support the land that supports the farmer. That’s a larger distinction than it sounds like. Even the most sustainably minded farmers grow crops and raise meats in proportion to what we demand. And what we demand generally throws off the balance of what the land can reasonably provide.

  Jamón ibérico might have done the same if the culture didn’t dictate slicing the meat paper thin. Or if jamón was the only product of the region. Instead, a larger cuisine grew out of negotiations with the environment, and it has helped maintain the delicate ecological balance ever since.

  A rooftop view of the dehesa almost inevitably raises the question, What if our ways of eating—not merely a plate of food, but a whole pattern of cooking—were in perfect balance with the land around us?

  Eduardo hinted at the answer when he held that piece of jamón up to the light as the model for his foie gras. Until that point, I had understood jamón only insofar as I understood that the white lines of fat running through the ham meant the pig had been blessed with a diet rich in acorns. Now I was realizing that Eduardo really held up the entirety of an ecological system, a road map for a Third Plate. Chefs can narrate that message in the same way that those striations of fat, and the red meat that surrounded them, narrate a story as intricate, complex, connected, and—to borrow from Jack’s description of how soil works—mysterious as the landscape that made it.

  CHAPTER 13

  JUST BEFORE I left Cárdeno and returned to the airport, I asked Eduardo a question that had been lingering in my mind all day. Despite their best efforts, no one has been able to replicate jamón ibérico outside of the dehesa. Did he think it would be possible to replicate his natural foie gras elsewhere in the world?

  “Yes, yes, of course,” he said, though he cautioned that the livers wouldn’t taste the same.

  I asked him how they would taste. “It depends on what the geese chose to eat. They decide. In England, I know a producer that raises geese close to the sea. I hate this liver! It tastes like fish!”

  “What about the lack of acorns?” I asked. “Wouldn’t that be a problem?”

  “No, really, you don’t have to have acorns. In Denmark, there are no acorns; the geese eat tubers similar to a wild potato and the liver is beautiful, with the aroma of root vegetables. Raise them on a coffee plantation in the right way and the liver will taste like coffee.”

  I wondered what a Stone Barns version would taste like—and then, almost as soon as the question occurred to me, I was already plotting how I would persuade Craig to sign on to the experiment.

  “I have to tell you about the most amazing Spanish farmer!” I said when I bumped into him a few days later in the courtyard of Stone Barns. Craig opened his mouth and his eyes widened, in what I thought was genuine interest. By the time I mentioned foie gras, he looked like an Edvard Munch painting.

  “Can we raise geese?” I asked. The question put him at ease.

  “Actually, we have fifty or so, arriving any day now,” he said. Apparently Craig had decided earlier in the year that geese would work well in his animal rotation at Stone Barns, and that their meat—he hadn’t considered fattening the livers—would be popular at the farmers’ market for Christmas.

  I described Eduardo’s farm and the natural foie gras. “Interesting,” he said, looking at the ground and modulating his heavily stressed voice with frequent throat clearings. “I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to try.” It wouldn’t hurt to try meant that it would actually hurt a lot. But he would try.

  He began in August. Craig and I settled on dividing the daily chores. Craig’s team would bring water; the cooks and the managers were assigned to the feed, twice a day. Though I hoped to mimic Eduardo’s system, allowing the geese to forage for themselves, Craig reminded me that our pasture wouldn’t provide the same assortment of acorns, figs, olives, and lupins that Eduardo’s geese enjoyed. Without additional feed, he said, the geese not only stood zero chance of producing fatty livers; they would eventually starve. Grass alone (even a diversity of grasses, treated to Craig’s methodical rotations) doesn’t fatten a goose any more than grazing a salad bar would prepare us to play right tackle for the Broncos. Craig was determined to feed corn, but free choice corn, without forcing anything.

  The first day, he escorted me out to their sequestered paddock, deep in the corner of the main pasture. The geese moved about in a loose phalanx, heads held high, eyes darting around at their new surroundings. I took notes on his instructions for the feeding. Th
ere wasn’t much to it, Craig said, showing me the box that controlled the electric current for the fencing, and the bins where the grain should be dumped.

  “Field gras,” Craig’s assistant Padraic said as he passed by the geese. “I can’t say I’ve ever heard of it, but it sounds delicious.”

  Over the next several weeks, the feeding rotation went smoothly. After filling two large buckets with corn, the cooks would walk to the goose paddock, pour the grain into the troughs, and return the pails. There was never anything unusual to report, until one day our butcher, José, came to my office. He very seriously asked if he could talk about a “disturbing trend” and shut the door behind him.

  “Chef, it’s the geese. They are not happy about the grain,” he said, his head bowed.

  José has permanently disheveled black hair and sloped shoulders. Diminutive and painfully shy, he’s the antithesis of every burly, testosterone-fueled stereotype of a young butcher. He works near the entrance of the kitchen delivery door, an oxford shirt under his chef’s jacket to keep warm from the draft, hacking, sawing, and, most often, maneuvering his small boning knife around and in between the muscles of large carcasses. He’s patient, deliberate, and very talented.

  “It’s not like it used to be,” he explained. “They used to run to you as you entered the fence. It was like they smelled hot food coming or something. And then they’d run all over the grain bin, fighting for a good spot. Now when I come they sort of, I don’t know, they ignore me or something.”

  When I saw Padraic later in the day, he told me that he, too, had noticed a change in the geese. “Yeah, it’s the darnedest thing,” he said, removing his cap and scratching his head. “I’m no goose-ologist, but you’d think they’d just inhale the sweet stuff, like the pigs. Maybe they will when the cold kicks in—that’s what your goose whisperer guy said they’d do, right?” He didn’t wait for me to answer. “For now, they remind me of eating at one of those fancy Japanese restaurants, where they serve you a bowl of plain white rice at the end of the meal to make sure you’re satiated and all. That’s how they’re treating the grain—like filler.”

  I went to investigate myself the next morning. On my way to the field, I passed a truck unloading the monthly order of fifteen thousand pounds of grain. There should have been nothing strange about standing in the shadow of the hulking load as I stopped to speak to Craig. I had seen dozens of deliveries before. The pigs and the chickens had been eating their fair share of those deliveries for many years. But on that morning, I peered over Craig’s shoulder and stared up into the back of the flatbed. The mountain of yellow corn looked imposing, formidable. It was not unlike the first time I took notice of the mound of white flour in the middle of Blue Hill’s kitchen. Like the flour, the corn was its own kind of landscape, and not a kernel of it had been grown on the farm. With two buckets, one in each hand, I carried the grain over to the goose paddock. It trickled off the tops of the buckets and left a trail behind me.

  Aldo Leopold believed that land should be defined as “a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants, and animals.” But my role in transporting another farmer’s already exported energy was more like a circuit breaker, not a conduit. If we were feeding these geese—and, for that matter, the chickens and the pigs—grain grown however many thousands of miles away, on land that had nothing to do with the land I was standing on now . . . where was the flow?

  I dumped the buckets of grain into the troughs. The geese approached the feed politely, pecking at it like day-old Chinese food, a take-it-or-leave-it kind of meal. When given the option of grain—normally a candy bar for the goose palate—they preferred the free forage. By late afternoon, when I returned with two more buckets, the geese had eaten almost all of the morning’s delivery, but they couldn’t have been less excited to see me. Several of them flapped their wings and turned away. They were eating the corn, but they were no more choosing it than an addict chooses his drug. We might as well have stuffed it down their gullets.

  This clearly wasn’t “field gras.” This was grain gras, just not forced. It didn’t matter how noble our philosophy had been, or how big my idea had started out; we’d ended up raising those geese in exactly the conditions I’d been trying to avoid. Cover the paddock with a barn, supersize the bird, and you basically had a recipe for a Perdue chicken.

  “Why do you listen to this man you call Eduardo? Why?” I heard the familiar voice of Izzy Yanay as I bent over a case of turnips at the Union Square farmers’ market, a few weeks after my afternoon with the geese.

  Of all the proponents of foie gras, Izzy is among the most active—and certainly the most convincing. Raised in Israel, he moved to America in 1980, determined to do something with his agriculture degree. He partnered with Michael Ginor, a chef by training, and opened Hudson Valley Foie Gras, becoming the country’s first producer of fresh duck liver. Before Izzy, chefs used imported foie gras from Canada or France, usually preserved in tins (unless they were smuggling fresh livers via monkfish, as Palladin was known to do).

  Izzy, who is in his early sixties, wears black T-shirts that cling to his frame. With broad shoulders, bulging biceps, and a thin waist, he resembles a younger Jack LaLanne, were Jack LaLanne a member of the Mossad. At Hudson Valley Foie Gras, he fields all the questions pertaining to the humaneness of their product. If you’re a foie gras devotee and look forward to enjoying it in the future, you’re glad to know Izzy is defending your rights. He’s intense, assured, and dogged about refuting claims that foie gras is torture.

  “If what I was doing was unethical,” Izzy said once, “if someone could come to our farm and show me one thing we do that’s inhumane, I would be the first one out the door. I don’t torture my ducks, because tortured ducks don’t make good foie gras.”

  Izzy told me once how a group of skeptics visiting the farm (Izzy allows visits from anyone with a real interest in seeing foie gras produced) came to an area where the ducklings were gathered. Many of the guests reached down to pet the babies, cooing over their cuteness. He told them that petting does not make the ducks happy. He said that dogs and cats like to be petted; ducks do not. His point? Fowls and mammals are different species. “Do not equate how you would feel getting a tube inserted into your throat with how the duck feels.”

  In trumpeting the miracle of Eduardo’s natural foie gras (not to mention our own foie gras experiment at Stone Barns), I had unintentionally aligned myself with Izzy’s adversaries, which is why on this early Saturday morning he had come to find me.

  “Why not go to France if you’re so interested in foie gras?” he demanded as I stood to greet him. “You know? Why a Spaniard? You want to learn about great cars, you don’t go to Turkey, do you? You go to Germany. No? Is this not true?”

  “Hello, Izzy,” I said.

  “No, come on now, tell me why if you want to know about foie gras you don’t go to France? I tell you I want to cry when I go to France. I go to France and I visit a man like Marcel Guachie’s foie gras plant, anywhere like this, and I want to cry. I want to cry, but I have to catch my tears because God forbid my tears touch the floor. It is a shrine, these places. These people are gods. They know foie gras. They look at a baby duck and they’ll tell you what kind of foie gras you’re going to get. Everything Eduardo knows, they’ve forgotten—that’s how much they know. Me? Next to these guys? I’m nothing. I’m a speck. Dirt. They are king. I’m a baby with my thumb in my mouth. I’m nothing!” Izzy put his thumb in his mouth and sucked loudly. “Nothing!” People passed by us and stared.

  “Tell me, Dan Barber, what’s wrong with raising a goose inside? Because of this, now I can make the foie gras of my dreams. That’s what we do. We can make the foie gras of everybody’s dreams by putting them in one location under one roof.”

  “Why is that better?” I asked.

  “CONTROL!” he screamed. It sounded as if his throat were coated in broken glass. “
I can wake up and walk over and see how they’re doing. Eduardo makes a big lie, a big, big lie, I’m telling you. Why? I’ll tell you why. Geese in the wild—that’s why.”

  “But I saw it,” I said.

  Izzy ignored me. “Geese in the wild!” He threw his head back and laughed severely. “Do you want to know what? Geese die. They die here. They die there. They die of laughter. They die if they’re sad. They die if you touch them.” With his index finger he reached out and touched me on the shoulder. “Die,” he said.

  “So, okay, capisce, it works like this, this is what Mr. Eduardo says: he says they eat acorns, yes, right, lots of acorns, and they eat some yellow grass, and they go free—free like this, la, la, la, in the forest.” Both of Izzy’s arms were in the air, and he danced on his toes like a ballerina. “Like this, you know, in the wild, and the geese, they are HAPPY.” Izzy smiled a broad, fake smile, hands still in the air. “And they laugh, they listen to Schubert, and then one day . . . foie gras!”

  He called out to a farmer standing next to us. “Hey, guess what? Let me tell you what. Do you know you can turn a goose’s liver yellow if you feed it yellow? Yes! You can! Feed it yellow something and poof—the liver is yellow.” The farmer looked confused. “Yes, true.” Izzy went on, “And did I tell you? One time I feed my chicken popcorn. And do you know what? When I go to cook this chicken in the pan, it flips, on its own. Flip, flip. I go to cook, and like this.” He turned his hand back and forth in the air to imitate a chicken breast flipping over. “It flips. Like this. Flip!”

  Between Izzy’s accusations and the geese’s persisting ennui, I was not feeling optimistic about the fate of our “field gras.” In fact, I was suffering from my own ennui when Lisa called one afternoon to inquire about how the experiment was going. Why not fly Eduardo to Stone Barns, she suggested when I shared my bleak predictions. He could inspect the geese and also pay a visit to Izzy at Hudson Valley Foie Gras. (She was curious, as was I, to see Eduardo’s reaction to a more conventional approach.)