by Dan Barber
And it’s not just the medical sciences that have moved on. Businesses, government agencies, and educators have moved away from erecting silos between departments, encouraging more creativity under the logic that innovation prospers when ideas can connect and recombine. It’s all very logical, really, except that most of agriculture is still mired in seventeenth-century ideology. Diversity has been replaced by specialization; small, regional networks have given way to consolidation. Farming has been broken into component parts in pursuit of growing more food.
One hundred years ago, Steiner saw this thinking as folly. To break nature into its component parts to solve problems, as you would go about repairing an old watch, is to go about it in entirely the wrong way. That isn’t how biological systems work. It’s how computer programs work.
What’s become clearer to me, after spending time with farmers like Miguel, Klaas, and Eduardo, is that farming with nature’s frustrating complexities—even, or especially, with supposed enemies of the system—is inherent to their success. True, their systems are “artificial” (Veta la Palma’s pump-moderated estuary, Klaas’s intricate crop rotations, Eduardo’s man-made dehesa), but human intervention, in each case, is in service to the ecology rather than in opposition to it. They embrace the diversity of the natural world; they work within the constraints of nature—and, in the end, benefit from them by producing food with great flavor.
I often think back to what Miguel admitted to me in the first hours of our meeting. It was so true, and so humble—and, when you think about it, so Steineresque, with its hint of spirituality. He said that most of what happens between the species at Veta la Palma he couldn’t see. “But,” he added, “I am absolutely sure they are allies of the system.”
CHAPTER 20
THE DAY after Carl and I visited Veta la Palma, Lisa arranged for Ángel León to join us for lunch at Sant Pau, a seafood restaurant in Sant Pol de Mar, near Barcelona. I was thrilled to see him again, especially in the company of Carl Safina. I’d imagined Carl was likely something of a hero to Ángel. And I figured Carl would enjoy meeting a chef with a passion for the health of the oceans that matched his own. Lisa also happened to be a great admirer of Carl’s writing. It had the makings of a memorable gathering.
By the time we received menus, I was convinced I wouldn’t be able to forget it soon enough. Ángel, it turned out, had never heard of Carl. Sitting there at the table across from me, he looked distracted. He had heard of Veta la Palma—maybe once, he said—but though his restaurant is only one hour from the farm, he had never visited. I asked Lisa how this was possible. How could Spain’s apostle of the oceans not support such an enlightened fish farm, especially one that existed a few miles from his restaurant? And, more to the point, one that produced such delicious fish? She told me that Ángel was adamant in his opposition to aquaculture, which was when I heard Ángel’s Churchillian decree from across the table.
“Never, never, never,” he said, his dark eyes squinting in my direction. Lisa described Veta la Palma—the water purification, the natural feed, the birdlife—and I spoke about the flavor, but Ángel only shook his head. “I’ve spoken to fish farms,” he said. “They all talk about their uniformity. ‘I can get you a perfectly uniform fillet’—they tell me this all the time, as if that’s something to celebrate.” Beads of sweat formed above Ángel’s upper lip. Lisa argued that Veta la Palma was the exception to the rule, explaining how, with its limited feed and cleansing waters, it could be a model for other fish farms around the world. Ángel shrugged. “There’s already plenty of fish—if we cooked with the bycatch.”
As Ángel excused himself to make a phone call, I told Carl about my meal at Ángel’s restaurant, Aponiente—about the unnamed fish and the innovative cooking methods, and about the consortium of local fishermen Ángel had cultivated to help create a market for bycatch. Carl nodded without looking up from the menu.
“The problem,” he said, suddenly peering up at me over his glasses, “is that your friend over here is going to create a whole new level of demand. It’s just a matter of time before these smaller fish become fashionable.”
Safina saw the flip side of Ángel’s logic: by bringing awareness to new species, you initiate their decline. “It’s the classic story of fishing down the food chain,” Carl said. “We exhaust the large predators and move to the smaller fish for substitution. Of course, the technological advances of the last fifty years have meant that we’ve been moving up the chain as well, as technology and access have improved. So basically, it’s been a round-trip.”
Except that, according to Carl, we’ve got nowhere else to go. He predicts that our children will be living in a world of radically impoverished marine communities, dominated by simple forms of life, like jellyfish.
Just then the future came to us in the form of our second course: It was fideua, a traditional Spanish noodle dish, in which the chef, Carme Ruscalleda, had replaced the usual seafood with jellyfish. It was as delicious as it was imaginative, but would it be as delicious or imaginative when jellyfish was all that was left for us to catch?
Ángel returned to the table just in time to overhear Carl’s predictions of what would be left of the ocean. “This is why chefs are so important,” he interjected. “With less resources, we’re the ones who are going to have to make what’s left taste good.” He looked at me meaningfully from across the table again. Carl appeared befuddled, and perhaps annoyed.
“Unless more farms are built like Veta la Palma,” Lisa said quickly, breaking the growing tension at the table.
Ángel didn’t play along. He mentioned Kindai tuna, a method of bluefin tuna “ranching” marketed as a sustainable solution to dwindling numbers of wild tuna. “It tastes terrible,” he said. “Way too much fat. Let it sit in your hand even for a minute and you’re covered in oil. Eating it is worse. Just thinking about it is giving me a stomachache. It’s an insult to tuna,” he said, sounding so much like Eduardo that I looked at him in bafflement. “When you go against nature, you always get it wrong. I only cook with the real thing.”
Carl adjusted his glasses and looked at Ángel. “You serve bluefin?”
Ángel looked confused by the question. “Yes, yes,” he said, turning to Lisa to make sure he hadn’t misunderstood. “It’s the greatest fish in the world. Of course I put it on my menu when it’s in season. We celebrate it.”
It was an odd moment. Both Carl and Ángel turned to look at me, their expressions each saying the same thing: Who is this guy? It must have struck Carl as especially strange. I had described Ángel León as a visionary chef in tune with the health of the oceans and the future of sustainable seafood. And here he was declaring bluefin, the most seriously depleted of fish, the species Carl had spent his life protecting, fit for celebrating on his menu. It was as if you were arguing for the slaughter of chimpanzees with Jane Goodall. I clutched my glass of water.
No one spoke until Lisa broke the silence. “Your tuna is coming from the almadraba, isn’t it?” she asked, referring to an ancient system of tuna fishing practiced in Spain.
“I only cook with almadraba tuna. It’s the best tuna in the ocean,” Ángel said.
The almadraba is a web of large nets along the southern coast of Spain, around the corner from Veta la Palma and along the Strait of Gibraltar. The nets are hung every year, from May until mid-June, just as the tuna are leaving the Atlantic to spawn in the Mediterranean. On their way through the strait, some tuna lose themselves in the maze of nets and are corralled into an area small enough for the waiting fishermen to haul them to the ocean’s surface. It’s a passive pursuit compared with the sonar-seeking trawlers that have been so destructive to bluefin populations around the world. The almadraba is also part of a long, deeply held Spanish tradition, a tradition that’s especially revered in Ángel’s coastal area of Cádiz.
Carl wasn’t impressed by the distinction. Though he had heard of the almadraba, h
e argued that we were at a point where the decline of bluefin was so severe that greater pressure, however passive and traditional, wasn’t possible to support. Ángel leaned forward in his chair. His darting eyes made him seem both wary and mischievous.
“I have something I want to show you,” he said to Carl, reaching into his pocket and removing a coin. “Do you know what this is? This is an original Phoenician coin. Look here,” he said, leaning over. “Phoenician,” he repeated, pointing to the coin’s faded depiction of tuna enmeshed in the netting of the almadraba. “It’s very emotional. I carry it with me everywhere I go. The almadraba is 2 percent of the tuna taken in the world. I want to be an apostle about protecting this 2 percent. The almadraba is not the problem. The sonar-seeking trawlers are the problem,” he added, in a tone that suggested anyone who thought otherwise might also be a problem.
When Lisa finished translating, she nodded and added, “There’s something inherently unfair about telling almadraberos that they have to stop doing what they and their ancestors going back millennia have done because other tuna fishers have overexploited and endangered the stock. Ángel is right; the almadraberos are not the problem. It’s like banning sex because some men can’t be trusted not to rape.”
Carl said the debate was moot: the world was running out of tuna. “You can keep saying, ‘We didn’t create this problem.’ I’ve heard the Japanese say that, too. This is the tragedy of the commons—everyone is responsible for tuna, which means no one is responsible. The idea that we can continue to take what is going extinct, whatever the reason, is crazy,” he said.
There are moments in Carl’s presence when you wonder if he’s agitated about an issue or just agitated because he’s talking to you instead of doing something more productive. I got the feeling that both were true at this moment. As Lisa translated Carl’s response, Ángel sat so far forward in his chair that I thought he might fall off. Both men looked pissed.
“I want to tell you something,” Ángel said forcefully. “I want to tell you about the almadraba fishermen. I know of many, the older ones especially, who can rub the skin of a tuna”—Ángel rubbed the tablecloth with the tips of his fingers—“and when they smell it they smell the fat,” he went on, his fingers at his nose, his breath drawn in dramatically. “They can tell you just from that how old it is, and how it will grade out at market.” He lowered his hand from his nose. “Can you imagine how many years of culture that takes to understand?” Ángel didn’t wait for a response. He excused himself to smoke a cigarette outside.
Carl calmly finished eating while Lisa leaned back in her chair and shook her head, looking at me. “To tell the people of Cádiz that they have to stop eating tuna means they have to stop being themselves,” she said. “The almadraba is more than an annual ritual. It has influenced class structure, leisure activities, religious beliefs, cooking techniques, and probably even mating rituals as well, if you looked into it. It’s so fundamental to the mores and traditions of this area that it isn’t just a part of the culture, it is the culture.” Lisa turned to speak to the waiter.
Carl leaned over to me. “Sure,” he said, “but without biology there is no culture.”
CHAPTER 21
BACK WHEN chefs like Alice Waters and David Bouley began naming the sources of their ingredients in the early 1990s, it was a refreshing novelty. But that kind of proclaimed sourcing has reached a fever pitch: we get menus now written in a way that all but begs for ridicule. They declare the provenance of their vegetables with holy pronouncements (“Farmer Dave’s biodynamic turnips”). Or they announce their do-good nature with a Girl Scout–like earnestness that’s hard to stomach (“We source only ingredients that are good for the planet”). Menus like these strain to be virtuous.
I got to thinking about menu descriptions because, after months of back-and-forth, Miguel and several others from Veta la Palma decided to come to New York City to introduce themselves to a few seafood distributors, with the hope of exporting their fish to the United States.
For Blue Hill New York, which still features a traditional à la carte menu, I struggled for words when it came to Miguel’s fish. Do you say “Sea bass” and leave it at that? Bass sells itself, thanks to Le Coze’s popularizing the fish at Le Bernardin many years ago. But I wanted people to know that what they were eating was not just stunningly delicious but also a hopeful sign for the future of aquaculture. “Sustainable sea bass” is what I think I settled on, because it sounded the least annoying, and it had nice alliteration.
But it didn’t matter, because the meetings did not go as planned. When I called Miguel after their appointment with the first purveyor, he said it had gone well (though Miguel seems constitutionally incapable of saying something negative about anyone). After a little prodding, he told me that the samples of bass they had brought were never talked about or tasted. When I asked if headway had been made in importing the bass, he said he couldn’t be sure when it would happen, if it were to happen at all.
I had planned to meet Miguel and the others for lunch at Esca, chef David Pasternack’s seafood-centric restaurant in midtown Manhattan, but a problem at Blue Hill developed in the late morning, and I knew there was no way I’d make it out. I called Pasternack to explain who was coming in.
Before I could get very far, he interrupted me. “You’re sending me a couple of goombah fish-farming guys?” Like Ángel León, he found the mere idea offensive. Pasternack, a lifelong fisherman from the North Shore of Long Island, is almost pathologically obsessed with great seafood. He regularly fishes from Montauk to the Far Rockaways and has been known to ride the Long Island Rail Road into Manhattan with the previous day’s catch packed on ice.
He proceeded to stake out Miguel as soon as he arrived. Miguel answered questions about the farm, then handed over a sample of the bass to Pasternack, who called me from his kitchen, having just filleted it and tasted a piece. “Fucking very good,” he said, his voice low and controlled (likely not wanting to admit in front of his staff that he was impressed by a farm-raised fish).
Pasternack didn’t waste time. One taste of Veta la Palma’s bass and he had what he described to me as “a small epiphany” about the potential for farm-raised fish. While Miguel was still eating, he called Rod Mitchell, the owner of Browne Trading Company, in Portland, Maine, to convince him that this was a fish he should import without delay. Mitchell is among the most important seafood purveyors in the United States, and though it sounds falsely modest when he insists he’s merely “a fish picker,” it’s also true. Mitchell picks fish for the country’s best chefs, from Maine to California.
It started in 1980 when he met Jean-Louis Palladin. Through a mutual friend, Palladin discovered that Mitchell was a diver, so he went to visit the wineshop in Camden, Maine, where Mitchell was working at the time. Palladin examined the store, but according to Mitchell he kept looking out the window.
“It was one of those foggy, rainy days in Camden,” Mitchell told me. “The first thing he says to me, pointing out to the shore, is that the area reminds him of back home. He says he bets there are some great scallops out there. I told him he was right about that.”
Palladin knew that at that time of year the scallops would be at their peak flavor. When the Atlantic waters turn cold in October and November, phytoplankton drop from the water’s surface and fall to the ocean’s floor. Scallops, like geese, gorge on the excess nutrients to fatten themselves for the winter months.
The next day, Mitchell dove for scallops in his favorite area of the bay. “Jean-Louis took one look at them and nearly cried. In that thick, deep, gravelly-voiced French accent of his, he said, ‘What else can you get me?’ That started the business.” And an industry. Just as Palladin helped establish John and Sukey Jamison for their grass-finished lamb—influencing a generation of small farmers—and just as he converted mushroom hobbyists into full-time foragers and small milk producers into cheese artisans, he transformed M
itchell from a recreational diver into one of the most important seafood distributors in the country.
“All of a sudden we got run over with demand,” Mitchell told me. “It was like Jean-Louis had a front-page ad in every chef’s morning paper. I kept hiring divers. These guys couldn’t believe it. We’d dived for scallops all our life, just for fun, and now chefs in New York and Boston wanted to pay us a lot of money to do it.”
Now on the menus of countless restaurants across the country, “day boat” or diver scallops are well-known to be the sweetest and most flavorful of their kind. They’re among the most sustainable, too. Until Mitchell began paying divers, scallops were almost always harvested by dragging nets along the floor, up to one hour at a time. The divers may yield smaller harvests, but they are more discriminating (and less destructive) in what they catch.
When the scallop season ended, Mitchell sought out other fish to sell to chefs. “I just purchased the best of everything I could find,” he said. “I had chefs, the best chefs in America, wanting to know how many scales were on the damn fillet. You couldn’t fool these guys. So we always bid first and last, always, because I couldn’t afford not to have the best stuff.”
It was the beginning, Mitchell told me, of the specialty seafood business. An outlet for fishermen developed in the same way farmers’ markets created an outlet for small farmers. Before long, Mitchell was delivering seafood to all fifty states. Even Gilbert Le Coze, who hadn’t been interested in meeting Mitchell until the early 1990s, finally invited him to Le Bernardin. (“He brings me to the kitchen, stares at me, his right eye twitching in the way he did when he was nervous. ‘If it’s not the best fish you have,’ he said, ‘if it doesn’t look like it just came out of the water, my name should not enter your mind—I do not exist.’”) The restaurant would soon become Browne Trading Company’s largest single purchaser, and remains so today.