The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food

by Dan Barber

  In 2007, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced that the number of farmers’ markets nationwide had doubled in four years, a sign that the sustainable food movement, long a fringe idea, was gaining traction. I was interviewed about the news on PBS, along with Dennis Avery, an agricultural analyst, strong promoter of agribusiness, and author of Saving the Planet with Pesticides and Plastic: The Environmental Triumph of High-Yield Farming.

  The host asked if, in a perfect world, we would do all of our food shopping at farmers’ markets. The question was a little silly, I thought, and after fumbling over my answer a bit, I ended up just saying yes. The host turned to Mr. Avery, who, sitting in his office in Swoope, Virginia, looked very stately in his leather chair, a library of scholarly books lining the wall behind him. He smiled.

  “Well,” he said, “I like farmers’ markets, too.” He said he shopped at his local farmers’ market occasionally—for things like cinnamon rolls, sausages, and peaches. On the other monitor, I saw the host smile. Avery continued. “But this country needs hundreds of millions of tons of food every day. If New York tried to supply itself from farmers’ pickup trucks, the traffic jam to end all traffic jams would lock up the city.” He deftly painted my perfect world as a disaster. I had lost the exchange at “cinnamon rolls.”

  Large-scale agribusiness should be difficult to defend. It has helped bring about ecological problems of unparalleled scope and significance. The costs to soil fertility alone are too great to sustain for the long term. Yet it’s hopeless and naive to try to argue that farmers’ markets (and boutique farmers like Eduardo) can feed all of us. Asking every farmer to plant, harvest, drive his pickup truck to a public market, and man the cash register would be like asking chefs to cook, serve, and then wash all the dishes every night.

  The more I hung around Klaas and the community of farmers in Penn Yan, the more I learned that the answer to my interviewer’s question lies somewhere between my idealized vision and Mr. Avery’s reality. There is actually a middle of agriculture, and it’s worth examining. These are farmers with midsize operations—farmers like Klaas, who are too big for farmers’ markets but a bit too small to compete with the mega-scale food system. Unfortunately, most of them are, unlike Klaas, caught up in the commodity game. They’re planting single crops because that’s where the money is. (Behind on a bank loan for a combine, with a mortgage to pay on top of that, how many of us wouldn’t play it safe to keep up?)

  Fred Kirschenmann, the president of the board of Stone Barns Center and himself an organic wheat grower, is the country’s greatest advocate for this disappearing contingent. He told me that, though midsize farms cultivate more than 40 percent of our farmland, in another decade most of them will be gone. As their land is consolidated into ever larger farms, the prospects for diversifying what’s grown continue to narrow.

  In our search for solutions to modern agriculture’s seemingly intractable problems, we would do well to consider the ingenuity and nimbleness of midsize farmers like Klaas and Mary-Howell as examples of what’s possible for the future of agriculture. A sustained food system is more than a set of farming practices, as the dehesa and Veta la Palma proved, and more than an attitude toward food production and consumption, although both of these are central to it. It’s a culture, too, and while we may idealize small farmers for their rugged individualism, as agents of change their power is limited.

  The culture became clear to me during my first visit to Klaas and Mary-Howell’s mill. It was an early spring morning, the parking lot filled with pickups. A large flatbed truck was pulling in with a delivery, and another, larger one was leaving. Inside, Mary-Howell worked the phone, taking orders, scheduling seed inspections, and accepting calls from farmers seeking her advice. Forklifts carrying bags of grain crisscrossed the crowded floor. Klaas held court with several grain farmers, who were amazed by his conviction that Fusarium, a debilitating and costly fungal infection, is avoidable through properly managed soil. Another group of farmers, double-fisting coffee and doughnuts, stood with the mill manager and debated market opportunities for organic soy. One man searched through the clutter of a large message board for a deal on used machinery.

  It struck me that the mill served a purpose beyond enabling organic agriculture to thrive in Penn Yan; it created a kind of social fabric, too. Much like an old grange hall, it was a place to vent frustrations, exchange ideas, and escape the isolation of farm life. There was a feeling of shared purpose, if not the thrum of mutual regard. From the truckers to the mill workers to the farmers to the revitalized town of Penn Yan itself, it was all around me, thriving.

  On the drive back to Stone Barns from Penn Yan, I started to see Klaas’s story as really several stories nesting inside one another like Russian dolls. On the outside, the framing story—the one I first planned to write about—was Klaas’s decision to break with his brothers and embrace organic agriculture. It is a large enough story to stand on its own. But the quality of his farming and the masterful rotations that feed his soil suddenly gave birth to another story: a whole community of like-minded farmers. Which led to more stories. The farmer as seedsman. And then as miller and distributor. Put them together and they start to take the shape of a sustainable food system.

  But I was reminded of my conversation with Wes Jackson, who wouldn’t call it that at all. “Because it won’t last,” he had told me, pointing out that sooner or later, as the history of agriculture shows, someone comes along and makes a shortsighted decision, degrading the land and compromising its health for the future. Even with all of Klaas and Mary-Howell’s good intentions and hard work, eventually, Wes predicted, the system would unravel.

  He had a point. This wasn’t the dehesa, after all, where generations of Spaniards protect the land because it is a fundamental part of their history and culture. As Lisa had explained to me, the dehesa operates as a mythical landscape in the Spanish imagination largely because of its relationship to jamón ibérico and the ways of farming and eating that have evolved around it. A place like Penn Yan, and a whole category of farming—the midsize kind—doesn’t resonate as strongly with Americans because there is no food culture attached to it, no jamón equivalent.

  Generally speaking, the organic farmers of Penn Yan aren’t really feeding people, at least not directly. They’re producing the grain that feeds animals that feed people. Klaas admitted this to me several times over the course of my visit, but it didn’t resonate until I drove south along Route 54 on my way out of Penn Yan. The evidence was everywhere. I saw milking cows (organic milk is still the economic driver for many of these farmers) and endless fields of feed grain and cover crops. Compared with my rooftop view of the dehesa, I would argue that the views were no less beautiful. But what I didn’t see were crops that I could cook with. Which meant a vital part of the story was still missing.

  If the true sustainability of a food system is about the strength of its disparate parts, and the way to measure that strength is to examine how deeply they penetrate the culture, then Wes was probably right. As explosive as the sales of organic milk have been, what will happen when another trend comes along to replace it? Or when more farmers in the Midwest, where land is cheaper, convert to organic grain and the dairies in upstate New York can no longer compete?

  By doing what the conventional grain market refused to do—pay for crop rotations that produced healthier soil—Klaas and Mary-Howell addressed an agronomic problem, and by setting up the mill and seed businesses, they solved an enormous economic problem for these farmers. (They also, quite by accident, cooked up a recipe for feed that ended up producing better-tasting milk and pork.) But as Wes might argue, one hundred years from now, Klaas’s farm could look a lot different, and not for the better.

  What was missing from his story—crops ingrained into the mores and traditions of our culture—was no fault of Klaas’s. At least some blame falls to chefs and restaurateurs like me. Because those rotation
s of wheat, millet, flax, soy, buckwheat, rye, and dozens of other grains and legumes—the things that give soil its fertility, and give us the best-tasting food—are largely grown for animal feed. They could be grown for our menus instead, and in the process provide much greater profit for the farmer.

  “If there was the demand and the infrastructure to make it happen,” Klaas told me once, “the farmers of Penn Yan alone could bury New York with local grains.” I’d seen enough to know that he wasn’t exaggerating.

  Ángel León saw mountains of discarded fish while working on commercial fishing boats and created a market for them by broadcasting their culinary value on his menu. Many of Penn Yan’s soil-building rotational grains and legumes are the agronomic equivalent of bycatch. Throwing them into animal feed, while serving a better purpose than tossing unmarketable fish back into the sea, is not a way to build a sustainable food system. If I was truly in pursuit of a Third Plate, I needed to take a page out of Ángel’s playbook and learn to incorporate these less desired grains into Blue Hill’s cuisine. More than incorporate, I needed to make them as essential to my menu as they were to Klaas’s rotations.

  I would start, I decided, where Klaas himself had started—with wheat. In working with his heirloom emmer and spelt, could I finally recover what he called the lost taste of grain?

  CHAPTER 26

  THE DAY KLAAS’S wheat first arrived at the restaurant, no one knew what to do with it.

  “Can I tell you something?” Alex, the Austrian-born pastry chef at Stone Barns, admitted to me later. “That day I was handed the bags of whole wheat—the spelt, the emmer—I did not know what the hell these are. I said, ‘Sure, I make something with this here,’ but the only thing that I think to make is knödel.” Alex pretended to lift something very heavy, to show that whole wheat dumplings wouldn’t have been right for our menu.

  “So the first thing I do is I call my grandmother,” he continued. “I tell her to help me. She must have worked with these grains here. ‘No!’ she says to me. She says she would have to ask her Grossmutter about such grains. For whole grains, this is how far back we need to go.”

  That night, Alex couldn’t sleep. “Because I am the pastry chef,” he said. “So of course, I should know flour. A carpenter knows a hammer, doesn’t he? If you hand him another kind of hammer, an older hammer, maybe it’s longer and heavier and really weird, and maybe it takes him a moment to adjust, but he can still use the hammer, no? He doesn’t put the hammer down and say, ‘I am sorry, but I can no longer build this table here.’”

  The next day, he rebounded with an idea. He made a classic brioche loaf but substituted the whole emmer wheat for white flour. Had he asked, I would have warned him not to do it. Brioche, like coq au vin or tarte tatin, is the kind of classic that does not need reimagining. Why bastardize a perfect bread?

  Alex milled the emmer wheat in the same tabletop grinder we had used for the Eight Row Flint corn. “The more we ground,” he said, “the more the kitchen started to smell like dirt. No, not dirt. Nature. It smelled like nature, like going on vacation with my parents in the summertime when I was a kid, in the field when the wind blows through the wheat.”

  For several days, Alex had nothing for me to taste. “The first loaves, this was a disaster. It was too—how do you say this? Schwer wie ein Stein—like a rock, this is,” he said, remembering the weight of it. “This was a learning process. My brioche was always very basic, straightforward—eggs, flour, yeast, butter, mix everything together, proof it, and bake it. This is it. Perfect every time. But this, now, this was more sophisticated.” He mixed and proofed the dough for longer periods of time. He adjusted the quantities of butter (not quite as much) and eggs (a little more).

  A week later, just before dinner service began, Alex finally showed me the results of his efforts, cutting thick slices of warm whole wheat brioche. A swirl of steam rose from the bread and wafted toward the ceiling like an image from a children’s cartoon, its nutty apricot scent lingering around us. The bread looked airy and light like classic brioche, only the loaf was a rich russet brown.

  Alex handed slices to several of the cooks gathered around. It is not difficult to get hungry cooks to eat anything, especially warm, buttery bread. He could have offered them a tray of melba toasts. But the usually impartial cooks were encouraging (“You rock my world, Alex”) and genuinely impressed (“Who knew a German could bake bread?”).

  The brioche was delicious, comforting in the way bread should be, but also a little exciting, with a flavor of toasted nuts and wet grass. Just as the Eight Row Flint polenta tasted of corn—reminding me (because I needed to be reminded) that dried corn should actually taste of corn—the whole wheat brioche tasted distinctly of wheat.

  The experience reminded me of my first taste of raw milk. I was with my brother, David, in Mr. Mitchell’s kitchen, a few miles from Blue Hill Farm. We had just finished morning chores, and Mr. Mitchell’s son Dale reached into the refrigerator and opened a box of chocolate chip cookies for breakfast. I was ten years old; it was a dream. Just as we dug in, Janet, Dale’s sister, appeared with a steel jug of the morning’s milk—unpasteurized, butter yellow, and still warm. Dale took a long swig and passed it to me, like moonshine. “Udderly delicious,” he said. I was fixated on the cookies, but I took a gulp. I couldn’t believe what I was tasting. It was creamy and sweet, but also tangy, with a scent that reminded me of morning pasture. It was milk unplugged, and it made the thin, pasteurized kind seem like a poor facsimile, in the same way that frozen orange juice doesn’t compare with freshly squeezed. Alex’s brioche was like that. It hardly resembled the version I knew before.

  By the third or fourth slice, I’d gained an entirely new appreciation for the term “whole wheat.” The technical definition is that the entire wheat kernel is preserved in the flour. What’s missing from this definition is the feeling of satiation that whole grain provides. Classic brioche is rich, even decadent, but it doesn’t do much more than fulfill a craving. It’s a pleasure, not a satisfaction. It struck me then that Alex’s whole wheat brioche was so delicious for a reason that went beyond Klaas growing the wheat in the right way, and beyond fresh milling. It was delicious because, as the name implies, it was wholly satisfying to eat. It was a complete food.

  We began serving the new brioche on the tasting menu at Blue Hill at Stone Barns. I didn’t want it to get lost in the breadbasket or treated as an afterthought between courses. So I borrowed that lone perfect peach concept Alice Waters had used at Chez Panisse. I sliced the brioche, toasted it lightly, sprinkled it with a bit of salt, and served it alone on a small white plate. The bread showed off Klaas’s wheat perfectly—why not let it speak for itself?

  But the waiters spoke first. When I did a test run at the expediter’s table, that narrow landing pad between the kitchen and the front of the house, the waiters stared skeptically at the naked slices of bread. They knew Klaas, and they were not ignorant about the importance of whole wheat, but they shook their heads in disapproval. It won’t work, they said. Diners won’t get it. Having expected some pushback, I told them about the lone Mas Masumoto peach, and the revelation of serving something so perfect and so unexpected. One of the lead waiters took me aside and said, definitively, “That only works in California.”

  There is a misconception about the power of the chef, even in his own restaurant. We are often thought of as generals, leading an army through the blitzkrieg of dinner service. But a chef is really more like a chairman of the board; the waiters are the board of directors. With no menus at Blue Hill at Stone Barns, the power tilts toward the board, and the waiters know it. They develop an intimate connection with each table—befriending, comforting, informing, even lightly provoking. They are ambassadors for both sides—they represent the restaurant, but in our system they become emissaries for the diners’ interests as well. In many cases they will follow the ticket into the kitchen and write the menu themselves.
So when our waiters are not excited about a dish I’ve conceptualized earlier in the day—a whole roasted beet with homemade molasses yogurt, for example—the message on the ticket arriving in the kitchen might be: “Table has an aversion to beets.”

  I pushed ahead anyway with the naked brioche, but that night our diners mysteriously suffered from a “whole wheat aversion.”

  So I modified my approach. A few days later, I met with several of the waiters before their shift. I had them taste the whole wheat brioche just out of the oven. I added a spoonful of homemade ricotta, still warm from the stove, and a marmalade made from salad greens grown in the greenhouse. The waiters spread it over their brioche. “This works,” one of them finally offered, anointing it worthy for service.

  That’s when the trouble began. “Table requests brioche” started appearing on the tickets, because the waiters were enthusiastically preselling the bread, showing off Klaas’s grains at the table and warming guests to the idea that one of their courses would be, as one waiter put it, “a celebration of freshly ground whole wheat.”

  It did not take long for the supply of Klaas’s wheat to run low, so Alex purchased some conventional whole wheat flour, already ground, while we waited for the next delivery. But he dismissed the replacement with the first batch of bread.

  “The brioche came out looking nice,” he told me. “Very puffy. But when you open the oven, it does not smell aromatic.” He complained that it smelled “dusty—dusty like an old closet.”

  We stopped serving brioche entirely until more of Klaas’s emmer finally arrived. Only it, too, proved to be problematic. The new batch, from a different harvest, wasn’t compatible with the recipe Alex had perfected. The dough was sticky and difficult to work. At first, it didn’t rise. Then it would rise but quickly collapse.