The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food

by Dan Barber

  When we parked our rental car at the front gates of Veta la Palma, I was feeling proud of myself. I’d pulled a nice little coup: I’d brought the leading expert on sustainable fishing to the leading European model of sustainable aquaculture. Or so I hoped. It wasn’t until we entered the farm that I began to worry I’d made a mistake.

  I stepped forward to hug Miguel, a little awkwardly. I want to say my embrace was out of appreciation for his tour six months earlier and our continued correspondence. But I found myself hugging Miguel out of anxiety. What if Carl, standing in Veta la Palma’s greeting room, as we now were, examining a twelve-foot-long replica of the farm and the national park that surrounded it—the seemingly endless, intersecting canals, the rich marshland, the forty-five fish ponds, and the 740-acre lagoon reserved just for the birds—what if he took one look at the place and skewered it? Was it crazy to think that his critical eye could find fault where I had found none? No, it wasn’t. The craziness was in persuading the world’s foremost ocean conservationist to travel thousands of miles to drop in on a place I knew next to nothing about. I didn’t even know enough to know what I didn’t know.

  Standing in front of the replica with a long professor’s pointer, Miguel took us on a virtual tour of Veta la Palma, starting with how the water flowed through the system and out into the Atlantic, and then back in again with the help of the pumping station. If he was nervous to present his life’s work to Carl Safina, he didn’t show it. He sounded thoughtful, well informed, and passionate. Carl looked bored, and even a little annoyed.

  I was sure his mood would change when Miguel described how the canals had been drained in the ’60s to raise beef cattle on the land. Instead Carl politely nodded, as if he were learning about draining a kitchen sink. “Marshes have been emptied forever and a day,” he said. “It was always the fear of disease, especially malaria.”

  Miguel added details I didn’t know, like the fact that they were devoting a section of the surrounding fields to raising grass-fed beef. I asked him how the beef cattle benefited the fish, knowing Miguel enough to believe that it would, and that the connection might impress Carl.

  “It’s a totally different activity,” he said. “There’s no relationship with the fish. But the result is that the northern sector of the property gains in value.”

  “In other words,” Carl said, his tone tinged with derision, “there is no ecological relationship—it’s a financial one.”

  “Yes, that’s right,” Miguel said. “It makes the whole operation more viable. Also, raising livestock is a really deep tradition in the area. So it forms part of the eco-cultural landscape. Because it has such deep roots.” Carl nodded. I looked at Miguel.

  “For the future,” he said hopefully, “we should not consider agriculture and aquaculture as separate entities. We should consider them as part of the same ecosystem, and we will.” Though we were only standing over a replica of Veta la Palma, I had the same sense as when I’d looked over the dehesa from Placido and Rodrigo’s rooftop. Everything was connected.

  Carl pointed to one of the bass ponds. “What’s your density?” he asked.

  “We have low density for the ponds. It’s roughly nine pounds of fish for every one cubic meter of water, which enables us to keep free of parasites—”

  Carl interjected. “Hang on. That’s nothing? That’s crammed!” he said, translating the number to twelve cubic feet on a piece of paper. At the sound of the word crammed, my heart sank. “That’s not a lot of space at all.” He outlined twelve cubic feet by walking in a rough approximation of a square, and then stood inside it and scrunched his shoulders to illustrate the confinement. He looked like a caged bird. I cringed.

  But Miguel walked over and gently corrected his calculation. One cubic meter was thirty-five cubic feet, not twelve. Miguel outlined the larger square, and Carl looked at it approvingly. “Oh, okay, not bad.”

  I didn’t relax until we were walking the farm. Rather, Carl didn’t relax until we were walking the farm, and as a result, I didn’t, either. What turned him wasn’t the flooded plain—the flat relief of endless pockmarked depressions filled with lush vegetation—nor was it the engineering feat of the pumping station, or the talk of phytoplankton and microinvertebrates. It was the birds. Compared with my last trip, there seemed to be even more birds, thousands more. They crowded the skies, Hitchcock-like.

  Every few seconds, Carl craned his neck in another direction. “Wow,” he would say. “A redshank.” And then, “Holy cow, willow warbler.” It was Mr. Ellis with a beard and an ironic glint in his eye. I smiled. Miguel smiled. And then, after we had walked a bit more, Miguel tried bringing our attention back to the fish. Carl kept right on surveying the sky, wide-eyed, overcome with excitement. “Oh, my,” he said, ignoring Miguel. “That’s a black-shouldered kite.”

  The scene reminded me of something Jack Algiere had told me in frustration one day. He said visitors to Stone Barns Center’s 23,000-square-foot greenhouse arrive and immediately look up at the computerized overhead irrigation, the retractable roof bays, and the sprawling structure. “They look up at the bells and whistles,” he said, “but really they should be looking down.” He pointed at the soil, and the billions of organisms that thrived beneath the surface. “This tells you everything you need to know.”

  Carl was looking up because it told him everything he needed to know.

  Back in the car, Carl leaned forward on the passenger seat, holding his long-nosed camera at the ready. He asked how the bird population changed during the dry season, from June to September.

  “Doñana, the national park, is dry, but Veta la Palma stays flooded the entire year, as”—Miguel added, in a tone that suggested perhaps Carl had forgotten—“it is a fish farm. Which makes Veta la Palma the only place aquatic birds can land and rest.” Carl rolled down the window and maneuvered his camera into position. He caught a group of spoonbills nesting nearby.

  We were driving on the periphery of the farm, heading toward the pumping station at Carl’s request, when we saw tractors harvesting rice on the outskirts of the property. Miguel told us that almost one hundred thousand acres of rice production surround Veta la Palma in the province of Seville. The region is one of the largest rice-producing areas of the world, little of it organic. I wondered aloud how such intensive, conventional rice farming affected Veta la Palma’s waters.

  “It’s a struggle, always,” Miguel said. “But what you said before about the bass skin you tasted—how the flavor is so sweet and clean—tells me things are working.” He explained that fish skin is a kind of last defense against contamination, evolved to soak up the impurities before they cause harm. “But,” he said, “we don’t have impurities.”

  Veta la Palma is continually testing the water for nutrient levels. The water in the canals, after all, is flowing in from the Guadalquivir. It courses through the farm and carries all the things rivers tend to carry these days, including chemical contaminants and pesticide runoff. The system, though, is so healthy—because of the continuous water flow, the plant biomass, the filter-feeding fish and birds, and of course the plankton—that it acts like a sieve. Water flows into the farm, and when it flows out into the Atlantic it’s actually cleaner than when it started.

  “This is a good example of how a natural system can soak up the artificial management of land even across the street,” Carl said. He explained the value of Veta la Palma in the context of estuaries, which are the most productive areas of the oceans—twenty times more so than the open sea. (Of the one hundred or so recognized estuaries in the United States, Carl noted somberly, most, unfortunately, are in severe decline.)

  For the first time, I learned the reason for their explosive growth. Phytoplankton, those organisms on which all ocean life depends, can grow only with abundant sunlight. And sunlight is abundant only near the surface of the water, the sea’s uppermost layer. This is called the sunlight zone, and
it’s the habitat for 90 percent of ocean life, just as the topsoil—the outermost layer of the soil—is home to most subterranean life. Which is why the deep sea, from the perspective of producing life, is really more like a desert: no sun, no feed.

  Sunlight is not the only thing plankton need. Carl listed their nutrient requirements, like nitrogen and phosphorus. This is where rivers come into play. Rain-drenched, nutrient-rich soils wash into rivers, infusing them with a vitamin pack that flows into estuaries and then eventually gets dispersed in the ocean.

  Rivers, in other words, not only connect land and sea; they are the feeding tubes of the sea. For the first time I understood that the Gulf of Mexico—teeming with diversity—owes some of its initial good fortune to Mighty Mississippi. America’s heartland always gave up a little of its fecundity every year to feed the system that gives us the shrimp and the bass for our menus. Only now there is so much fertilizer leaking into the ocean that a large area of the Gulf is choking to death on too much nutrition. Carl once wrote that pollution “comes from land. Gravity is the sea’s enemy.” Gravity is also the sea’s lifeline. What suffocates the Gulf is the misuse of what enriches the Gulf.

  Carl’s call for a “sea ethic” reminds us that we tend to think of farmland management and ocean sustainability as distinct pursuits. But stand in the middle of Veta la Palma, surrounded by nearly one hundred thousand acres of chemical-intensive rice farming, the lifeline of the polluted Guadalquivir coursing through it, and you feel irrefutably—and, if you’re Miguel, maddeningly—connected.

  The water that flows out of Veta la Palma, cleansed by the health of the system, is dumped into the Atlantic. As Jonathan Rosen said about birds, it is like a story told by one part of the world about another part of the world.

  THE HEART IS NOT A PUMP

  Rudolf Steiner, the Austrian philosopher and educator, was once presented with a problem. A group of farmers, alarmed by their experience with “mineral manuring,” or chemical fertilizers, and worried about how these new practices would affect soil health, asked Steiner for advice. These were prescient farmers; the year was 1924.

  In response, Steiner provided a series of lectures and follow-up lessons that became the foundation of what would later be called biodynamic farming. Farms are living organisms, he explained, and they operate in the greater organism of earth. When Steiner said everything was connected, he meant it. Farming in concert with nature also entailed, for him, planting and harvesting according to phases of the moon. This idea, along with instructions like cow-horn clay preparations (pulverize clay, add water, stuff in a cow horn, bury) and discussions of “supersensory consciousness,” can make biodynamic devotees appear eccentric and occult. It’s all part of a powerful spiritual history of the organic movement, but as one farmer said to me, “Every good organic farmer follows the precepts of biodynamic agriculture, just shorn of the mysticism.”

  Still, I thought of Steiner as we stood before Veta la Palma’s famous pumping station that afternoon. Miguel described the pump as the geographic center of the farm, moving over 250 million gallons of water a day. It has the ability to open, partially open, or close, depending on the water and weather conditions. It was impressive to see up close, and Miguel’s enthusiasm was affecting, but I found myself distracted by the meaning of what he described: the pumping system doesn’t pump so much as assist the water. When the tide is up, water flows in, and when the tide goes out, the water returns to the river. Because of the force of the tide, this would happen with or without the pump, as it happens in every estuary in the world. The difference is the need to elevate the water into the irrigation canals. From there gravity eventually pulls the water into the fish-rearing ponds. The pumping station’s job is to automatically adapt, evaluating the changing levels of water and distributing it accordingly.

  “It’s a continuous movement, so the pumping station works all day long, year-round,” Miguel said.

  Which is why Rudolf Steiner came to mind. A student once asked Steiner what he believed the betterment of humanity required. He gave three answers, and it’s the last one that stuck with me. Steiner told the student that in order for human beings to improve and make true progress, they needed to understand that the heart is not a pump.

  I remember hearing this story many years ago at a lecture given by Sally Fallon Morell, a longtime advocate of traditional diets, and thinking two things. The first was: Really? Steiner, the great philosopher king, gets three suggestions to improve humanity and he gives us one that has as much clarity as a haiku? It confirmed for me what many think of Steiner: creative, provocative, and a little loopy.

  The second thought was: Really? If the heart doesn’t act like a pump, what does it do? At the suggestion of Fallon, I read Thomas Cowan’s The Fourfold Path to Healing. Cowan spent twenty years contemplating the question, and, while his analysis helped me decipher Steiner’s statement, it wasn’t until I stood at the pumping station—at what Miguel called “the beating heart of Veta la Palma”—that I began to understand its significance. Steiner wrote that science “sees the heart as a pump that pumps blood through the body. Now there is nothing more absurd than believing this, for the heart has nothing to do with pumping the blood.”

  Cowan argues that Steiner was right. For one thing, when blood enters the heart, it is traveling at the same speed as when it exits. It slows down as it heads to the smaller capillaries to transfer nutrients, then moves to the venous system, a highway of larger and larger veins that eventually lead back to the heart. As it approaches, the blood speeds up again. The heart acts more like a dam at this point, trapping the blood and holding it in its chambers until they’re filled, which is when the valves open and the blood is released, resuming the cycle.

  As Steiner explained, “The circulation of the blood is primary. Through its rhythmic pulsations—its systole and diastole—the heart responds to what takes place in the circulation of the blood. It is the blood that drives the heart and not the other way around.” The heart doesn’t pump the blood. The blood pumps the heart.

  So what does the heart do? It listens, according to Cowan, which is Steiner’s larger point. It’s the body’s primary sensory organ, and it acts like a conductor, controlling the rhythms of cellular management. A scientist might call this maintaining homeostasis. Either way, the idea is that the heart serves at the pleasure of the cells, not the other way around.

  Veta la Palma’s pumping station works the same way: the pump activates what the tidal action from the Atlantic and the powerful Guadalquivir River (the largest vein entering the farm, fed by thousands of smaller, capillary-like rivers) demand. It listens as the water “pumps” itself through the system. The pumping station is programmed to react, instead of control, the flow of water. And the distinction is not small.

  The first part of the distinction is that Veta la Palma’s technological pursuits are in the service of a better-functioning natural system. As Miguel later wrote to me, “It’s about technology working, side by side, with ecology. Without this engineering project, we biologists would not be able to guarantee the viability of what we grow, nor its ‘added value’ (i.e. the birds, since in summer Veta la Palma is the only place there is water). And without our biological and ecological knowledge, the engineers would never have been able to build such a sophisticated hydraulic system.”

  The second part is, to borrow a phrase from Steiner, spiritual, and that takes more time to decipher. Steiner was one of the earliest writers to question the so-called mechanistic approach to science, which viewed the workings of the environment in separate parts—machinelike more than lifelike. According to Fred Kirschenmann, a sustainable-agriculture writer, theologian, and the president of Stone Barns Center’s board, these ideas took root during the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, led by people like Sir Francis Bacon, who believed you could bend nature to your will, and René Descartes, who saw humans as masters and possessors of nature.
That may seem simplistic now, but who can blame them when the presiding wisdom of the day was the theology of the church? These scientists were reactionaries just like Steiner, questioning accepted theological teachings with the intention of breaking things down to their simplest forms. They wanted to show how the world really worked. Rationality and physicality were at the core of their thinking.

  The core of Steiner’s thinking was that biology is a lot more complicated than that. It is decidedly not linear. He didn’t see simple cause and effect applying in a natural system. Just like Miguel, Steiner valued relationships, and in that sense he was a kind of complexity theorist, seeing the workings of nature as continually in flux.

  “Steiner said what the science community at the time wasn’t ready to hear,” Fred told me once. “Nature doesn’t allow you to impose one idea, or one solution, because it inevitably changes the game.” The only way to comprehend nature was to recognize an inherent spirituality in its workings.

  It was the spirituality that always rubbed me the wrong way. And yet, as I stood in the middle of Veta la Palma, with the backdrop of the enormous pumping station, Steiner’s message began to seem more right than wrong. Today the mechanistic worldview is mostly old news. We don’t, for example, hear talk anymore of the search for the one gene that will cure heart disease. Or any other disease. For much of the past half-century, the prevailing view was exactly that: one gene, one trait. Identify the gene, suppress it, and solve the problem. We now know that to be wrong. Genes don’t act independently of one another. What’s most important is the complex set of relationships that determine how they get turned on or off.