The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food

by Dan Barber

  “Muscle activity is of course very important,” Miguel said. “Stress is just as important. Maybe more. How the fat is distributed is one thing, but stress affects the kind of fat. The flavor of the fat from a stressed fish is very different.

  “I see it with our own fish—especially the mullet I spoke to you about yesterday. At Veta la Palma, they must be the least stressed fish in world.” Lisa laughed. “No, it’s true,” Miguel continued. “They enter Veta la Palma of their own will, because they are hungry and they know the estuary is a healthy environment. This is very important. We don’t take them from the ocean and put them into our system. They come because they want to be there. And they are of course safe from predators—except some species of birds—but otherwise we’re like a nursery. They feast on the abundant health of the system and in the process help maintain the health of the system. Sometimes I get the feeling they know all this and reward us with flavor.” I could have been speaking to Placido about his hams, or Eduardo about his livers.

  Diego returned and shook his head apologetically. “I’m very sorry,” he said.

  “Levante!” the mayor cried, throwing up his hands.

  TWO MONUMENTS TO TUNA

  The consolation prize: Diego and the mayor took us to a museum. They led us into a sleek, modern building, out of step with old Barbate and aggressively contemporary in a way that screamed tourist attraction. It is the first, and probably the last, museum in the world dedicated to the almadraba.

  The wisdom of such a major investment was lost on me—and, to be honest, it made me kind of sad, too. We seemed to be the only visitors, for one thing. And judging by the generous greeting of the docents, it felt like we were the first in a long time. I somehow doubted that an almadraba museum would draw even one more visitor to Barbate. We were standing in what may soon become a mausoleum to bluefin.

  We passed a display of the tuna netting, a thick, woven web of rope. Diego stretched one of the holes to demonstrate the wisdom of the system. “You see? Smaller tuna are free.” Diego swam his other hand slowly through the hole, and then did it again, with the neat efficiency of a stewardess demonstrating how to fasten your seat belt. “Only the older fish get trapped. An eighty-year-old woman doesn’t have the potential for so many babies, does she? It’s the same with tuna.”

  A film played in a small room, where I saw the only other museum visitors—a Japanese couple with their young son—sit silently and stare up as a giant bluefin filled the screen. We learned about bluefin in the tone of a “Did You Know?” kindergarten lesson. I mostly did not know.

  I didn’t know, for example, that tuna can grow up to twelve feet and weigh on average 550 pounds. Or that they can live for thirty years. I didn’t know that, like sharks, if tuna stop swimming, they suffocate, making them machines of motion. I didn’t know that their dark red flesh, coveted by chefs for its meaty flavor, is the product of blood supply to the muscles. Unlike most fish, bluefin are warm-blooded and can also thermoregulate, adjusting their body temperature so they’re always warmer than the surrounding waters. Warm blood is key, because it means their bodies expend less energy as they hunt for food, which they do at speeds of up to thirty miles per hour.

  As we left the museum, I asked Diego about the legend Pepe had recounted about the larger bluefin entering the nets to satisfy their belly itch.

  “Pepe?” he said, smiling. “No, that’s crazy, of course. It’s a fable.” He put his hand on my arm and stopped me in the parking lot. “Do you want to know why the tuna come to the nets?” I assured him I did. “They come because they’ve had a great life. They’ve reproduced. They’ve eaten well. They’ve traveled. Now they want to die a dignified death. They know they will be treated with respect. Dignity in death is important to bluefin, because they are so dignified in life.”

  There’s a black-and-white photo I remember seeing as a young boy, of a group of men standing over a slaughtered buffalo, rifles slung over their shoulders, expressions smug. You can’t help but look at it and wonder: What were they thinking?

  In Song for the Blue Ocean, Safina compares the massacre of sixty million buffalo that once roamed America’s prairies (and supported Native American cultures for centuries) to the present-day destructive hunt for bluefin tuna. The comparison struck home a few years ago when I saw a photo of a record-breaking bluefin tuna just off a Japanese auction block. Around it stood a half-dozen fishmongers, all of them wearing that same self-satisfied look. Our greedy appetites made for the buffalo’s quick decimation; we’ve effectively done the same to tuna.

  Carl’s prediction came to mind as Lisa and I stood in front of Baelo Claudia, a Roman ruin just to the west of Barbate in Tarifa, another important almadraba town along the southern coast. Dinner that evening would be at Aponiente, where we would learn of the “revolutionary new idea” Ángel had been working on with Veta la Palma. Distracted by the promise of Ángel’s food, and uninterested in another lesson in history, I arrived at Baelo Claudia in the wrong frame of mind. It didn’t take long for it to change. Having parked the car and walked just a few steps past a beach walkway, we came to the spectacular—and the spectacularly discordant—sight of the ruins, the remains of a 2,200-year-old salting factory for preserving the almadraba tuna. The industrial-size factory—enormous columns, salt basins, large, coffin-like drying areas—was surrounded by more relics of a once prosperous port town for the Roman Empire. It all looked like the backdrop for the production of a Classical drama.

  There was something surreal about the scene, and it wasn’t just that Baelo was ancient and yet so well preserved. (Americans are always gawking at such sights in disbelief, while Europeans seem to view them with cool nonchalance. True to form, we were the only ones actually looking around, while a group of bronzed sunbathers lined the beach nearby.) The surreal setting had to do with the striking prominence of the tuna-preserving factory, a prominence that Lisa pointed out as we approached. The entire town seemed to have been built around it, suggesting that the Roman Empire needed the almadraba tuna to feed its growing population. It was clear how abundant bluefin must have been. Was I looking at a Roman ruin, or the future of a ruined Barbate?

  Past the line of sunbathers, past the approaching tide and the indigo water of the Strait of Gibraltar, I could see the vast silhouette of Africa, right there just a few miles from where we were standing. It was a vision, arresting in its simplicity, of a very connected world. The rushing waters of the strait are, of course, a major artery connecting the Mediterranean to the Atlantic Ocean, which eventually feeds into still more oceans: Pacific, Indian, Southern, and Arctic. You get the picture. It’s one ocean.

  At the foot of the strait—bluefin undoubtedly just below, jetting off to spawn, and the migrating birds from Veta la Palma just above—it seemed impossible to separate anything in nature, just as Rudolf Steiner had warned against doing. The bluefin below and the birds above were living metaphors for the ecological network Miguel believes in so strongly. And suddenly, though not by accident, I saw the network as larger—not just ecological, but cultural as well. It was everywhere around me, memorialized in the fading marble of Baelo, the menu of El Campero, and the Phoenician coin Ángel carried around in his pocket. Just as Lisa described, tuna are inseparable from these people and this place.

  Look no further than the depleted almadraba fleets. These are the last vestiges of cultures that evolved in accordance with nature, of diets that listen to the seasons and the ecology and as a result are rewarded with the best possible flavor. Their demise, like our abuse of soil, is evidence of decisions made in the service of immediate goals (cheaper, more abundant food) rather than the future. It’s Eduardo’s “insult to history” all over again—an insult to culture itself.

  By the time we left Baelo, I had changed my mind about the Barbate museum. If the almadraba is, as Miguel claimed, “a living lobotomy of the ocean,” the museum was a peek inside the operating room. The
passions of the people practicing a dying art were all along the walls—in writings, three-thousand-year-old etchings, and black-and-white photographs from the turn of the last century. The museum won’t save bluefin from extinction, but for the children of Barbate yet to be born, it will help them know the culture from which they came.

  CHAPTER 23

  AS WE walked through the door to Aponiente, Ángel grasped my head in both hands. “Dan!” he said, shaking his head and apologizing for the missed almadraba. “Fucking wind!”

  The dining room had been renovated since my last visit. Ángel said he had hopes of finally achieving a Michelin star, insinuating that he had been overlooked because of the restaurant’s design, not the food. But once again we were the only diners.

  Ángel sat down across from me. Slouching forward to light a cigarette, he brought his face under the light. He looked exhausted. His small, deep-set eyes were ringed with black.

  “It’s been so crazy,” he said. I looked around the empty dining room and wondered what he was referring to. “I get these feelings. Thoughts in my head that I can’t get rid of. I know something is going to happen, some idea is going to be born. It’s going to come out of me. I say to myself, You must relax. But who can relax when you’re about to give birth?”

  I asked if he was getting enough sleep. “Sleep? Yeah, sure. Three and a half hours. This is optimal. I believe I’m getting that much. Anything less is no good.” He extinguished his cigarette. “But anything more and I get very fucking crazy.”

  Lisa asked how he had become involved with Veta la Palma. It was, after all, the reason we’d come. He shrugged his shoulders and said they had simply approached him. It was “organic,” he said. I reminded him of his rejection of fish farms at the lunch with Carl. (“Never, never, never.”) How had he gone from refusing to even meet with Veta la Palma to becoming a champion of their fish?

  “Actually, I signed on as a partner now,” he told us, without a hint of embarrassment.

  A small plate of almadraba tuna skin with tomato marmalade appeared. “If you can’t get to the almadraba, I’m going to bring it to you,” Ángel said. He had scraped the skin of its fat and impurities, boiled it, and then braised it. It was soft and gelatinous. Ángel told us that ancient Romans would dry the skin and use it for shields.

  The tomato marmalade was very dark and intense. “Tuna blood,” Ángel said after I took a few bites. “I added it to the tomatoes while they reduced. My parents are hematologists, what can I say?” He continued, impressed by his own train of thought. “Chefs know death. We know dead products. But in order to understand death, the chef also has to know the life.” Ángel paused as I finished the marmalade. “So we’re forensic scientists.”

  We are also naturalists. Not to get too high-handed about it, but chefs can do a pretty good job of translating the natural world. A delicious carrot communicates the soil it was grown in, a grass-fed lamb the kind of grasses it was pastured on, and so forth. The experience of a well-prepared meal can make these connections clear in powerful ways.

  It really wasn’t until my experience eating at Ángel’s restaurant that I started to see just how powerful. Cooking with tuna skin and blood is daring, provocative, and in the vein of what’s popular right now. If Ángel’s food were defined only by this kind of nose-to-tail cooking of the sea, it would be just that—daring and provocative, and in vogue. But the totality of a meal in Ángel’s hands transcends the individual plates of food, and even the craft of cooking. The meal becomes, like jamón, more than the sum of its parts. And you emerge from it with a sense of awareness you didn’t have when you sat down—about fish, absolutely, but also about the fragile state of the oceans and our responsibility to keep them healthy.

  In that sense, meals in the hands of chefs like Ángel are not only works of art; they can also be vehicles for igniting change in our food system. I know that’s an unlikely idea—to sit in a restaurant halfway around the world (a seafood restaurant, no less) and come to the realization that a meal has the power to change the American food system. And yet that’s exactly what happened.

  Ángel, like Eduardo, is offering an alternative by way of consciousness. It’s often said of restaurants that they are places of escape. Through Ángel I came to view them as places of connection, too. You eat, say, an unknown fish and want more of it. Wanting more of it invariably means becoming interested in how to ensure it survives. Knowing how a species survives requires an understanding of marine biology (like phytoplankton) and the politics around fisheries (like bycatch). Pretty soon you’re interested in the cultural significance of preserving other species (bluefin tuna). Consciousness breeds what Aldo Leopold called a land ethic (and Safina later called a sea ethic), and he called it an ethic because he understood that ethics can inform and direct action.

  Which isn’t to say that the Third Plate, as I have come to envision it, exists solely within the world of haute cuisine. But it is to say that chefs like Ángel have an opportunity—and perhaps the responsibility—to use their cooking to shape culture, to manifest what’s possible, and, in doing so, to inspire a new ethic of eating.

  JAMÓN OF THE SEA

  Across the small dining room, a waiter wheeled a cart. Ángel sprinted out of his seat and took control. Smiling broadly, he lowered his head to just above the cart, his eyes squinted eagerly, and drove over to our table.

  The cart held three cutting boards, each with a different cured fish sausage. There was a butifarra (traditionally made with Catalan pork), a classically inspired chorizo, and a riff on a caña de lomo (cured pork loin). In each case, Ángel had substituted fish.

  “Jamón ibérico of the sea,” Ángel said, slicing a piece of each and handing me a plate of glistening meat. It was nearly impossible to distinguish them from their pork archetypes. Pimentón, the distinctive dried red pepper that’s a classic seasoning for Spanish chorizo, perfumed the meat.

  Here I have to credit Ángel with something I neglected to acknowledge at the table. No one in the history of cooking, as far as I know, had ever thought to fashion fish into charcuterie. There is of course cured fish, and there are fish “sausages”—fish mousse mixed with heavy cream and egg whites, stuffed into a casing, and poached (an invention of the nouvelle cuisine chefs in the early 1970s). But no chef had replaced cream or pork fat with fish fat and then actually hung it to cure. This alone was a pretty revolutionary idea. (Lisa saw it differently: “The Spanish mentality is to make everything resemble pork, since pork is the paragon of food. So in that sense, I don’t know, Ángel actually did something rather predictable.”)

  Then Ángel said something truly revolutionary. “Dan!” he said, looking like a small child behind his sausage cart. “It’s mullet!” Ángel explained that he chose mullet for the flavor, and the fat. “In fact, I no longer cook with the bass,” he said. “It doesn’t compare. The mullet is the most misunderstood fish in the history of fish.”

  To put this declaration in perspective, imagine a Texas rancher declaring his preference for boneless, skinless chicken breast over sirloin. This would be very much like choosing mullet over bass and boasting about it to another chef.

  I first learned of mullet (this is grey mullet, not red mullet, the delicate and revered—and unrelated—fish of the Mediterranean) when I worked in Paris, where I saw their narrow, silvery blue bodies packed tightly together in fish stalls and markets. Alan Davidson, in his ocean guide and cookbook North Atlantic Seafood, writes that the mullet “swims along the bottom, head down, now and then taking in a mouthful of mud, which is partially culled over in the mouth, the microscopic particles of animal or vegetable matter retained, and the refuse expelled. When one fish finds a spot rich in the desired food, its companions immediately flock around in a manner reminding one of barn-yard fowls feeding from a dish.”

  The unflattering description is justified. The mullet’s herbivorous diet translates into a flavor that’s n
otoriously oily and off-tasting, often like the muddy water they inhabit. For bottom-feeders, that’s to be expected. You are what you eat. Which is why, as Ángel explained, the mullet from Veta la Palma are so demonstrably superior to other mullet. Their habitat is clean, and full of the kind of varied diet that mullet—or any other fish, for that matter—rarely find.

  “I could never get a cured sausage to work,” Ángel said. “It’s a delicate process, and it absolutely depends on the fat. The mullet have the right kind of fat.”

  He informed me (as Lisa and I had guessed by now) that he was collaborating with Veta la Palma on the project. Apparently convinced of the genius of the idea, the owners of Veta la Palma had committed to building a three-thousand-square-foot curing room and supplying the mullet for the operation. Ángel was donating the intellectual capital. He predicted that within a year they would be producing four thousand kilos (8,800 pounds) per week.

  The next course was a fillet of roasted mullet with a puree of sea lettuce and phytoplankton. The dish was an ode to the mullet’s diet. The garnishes were meant to instruct and amuse, and they were very tasty. But the mullet itself, the first fillet I’d tasted, was stunning.

  I had reason to feel conflicted, having frequently declared Veta la Palma’s sea bass to be the best piece of fish I had ever eaten, a fish that could change the world. I’d recently learned from Miguel that, as an herbivorous fish, the mullet is infinitely more sustainable to raise than bass, and now, thanks to Ángel, it appeared to be better-tasting, too—sweeter, richer, and flavorful in ways you don’t associate with fish, especially not mullet.

  Ángel took two large gulps of beer. “Mullet is not like other new fish. You know how it is: you get all excited working with them for the first time, it feels so right, and then after a little while it gets stale and you start thinking about other fish. Every time that starts to happen with mullet, that’s when they surprise me. They do something crazy. And I fall in love all over again.