The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food

by Dan Barber

  “Yeah, it’s true. There’s an ocean conservationist by the name of Carl Safina, who’s a renowned expert on tuna. He told me,” I explained. (Not true.)

  “Carl?” she said, with a laugh. “I just spent a few days with Carl for a major story I’m working on about chefs and seafood sustainability. I really don’t think he said that.”

  I like to think I remained admirably steadfast as Bates stood at the other side of the expediter’s table and shook her head. What was I clinging to? I think it was that Safina had argued, quite convincingly, that if a fishery is well managed and regulated, one ought to be supporting the small-scale fishermen whose livelihoods depend on catching within sanctioned quotas. But he wasn’t referring to tuna.

  I stood silently, replaying the words “a major story I’m working on about chefs and seafood sustainability.” There was the usual kitchen commotion around us, but with the added sting of the expediter yelling for the waiters to “pick up the tuna belly for table 41! Pick up the tuna!” followed by Bates’s exasperation as the glistening pieces of bluefin—the majestic, hauntingly delicious, and nearly extinct fish—were whisked to the dining room in front of her.

  I spent much of that summer marinating in fear of the Gourmet article. It was cold comfort to know of other New York chefs serving bluefin, or that nearly every good sushi restaurant in America goes through copious amounts of toro. They were not part of a nonprofit education center devoted to the future of sustainably produced food.

  The article ran that fall under the title “Sea Change,” and while Bates did not name me, she did mention bluefin as every chef’s “guilty pleasure,” admitting that she, too, used to indulge but had since changed her mind (just like me!) after reading Carl Safina’s Song for the Blue Ocean.

  I went back and reread parts of Safina’s book after the article came out, stopping at a section very near the end that, nearly a decade earlier, I had underlined extensively (and forgotten about completely). Safina makes reference to Aldo Leopold, whose writing had helped me understand the dehesa and tierra, the Spanish word for “land” (meaning more than just the ground we stand on). Back when Leopold defined this philosophy as the “land ethic”—what he called land and we call the environment—it was a novel idea. Over the next half century, it became the very heart of conventional environmental thinking, and Safina called for extending it even further, to “below the high-tide line.” Explaining this new “sea ethic,” he writes, “Simply by offering the sea’s creatures membership in our own extended family of life we can broaden ourselves without simplifying or patronizing them. With such a mental gesture—merely a new self-concept—we may complete the approach to living on Earth that began with the land ethic.”

  Safina ends Song for the Blue Ocean with a thought that I also underlined: “The promise: that any honest inquiry into the reality of nature also yields insights about ourselves and the dramatic context of the human spirit.”

  He was right. After some honest inquiry into the reality of nature, I did gain some insight about myself, forced on me as it were, and it wasn’t flattering. Even though Safina’s writing had been affecting and instructive to me as a young cook—introducing me to the power of the chef to create demand for certain foods and demonstrating how profoundly these demands shape ecologies—I had become, somehow, the very person Safina warned against: the consumer who considers the ocean “other.”

  Safina calls us “soft vessels of seawater”—and he’s got a point: water makes up more than two-thirds of the human body, the same proportion it covers on the earth’s surface. “We are,” he writes, “wrapped around an ocean within.”

  In the landlocked streets of Greenwich Village and the wooded pastures of Stone Barns, I often treated the ocean and the plight of its inhabitants as separate, both from myself and from our work with sustainable agriculture. Caroline Bates had given me a free pass by not calling me out in her article. I promised myself I would make up for years of ignorance with some honest inquiry into the state of the oceans.

  CHAPTER 15

  IN 1883, the British biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, one of Darwin’s earliest and most vociferous defenders, wrote that “nothing we do seriously affects the number of the fish,” a striking statement so high-handed it seems nature was just itching to slap him down.

  It’s striking, too, because it actually wasn’t that long ago. Which is the point, really: so much has happened to two-thirds of our earth in such a short period of time that only the greatest of exaggerators could have predicted the extent of the damage. The bluefin’s decimation is just part of the overall decline of fisheries around the world.

  There are three stories to tell about the decline.

  The fishing-industry story goes like this: over the past sixty years, we started taking too many fish from the sea, more than quadrupling our annual haul, from nineteen million tons in 1950 to eighty-seven million tons in 2005. Simply stated, we are taking fish from the ocean faster than they can reproduce. The result is that the commercial fish catch has been declining by 500,000 tons per year since 1988. More than 85 percent of the world’s fish stocks are now reported as fully exploited, overexploited, depleted, or recovering from depletion.

  The origins of the most serious damage coincided with the industrialization of American agriculture at the end of World War II. Which is not to say that prior to World War II the oceans were universally respected and well managed; just as destructive farming practices have been a part of agriculture since ancient times, fishermen have been depleting certain populations of fish for ages. But it is to say that before World War II, conquering the seas for the sake of sating our appetites was largely impossible, or at least limited to specific species and geographic locations.

  In the same way that munitions factories built during WWII were later converted for the large-scale production of pesticides and fertilizers, paving the way for monocultures—Michael Pollan’s “original sin” of agriculture—wartime technologies also radically changed the nature of the oceans. The equivalent sin of modern ocean fishing might be the use of sonar detection equipment (developed to locate enemies at sea) in the hunting of fish. This technology helped easily identify and track large schools of fish, making catches instantly more plentiful and profitable. Safina has written that before these advances, fish catches were naturally constrained by certain stretches of the ocean being “too far” and “too deep.” Along with radar came more powerful vessels, able to fish in what had been impossible-to-reach areas, and better refrigeration on board to preserve the day’s catch.

  With unhindered access, the fishing industry conceived a seemingly endless number of ways to slice and dice the ocean more efficiently. Some of the advances, as sometimes happens in agriculture, were reasonable within limits. But limits aren’t something the fishing industry (or industrial agriculture) knows much about. Add technological know-how to a conquering mind-set, and reasonable ideas can easily be taken to unreasonable extremes.

  Trawling, for example, a form of net fishing that in one form or another has been around since the 1300s, turned particularly lethal. Today bottom drawlers drag nets (some as large as football fields) that scrape, scour, flatten, and otherwise upset the diverse and vital community on the ocean floor. Much of what gets disturbed—and, in so many cases, destroyed—during routine bottom trawling decreases the ocean’s regenerative capacity. It’s a scorched-earth policy for the seafloor.

  “Imagine what people would say if a band of hunters strung a mile of net between two immense all-terrain vehicles and dragged it at speed across the plains of Africa,” Charles Clover writes in The End of the Line. “This fantastical assemblage . . . would scoop up everything in its way: predators such as lions and cheetahs, lumbering endangered herbivores such as rhinos and elephants, herds of impala and wildebeest, family groups of warthogs and wild dogs. . . . The effect of dragging a huge iron bar across the savannah is to break off every outcrop and u
proot every tree, bush, and flowering plant, stirring columns of birds into the air. Left behind is a strangely bedraggled landscape resembling a harrowed field.” We clear-cut the oceans as we once plowed up the prairies.

  While bottom trawling destroys underwater habitats, it’s led to something equally troubling: the enormous unintended catch these boats bring aboard and then discard. Estimates of “bycatch” vary, but the number could total between eighteen and forty million tons—one-quarter of all the fish caught at sea. Why throw away a quarter of your fish? Because no one will buy them. There’s limited space and time to process fish on the boats (and, depending on government regulation, limited quotas, too); bringing aboard what can’t be sold would mean leaving behind the fish that can. It’s cheaper to throw the undesirable dead or dying back into the sea or process them into fishmeal.

  Several years ago, reports of dolphins trapped and drowned in tuna nets raised international concern about bycatch. The alarming news, made all the more alarming by the universal appeal of the bycatch in question (dolphins are more photogenic than, say, sea cucumbers), led to improvements in dolphin release procedures and helped initiate other advances to reduce the carnage imposed by large-scale fishing. But the problem of bycatch is not going away—not until destructive fishing techniques are outlawed and not until a market is created for these underutilized species of fish.

  Which brings us to the environmental story: Once upon a time, the conventional wisdom held by Huxley—and most everyone else—was that the ocean was so vast and so resilient, it was impossible to take too many fish. Not true, it turns out. It was also thought impossible to overburden the ocean with our waste. That was never true, either. The problems with the oceans, in other words, aren’t just about what we take out. They’re about what we put in, too.

  The fertilizers and pesticides that feed our monocultures end up in the ocean. So do the chemicals used for maintaining places like golf courses—monocultures with eighteen holes—and backyards. Many of the toxic materials we use on land eventually leach into the sea.

  This has led to a whole host of problems, including the appearance of more than four hundred dead zones worldwide, from the Chesapeake Bay to the Baltic Sea. These uncontrolled blooms of algae hungrily feed on the excess nitrogen and phosphorus in the water—extreme examples of the same trend Klaas saw close to home with the effects of nitrogen leaching on Seneca Lake. Their eventual death and decomposition deplete the water of oxygen and slowly choke aquatic life.

  The most notorious of these is the eight-thousand-square-mile dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. The location is no coincidence—positioned at the mouth of the Mississippi River, the Gulf corrals all of the chemical runoff from our nation’s Grain Belt monocultures. Each summer, the deadly algae bloom expands to fill an area the size of New Jersey. Most fish and shrimp, sensing the change in oxygen levels, swim to safer waters, leaving the area virtually deserted and paralyzing the local fishing industry. Less mobile creatures—crabs and mussels, for instance—aren’t so lucky. University of Louisiana marine ecologist Nancy Rabalais, who has been studying the area for almost thirty years, once described her experience scuba diving in the hypoxic zone. “You don’t see any fish,” she said, just “decomposing bodies lying in sediment.”

  The threat to marine life is about more than what we put into the ocean; it’s about what we put into the sky, as well. This is another part of the environmental story, the climate change part, which, from a biological point of view, has only just begun.

  One way to detect it is through the ocean’s primordial lead actor: phytoplankton. Phytoplankton are effectively floating microscopic plants, as opposed to zooplankton, which are microscopic animals. Too small to see, they make their presence known in clusters; the greener the waters, the more phytoplankton are present. They’re a real gift to marine life, the ocean’s answer to soils rich with microorganisms. The tangy smell we associate with the sea, and the seafood flavor we covet, really come from sulfurous gases produced by phytoplankton. In fact, the entire marine food web begins with phytoplankton, upon which all other organisms in the ocean depend either directly or indirectly. Phytoplankton are the engine for all underwater life, sustaining the microscopic organisms (zooplankton), the supersize ones (whales), and everything in between (herbivorous fish eat the phytoplankton, carnivorous fish eat the herbivores, and so on up the food chain).

  Since plant life requires certain conditions for growth, phytoplankton are also very good indicators of changes in the environment. Which is why the grim predictions for their future are so troubling. A recent study suggests that global warming has precipitated a 40 percent decline in phytoplankton since 1950, the implications of which are staggering. Scientists are predicting that this will prove to be the single biggest change to the earth in modern times.

  Evidence shows that when phytoplankton populations plummet, as they do during El Niño climate cycles, seabirds and marine mammals starve and die in huge numbers. But phytoplankton’s role extends well beyond the ocean. The sulfurous gases they release are not just responsible for the sea’s signature aroma; they also help with the formation of clouds, which means less solar radiation. And much of the oxygen we breathe is made by plankton. Like trees and grass, phytoplankton use photosynthesis to capture the sun’s energy and convert it into chemical energy, releasing oxygen in the process. In fact, plankton are responsible for 50 percent of oxygen production on earth. And they play a crucial role in the carbon cycle, which determines how much carbon dioxide—the most dangerous greenhouse gas—ends up in the atmosphere.

  Scientists often refer to the ocean as a giant sink, one that takes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and deposits the carbon in long-term storage that can remain undisturbed for thousands of years. The services of the ocean sink are performed largely by phytoplankton. A 40 percent decline in phytoplankton makes the destruction of the rainforests seem almost insignificant by comparison. If there is less phytoplankton to store carbon, there’s less of a buffer against global warming. More than that, it increases the inevitability of a disastrous positive feedback cycle in which warmer water supports fewer phytoplankton, which then take up less CO2 from the atmosphere, which causes the surface water to warm even more due to the greenhouse effect.* And on it goes.

  Chefs have a story in here, too. That’s because a large part (albeit only a part) of the increase in fish consumption in this country since the 1970s is the result of chefs. One-third of the seafood eaten in the United States is ordered in restaurants—two-thirds if you measure in total expenditures rather than volume. Chefs control what gets taken from the sea.

  And we take the wrong fish. We demand those large fish—the salmon, halibut, and cod—at the highest trophic levels. Trophic levels are a way to measure the position of the fish in the food chain. The larger and more carnivorous, the higher the level, and the more exhaustive they are to the environment. They’re like the Americans of the sea—steak eaters and three-car-garage owners. And we can’t seem to get enough of them. The Northwest Fisheries Science Center recently published a study of cookbooks over the past 125 years, finding a gradual rise in the trophic levels of the fish used in recipes.

  You might say chefs help create their own positive feedback loop: by cooking with these fish, we advertise their virtues and make them more popular, which increases demand and drives up prices. Higher prices make these fish seem more worthy to diners. Demand increases further, which puts pressure on chefs to offer more of the same on their menus. It’s little wonder that many of these species—salmon, halibut, swordfish, cod, grouper, skate, flounder, and of course tuna—have declined by 90 percent in just the past few decades.

  “Does this matter?” asks Clover in The End of the Line, referring to the chef’s influence on depleted stocks of fish.

  Yes, I think it does, because the attitudes of the great are the stuff of fashion. Why should the leaders of chemical businesses be held responsible f
or polluting the marine environment with a few grams of effluent, which is sublethal to marine species, while celebrity chefs are turning out dead, endangered fish at several dozen tables a night without enduring a syllable of criticism?

  The irony here is that there’s nothing lowly about a sardine (except for its trophic level and price). In fact, it is among the most delicious fish in the sea. Just as chefs will tell you a chicken gizzard has more flavor than the breast, a very fresh sardine is more flavorful than a slab of tuna.

  So why do sardines sell about as well as chicken gizzards on most menus? Blame the long-standing conventions of the American dinner plate. A thick tuna loin seared on a grill—a tuna “steak”—is coveted, with all the comforting connotations of beef.

  But blame chefs, too, because after all, we are the supposed arbiters of taste. Identifying the best ingredients is an essential part of the cooking craft. Of all the complicated problems confronting the oceans, overfishing, especially of the higher-trophic fish, is not only the most immediate threat but also perhaps the easiest one to remedy. Inasmuch as the industry story of the depleted oceans is about greed—or the lack of what Carl Safina called the “sea ethic”—the chef’s story of the sea is about a lack of imagination.

  CHAPTER 16

  I’M OFTEN asked about my favorite meal, one meal that stands above all the others, and I struggle to answer, because I find myself editing my reply based on who’s asking the question. How do you rank my aunt’s double-boiled scrambled eggs when I was sick with strep—the barely coagulated eggs sliding down my throat and relieving my pain—against, say, a parade of courses at Alain Ducasse’s Le Louis XV, in Monaco, after a grueling yearlong internship at a Paris restaurant—one dish after the other so delicious I ended up weeping alone at the table? And where to place Eduardo Sousa’s natural foie gras, a liver that changed the way I thought about food—not despite but because everyone in the world believed it impossible to produce?