The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food

by Dan Barber

  “They were incredible to watch,” he said, admitting that he couldn’t do much else—they spoke no Spanish, and he didn’t speak Japanese. The chefs showed him a completely new way to butcher tuna, starting with the belly. “They were so fanatical about cutting according to the fat. It changed the taste of everything.”

  So did the method of killing, which for about three thousand years had been a barbaric affair: the tuna were hooked by the neck, dragged onto the boat, and violently clubbed to death. “A bloody, horrific thing,” Pepe said mournfully. The Japanese showed the Spaniards a different method that involved raising the nets, tying ropes around the tails, lifting the tuna, and plunging them into ice before slitting their throats.

  “This is precisely what we do with all of our fish,” Miguel said urgently. “This is most important.” The humanity of the minimal-stress slaughter yielded significantly better-flavored tuna, which only raised the price.

  “Now the death is cold and sweet. Before it was much more bloody,” Pepe said, pausing to consider the history of tuna’s last moments. “It was more spectacular, too.”

  Lisa asked Pepe if the Japanese ever explained the reason for preferring the almadraba tuna. “Because of the fat!” he said. Then he became very serious. “The legend is that the tuna hear a siren call from the Mediterranean at a certain point in their lives. It’s at that point that their meat is at its best—the most optimal point to eat tuna. So they go to spawn. But what brings them into the nets?” he asked, his eyes scanning each of us. He appeared delighted that no one ventured even a guess. “There’s a legend for this, too. It’s that the tuna’s fatty belly gets an itch, like a pregnant woman. They are drawn to the shallow waters to satisfy the itch. This is when they stumble into the nets.”

  While Pepe shared his legend of the tuna, I impulsively dunked a slice of toro in the soy sauce and dropped it into my mouth. I couldn’t believe the flavor. It was richer and more intense than any tuna I had ever tasted, a fact that I noted to Pepe.

  “Hmm, yes,” he said knowingly, “the almadraba tuna are at the peak of flavor. All of the energy goes into great intramuscular fat, producing a tuna that is at the moment of perfect flavor.” I thought of the Copper River salmon that David Bouley had exalted in his kitchen. I had always assumed the Japanese purchased from the almadraba because of dwindling stocks—a desperate move to satiate their world-leading appetite for tuna. But now I realized that the superior flavor must have driven the interest as well.

  Pepe nodded vigorously in agreement. “Yet over the years I’ve noticed a severe reduction in the amount of fat. It’s hard to believe, but it’s true. Just the other day, I was standing next to one of my cooks as he prepared to sauté the neck of the tuna. He got his pan nice and hot and added a good amount of olive oil. Nothing wrong with that, right? Except I got so angry I almost kicked him out of the kitchen. It wasn’t his fault. I became a little overwhelmed because when I was his age, the morilla was so full of fat, you didn’t even put oil in the pan. The natural fat just poured out, more than enough to fry it. The tuna cooked itself.”

  The mayor arrived. He moved quickly across the room, shaking hands, grasping an old man behind the head and kissing him on both cheeks, pointing his index finger like a gun to another. As he exchanged cheek kisses with Lisa, his hand jutted out from the side for me to shake.

  “Thank you,” he said, turning to me by way of an introduction. “I know of your work. This is a big day for Barbate. Tomorrow you will help us preserve tradition. Three thousand years of tradition. I think I must fight for this, and so I do.” He motioned for us to sit back down, a pastor in command of his congregation. “Of course, if the wind doesn’t stand in your way,” he said to Lisa as he removed his coat. “How do you say in English? It’s totally fucked.”

  Another waiter cleared our empty plates of toro. “Did you like?” the mayor asked. “Incredible, incredible, I know,” he said, without waiting for a reply. “When I was a child, there were so many tuna running at this time of year that I remember seeing the tuna washed up on shore, lined up on the beach one after the other, with huge bites taken out of their bellies. Even the sharks knew!”

  The second course arrived. “Mojama,” the waiter said, gesturing to the plate of cured tuna loin. A well-known Spanish delicacy, the loin is salted for several days, washed, and then laid out to dry on rooftops against the blazing sun and strong breezes. Miguel reached for the thin slices. “The ham of the sea,” he said. The mayor shot Miguel an approving glance.

  Examining a piece between my fingertips, I was struck by tiny, capillary-like streaks of white fat. I’d never seen them running through the loin, a traditionally lean cut. It reminded me of the jamón ibérico Eduardo had held up to the light, its weblike striations of fat a “perfect expression of the land.” I was devouring what had to be the perfect expression of the sea.

  The mayor continued talking. “Back then, up through the 1960s, everybody lived off the tuna. There were a million workshops, places where the fish would be butchered and processed—preserved, canned, that kind of thing. The people of Barbate, we really only ate the scraps. Everything that could be preserved was sold throughout Spain. No one wanted to eat the profits! We were left with incredible cuts, though, like the morilla—that was always very popular. Did Pepe tell you about the morilla having so much fat it cooked itself?” We nodded. “He loves telling that one. I even think it’s true.”

  The mayor popped out of his seat to greet two locals who had just entered the restaurant. As the plates were cleared, he sat back down, resuming where he had left off. “We were drowning in tuna, but then in the late ’60s the industry suddenly collapsed.”

  “Because of depletion,” I said knowingly.

  “No, because of anchovies!” he said. Again the mayor stood to greet guests, shaking the hand of an elderly man.

  He sat back down, motioning for the waiter to bring more beer. “No, the people of Barbate started working with anchovies because anchovies paid better. That was then. They paid a lot better, and plus, tuna was just three months of work. It’s three months of very, very hard work. Only now, since the government is further restricting the number of days to catch, and the world is calling for an all-out ban of tuna fishing, the people here say, ‘Hey wait a minute, this is our tradition!’ It became important the day they tried to take it away.”

  Tuna heart was the next course. “Eat this one,” the mayor said as his cell phone rang. “You’re going to like it very much.” The heart was glazed and sliced thinly. It tasted like a chewy fillet of beef, with a wash of sea flavor to finish.

  “It’s the captain of your boat,” the mayor said, covering the phone’s receiver. “The wind is terrible.” (Lisa threw up her hands and looked at me. “What wind?” she whispered. “It’s a goddamn breeze.”)

  The waiter returned, this time with a flight of hueva “lollipops” served on sticks. Lisa and Miguel couldn’t agree on the definition of hueva, the debate turning on whether or not they were the same thing as gonads (the sac that holds the semen). “No, no, it’s not semen. It is certainly more refined than that,” Miguel said.

  The mayor covered the phone again. “Balls,” he said authoritatively.

  “Please,” Miguel said with great seriousness, “we cannot make an analogy with a mammal.”

  The mayor shrugged when he finally got off the phone. “It’s out of my hands, really. They will make a decision in the morning, by ten o’clock. Pray for no wind.”

  Yet another tuna course appeared: the morilla, which, sautéed as Chef Pepe had described, looked to be oozing with plenty of fat. “This one I’m going to eat,” the mayor said. “Because I approve of this.” The waiter brought over a plate for the mayor. “I’m in love with tuna,” the mayor said. “But I only eat tuna three months of the year. From Easter until San Juan—the longest day of the year—all I think about is tuna. After that I don’t eat it
. I don’t even think about it.”

  I asked if he felt bluefin would be around for his children to enjoy. He answered carefully. “Basically, this whole tuna thing isn’t a problem. The quotas are working—there have been big improvements in the stock.”

  Lisa, perhaps still smarting over the possible cancellation of the almadraba in the morning, recited a long list of statistics about the decline of bluefin. She pressed the mayor, who fidgeted and looked around the room to see if anyone was within earshot.

  “Look, we don’t want to take away anyone’s business. We’ve been doing this for three thousand years. The Japanese have been doing it for thirty years. And that’s when—so they tell us, anyway—the stocks became depleted by 90 percent.” He looked at Lisa, with an expression that begged for some common sense. “The almadraba is seven hundred tons of tuna per year, which is about the same number caught by a big trawler in one day. Tell me something, are we the problem?”

  I asked if there were any strained feelings toward the Japanese, who now purchase almost all the almadraba tuna.

  “The Japanese have done nothing wrong,” he said loudly. “We have a terrific partnership with the Japanese, absolutely terrific. There is no problem. Zero. I would like to set up a direct flight to Cádiz from Tokyo. They can bring their cameras and their little hats, visit the beach, and catch tunas.” He was silent for a moment as the morilla was cleared. “The Japanese ambassador came to Barbate a few years ago. I kissed his wife two times. She was visibly upset. You know what? I don’t care. When they come to Spain, we do it our way. When I get invited to Japan, okay, fine, no kissing.”

  As the last course was served, a small local fish roasted in its entirety, the mayor volleyed back and forth between gratitude and regret about the Japanese influence on the future of his town. His ambivalence makes sense. He’s reliant on the Japanese to buy the bluefin at the highest prices. At the same time, it’s the demand for tuna that’s decimating the stocks and killing the almadraba—and the mayor’s town.

  “We should probably just shut down almadraba for a few years to recover the stocks. But if we shut it down, everyone has to shut down,” he said quietly, with a look that acknowledged the impossibility of such a thing happening. “What can we do? We just fish our fish for three months of the year.” The mayor paused and looked at me. “For three thousand years.”

  The next morning, Lisa, Miguel, and I were to meet the mayor at a bar along the docks of Barbate. The wind blew swirls of debris around the empty, brick-lined streets. Boats rattled against the shore. The decision about fishing for the day would be made at 10 a.m., but the mayor had arranged a breakfast meeting with Diego Crespo Sevilla, an owner of four almadraba boats who controls one of the major sections of the nets.

  The bar was nearly empty, with just a few old-time fishermen clutching espressos and dangling cigarettes, and crumpled tapas receipts littering the floor from the night before. Black-and-white photos of the 1940s and ’50s lined the walls, a shrine to past glories. The left side honored the bullfight—matadors brandishing swords, wounded bulls succumbing tragically. A set of pictures depicting the almadraba was on the right: enormous white waves framing heroic fishermen as they lorded over bloody and bludgeoned tuna. The montages told the same story—man’s victory over nature—but as I faced the old tuna fishermen standing in the morning’s empty bar, there was a feeling, as strong and undeniable as that stench of old fish, that neither side had won.

  The mayor arrived, followed shortly thereafter by Diego, both men shaking hands with the old-timers as they made their way over.

  The mayor introduced us. “Diego, say hello to my friends. They have come to experience the great almadraba. They await your—”

  Diego ignored him and shook our hands. “We’ll know in a few minutes about the decision, but I can tell you it doesn’t look good,” he said authoritatively. “I believe the winds are getting worse every year.”

  “Not good for the almadraba, but quite beneficial for the windsurfers,” the mayor offered, careful to weigh the feelings of another one of his constituencies.

  Diego’s physique suggested a taste for sherry and idle afternoons by the dock, but he carried himself like a seasoned businessman, remote and elusive. In lieu of a suit, he was dressed in khakis, a sky-blue Polo sweater, and loafers without socks. I asked him if the closing of the almadraba during the height of the season meant economic hardship for the fishermen.

  “As of today, we’re at 78 percent of the quota for the season,” he said. “The almadraba could run for at least another month, maybe more, but all we have is one or two more days of fishing and we’ll be done.” The bartender served Diego’s espresso, refusing to take his money. At this, the mayor looked peeved. “When I was a kid, there were seventeen almadrabas along the Spanish coast,” Diego explained. “We’re down to just four.”

  “And we are stopping this madness at four!” the mayor broke in, dropping his cup heavily on the bar and getting the attention of the men at the tables. “We must defend what’s left with everything we have.”

  Diego again ignored him. “It’s a very passive art, the almadraba, so it’s tough to predict, and to synthesize. But the trend has been way, way down.”

  Forty years ago, the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT, pronounced eye-cat) was formed to oversee and manage the dwindling tuna stocks. Perhaps a committee representing forty-eight member nations, with unequal influence and conflicting demands, was doomed to fail. Either way, it has failed spectacularly. (Carl Safina proposed several years ago that ICCAT be renamed the International Conspiracy to Catch All Tuna.) To this day, ICCAT’s own scientists suggest quotas that the committee openly ignores, often doubling the recommendation. It’s an organization that can’t rule, exactly, but it can, and does, use rules to ruin.

  I asked what Diego thought of ICCAT’s work.

  “ICCAT is a fine organization,” the mayor volunteered. “Very nice people. I will say to you that, while ICCAT’s been accused of lots of things, what’s never been debated is that they are trying. But my God, they have helped make a mess of things.”

  Diego waved his hand. “There are two things to keep in mind here. First, ICCAT’s numbers, inflated as they can be, are not obeyed. If the countries had obeyed even those ridiculous quotas, I think we would have been fine. But Spain overfishes. France overfishes. Libya—”

  “Libya!” The mayor rolled his eyes and threw up his hands.

  “Libya overfishes,” Diego continued. “You see, the almadraba is the last of the honest fishing. Because it has to be. Inspectors meet us on the docks. They count the fish we’re unloading. We have nothing to hide, because we cannot hide anything.” The mayor grabbed the pockets of his trousers and pulled them inside out, showing what it meant to hide nothing. “Out at sea, the Japanese helicopters meet them on the boat. Or the boats dock in Vietnam—in Vietnam, they couldn’t care less about counting the number of tuna caught.”

  Miguel, who had been listening attentively, neatly summarized the situation. “The almadraba is the best information source about the state of the stocks. It’s a living lobotomy of what’s happening in the ocean.”

  “Perfecto,” the mayor declared. “It’s like taking the temperature of the ocean.”

  I asked if it wasn’t true that some biologists, like Carl Safina, had more or less predicted fifteen years ago what that temperature would be in fifteen years.

  Diego was quick to reply. “Doctor Safina wrote Song for the Blue Ocean before tuna farming. It had just been invented. He couldn’t possibly have predicted how awful the situation would become. This is the second thing to keep in mind,” he said, wiping his mouth neatly with a paper napkin and searching my eyes for any trace that this was sinking in. “The farms are sealing the fate of tuna.”

  Diego explained that the bulk of farmed tuna is not coming from eggs. It is from tuna c
aught in the sea at an average of thirty-five pounds and fattened on these farms until they double in weight. The practice not only does nothing to save nature’s dwindling stock, but it hastens the decline. Bluefin are removed from the wild before they have the chance to spawn.*

  He told us that tuna farming is worse than industrial tuna trawlers, an argument that at first I thought might be far-fetched. It was not. “The way you fish tuna, even on the large boats, is that after the fish are caught, the boat needs to unload. Catch, unload, go back out—there’s a natural resting period. For the farms, they bring out enormous nets, drag schools of tuna into the farms, and then go out and drag in another school. There’s no recovery time.”

  The mayor: “Again, madness.”

  “We should perhaps not call these places tuna farms,” Miguel said. “They aren’t farms. Farming is a closed system. If you’re talking about fish, you hatch them, you grow them, you feed them. The tuna farms are just for finishing.”

  I had never thought of farmed tuna as similar to American-style grain-fed beef, and yet Miguel was right. We remove cattle from ranches and fatten them quickly on exorbitant grain diets before their slaughter. We don’t call the confinement beef operations “farms,” because they aren’t farms; they’re feedlots.

  Diego answered his phone, excusing himself for a conference call on the final decision about the almadraba.

  I asked Miguel if he had ever tasted farmed bluefin. Once, he said, and he didn’t care for it. My experience was the same. The difference in flavor is not unlike the difference between confinement-raised Iberian pigs and the real thing. The fat, abundant because of acorns, never fully incorporates in the muscle without the exercise required to forage. Tuna raised in pens have a similar kind of fat—abundant but not well dispersed. Muscle activation is key to distributing the fat and carrying the flavor, whether it’s a pork chop or a porterhouse—or a loin of tuna.