by Dan Barber
“It is often said,” Vandana Shiva has written, “that the so-called miracle varieties of the Green Revolution in modern industrial agriculture prevented famine because they had higher yields. However, these higher yields disappear in the context of total yields of crops on farms.”
But total yields of crops on farms matter only if we’re eating all of the farm’s crops—the math holds up only if we eat the barley and the oats. If the farmer can’t sell the barley and oats because there isn’t enough demand, the logic of growing wheat (or corn, or soy) in monocultures is difficult to compete with. It feeds on itself. As long as we don’t eat the diversity, the pull to produce more of the primary crop is too strong.
Which brings us to cuisine.
The challenge of making delicious use of various ingredients is at the heart of all great cuisines, and it evolved from diversity. Cuisines did not develop from what the land offered, as is often said; they developed from what the land demanded. The Green Revolution turned this equation on its head by making diversity expensive. It empowered only a few crops. And in the process, it dumbed down cuisine.
Of all the arguments against the Green Revolution, dumbing down cuisine sounds like the most insignificant—an acceptable sacrifice on the road to bringing agriculture out of the Stone Age and feeding the hungry. But nature writer Colin Tudge reminds us that the world’s population at the beginning of the agricultural age, ten thousand years ago, stood at about ten million. By the time industrial agriculture came into favor, in the 1930s, it was three billion. A three-hundred-fold increase, achieved with old-world farming techniques—organic farming before there was such a thing as organic. Not bad for an agriculture system now considered archaic. But more to the point: small-scale, old-world farmers produced not just a lot of food but a lot of really good food.
Legendary Soviet botanist Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov, who traveled the globe in the early twentieth century mapping the world’s greatest centers of crop diversity and collected specimens along the way, came to believe that the landrace crops he discovered were “the result of intelligent, innovative minds—and often the work of geniuses.”
For most of history, these geniuses were peasant farmers working with nature to create thousands of new crop varieties. This diversity, in turn, launched thousands of highly distinct cuisines. Not merely Indian, Italian, and Chinese, but their more local and original incarnations: Punjabi, Sicilian, Szechuan . . . not to mention Glenn’s Lowcountry.
Cuisine did not shift with fashion or preferences—that happens only with high-end cuisine, which has flourished over the past sixty years. Today’s chefs have the freedom (and the imagination, if not the pretension) to mix ingredients and techniques from around the world into one meal, or onto one plate. But we’re not reinventing anything. We may push new ideas forward, but we don’t create new cuisines. We really just build on what other cultures figured out over thousands of years, when peasants farmed the land and what it could produce dictated what people ate. Location used to be everything; now it’s just another ingredient.
True cuisine is more than just a style of cooking, or a unique combination of techniques and flavors. It is the foundation of culture. It determines a way of life. We are as complex—or as monotone—as the foods we grow and consume. As the great gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin said, “Tell me what you eat: I will tell you what you are.”
The Green Revolution made that difficult to do. It forced farmers to reduce crop diversity—to specialize, monetize, and modernize. It pressured countries in Africa and Latin America to give up locally grown crops like chickpeas and beans, making people dependent on less nourishing (and less delicious) grains.
Losing indigenous crops didn’t just change what people ate; it compromised people’s cultural identities. Vice President Henry Wallace’s alarm over the condition of Mexico’s small farmers may have sparked the Green Revolution, but it was soon clear that there would be no revolution unless those very same farmers abandoned their efforts in favor of large-scale monocultures. Borlaug’s modern varieties didn’t work in small landrace plots, and the need for large amounts of expensive synthetic nitrogen drove farmers around the world from their land.* Since peasant farmers, from the beginning of agriculture, had also been breeders, a few hundred seed companies displaced the millions who had for centuries been saving seeds and breeding new varieties.
Glenn isn’t turning back the clock as much as trying to even the genetic playing field.
As he turned to walk back to the car, he stopped and reached into his coat pocket for his cell phone. He showed me a picture of landrace oats he’d been experimenting with in another field. “I’m glad to have this picture, ’cause this will save us thousands of words.” In the photo, a single oat plant towered over the others, looking like an awkward teenager after a terrific growth spurt. “There’s maybe six of those plants out there,” Glenn said. “This one has three times the amount of seed at the head. Three times. Imagine that. It just appeared, which means it’s been dormant, but for reasons no one understands—and trust me when I tell you no one ever will—it decided to express itself. We’re going to save it in the middle of the field, put electric fencing around it, and go out and pray to it, pray that it makes it to harvest and we can save the seed and find out what the hell this is.”
The excitement, tinged with urgency, in his voice suggested more than a discovery. He was showing me a frontier of possibilities, a Who knows what’s out there? not only for oats but for all crops.
Glenn told me he sent the photo to Klaas’s wife, Mary-Howell, since he values her expertise as a seedsman. “I asked her, ‘What the hell is this?’ And she says, ‘Hell, I don’t know. I’ve never seen that before.’” He shook his fist at the phone, not in anger but in glee, like a child who just scored a goal or opened a birthday gift. “That right there—that’s landrace farming.”
CHAPTER 29
ON OUR way back to Charleston for lunch, Glenn made a detour just off Savannah Highway. We drove to the intersection of two large fields and got out of the car. The heavy air felt like it could suffocate the crops. South Carolina was in the middle of a long drought, which was why Glenn had brought me to the fields. They belonged to Tris Waystack, a lifetime cattle farmer who had once grown only corn and soy for feed. A few years earlier, he had signed on to grow other crops for Anson Mills.
“One day Tris comes up to me and he says, ‘My dad’s sick with cancer. I wanna go organic.’ Just like that. Tris is a master Eagle Scout, straight as an arrow. I figured the kid could farm, but he couldn’t even afford gas at that point.”
Glenn purchased a combine and a grain bin for Tris and paid him in full before Tris had even started. He offered to consult on the planting as well, but Tris asked only for seed to start testing, and for assurance that Anson Mills would buy whatever he grew. Glenn gave him Hopi Blue corn, an heirloom seed famous for making blue tortillas.
“A year later I’m standing next to the corn, about to harvest,” Glenn told me. “It was amazing. Eighteen acres of gorgeous blue corn. Instead of selling all the corn to me, he decided to donate some of this first crop to the Hopi nation, because he believed the people had good juju. He knew the Hopis don’t trade maize for money. He was just looking for the karma.”
We stood at the intersection of the two fields. On the right, Glenn pointed to a quadruple planting of cowpeas, sorghum, cane, and sesame seed. I didn’t know you could even plant four crops at the same time in the same field. Wouldn’t they compete for soil nutrients and water? Apparently not. Glenn explained that they grow at different rates and, as farmers discovered long ago, each crop has different needs. All four of them here looked vigorous in the withering sun.
On the left, just a hundred or so feet away, the other field was clearly suffering. The dirt was dry and cracked, the vegetation sparse, and many of the once green leaves had turned brown. I asked Glenn what the crop had been.
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“Soybeans,” he said. “Modern soy.” He said Tris had gotten cold feet about the quadruple planting and, with this second field, went with soybeans alone.
Glenn pointed to the healthy field and then back to the failed field. “He’s going to have to cut the soy under. He’s going to get nothing. Not a thing. He just blew all that money on expensive new seed.” The drought had killed the soy, he said, because modern soy has such small roots.
What I’d seen as old-fashioned that morning—a nostalgic attempt by Glenn to resurrect a forgotten system of farming—now seemed modern, complex, and even futuristic. In the face of weather that is less predictable and more unforgiving, a diversity of locally adapted crops is one way for farmers to hedge their bets. Glenn’s landrace system isn’t just repatriating a lost cuisine. It’s gathering the seed stock for the future of eating.
THE GLASS ONION
Glenn took me to lunch at The Glass Onion, a mustard-yellow restaurant with generic-looking alliums painted on the sign. Located just off Savannah Highway, it looked like any of the casual chain restaurants that mark the exits of America’s highways, but the chalkboard menu offerings were unexpected: Lamb and Oyster Mushroom Ragout, Fried Buttermilk Quail, Local Shrimp with Farmer Benton’s Bacon and Grits. There were local microbrewed beers and biodynamic wines. Only a few dishes on the menu were more than $10.
“The owner trained in white-tablecloth restaurants,” Glenn explained. “She was a real range rat for a while. But she decided she liked unpretentious southern food, no bullshit-bain cooking.” (“Range rat”: an experienced restaurant line cook. “Bain cooking”: the use of premade sauces or garnishes held in simmering water in a bain-marie, or double boiler.) We ordered most of the menu, including a side of Anson Mills grits to share.
The dishes were as true to southern cuisine as I’d ever tasted, and as unpretentious as the surroundings. They were superb, too, every one of them. Glenn made quick, furious stabs at the food, but he chewed thoughtfully, almost reverently, as if his high expectations for deliciousness would be met, if not with this bowl of mushroom ragout, or that side of coleslaw, then surely with the steaming collards. His face looked worn from a lifelong battle with optimism.
“I’m not a foodie,” he said. “I’m a food junkie.”
Glenn is interested in the primal act of tasting—eating food directly from the plant, with little processing—but he’s also searching for what he calls the “sub-taste threshold.” I asked what that meant. “Below the palate sensitivity range. It’s visceral, which good chefs can pick up on. It’s a McGee thing.” (Harold McGee: writer and food scientist.)
I asked for an example. “Well, look at the reaction you had to our graham flour. The flavor came from the healthy soil, no doubt about it. But let’s build on that a second, okay? Because we harvest the wheat before it dries on the stalk. It’s not green, it’s not immature—that would be like 20 percent moisture—but we harvest it long before it fully dries out, around 14 percent. We catch it on the way down. It’s like catching a ball in midair. Unlike 99.9 percent of the wheat harvested in this country. If your endgame is conventional wheat—dead wheat, whether it’s white flour, or even whole wheat flour that’s just been recombined after killing the germ—then you want wheat that’s stable, that’s safest from spoiling in the bin, which is as dry, or as near to death, as you can get a wheat seed.”
“You’re saying I can taste the difference between wheat left in the field for a few extra weeks?”
“Oh, hell, yeah. You can taste the difference even if it’s overnight. If you’re going for flavor—which is how wheat was bred, harvested, and milled since antiquity—then you have to watch it very, very closely. That’s not sub-anything. That’s above the line. A baby can tell the difference there,” he said, extending the plate with the last of the shrimp over to me. I declined, so Glenn brought it back close to him and eyed the lonely crustacean.
“So now it’s time to mill the wheat. We mill it to order. You call up your graham flour order, and the next day we mill and send it to you overnight. I’m looking at flour like you would a carton of milk or a bag of peaches. Because it’s a fresh product. It’s alive.”
“Versus everyone else?” I asked.
“Everyone else pursues shelf life. Most flour preservation is done by toasting it slightly—it’s called kilning—and what you’re doing is drying out the grain further so there’s absolutely no moisture. That’s what we eat. Wheat picked long past ripeness, then broken apart, and then mummified. Mills are abattoirs for wheat.”
I asked Glenn if people’s attitudes were changing, if they were beginning to recognize the significance of fresh milling.
“Well, you tell me,” he said. “Chefs like you are driving this thing. You’re demanding it. You’re making it happen. I can’t do retail, because no one wants to refrigerate. They keep shelving the stuff, and I come into the store and see it and I say, ‘Thank you very much and goodbye.’”
The waitress presented the steaming plate of grits and cleared the other plates. Glenn stopped her and grabbed the lone shrimp, popping it into his mouth.
“I’m not going to give up on the idea that we’re in the epiphany business,” he said. “No chef will pay the kind of money we charge unless we do everything we do. That’s the way this works. If I flip a chef with these flavors, I’m set. Chefs are pit bulls. They knock down walls to get to something with great flavor. I hit a chef and the infrastructure disappears. Everybody else just comes out of the woodwork. I remind myself every day: Glenn, you’re in the epiphany business.”
To what heights of deliciousness can grits rise? Tucked into a corner table in the epicenter of southern food culture, with the apostle of cultivating, harvesting, milling, and storing the best possible grains, I couldn’t be faulted for expecting a small epiphany myself. The grits were very tasty, but then again, the best grits of my life were not much better than the worst grits of my life. I consulted the expert.
“They’re okay,” he said, looking away, with an expression of complete dissatisfaction. I got a glimpse of what Glenn’s mother must have looked like when she rejected the rice he sent home from college. I insisted on knowing why.
Ever the southern gentleman, or perhaps not wanting to offend a customer of Anson Mills, Glenn lowered his voice before delivering his critique. The chef, he told me, had cooked the grits too quickly, at too intense a heat. “There’s no art to high-heat cooking,” he said. Packaged grits are like white flour—“dead, plain and simple, so go ahead and boil the shit out of that stuff.” But for freshly milled grains like these, he said, “the roiling boil is a surefire way to blow out almost all the flavor.”
So there, an epiphany. It’s possible to go to the ends of the earth to recover a lost seed, research its history, and work it into a complex matrix of crops so that it’s cultivated in the most fertile of soils and harvested at the perfect time—the perfect hour, even—but if a chef cranks up the heat to ready the grits for a busy lunch service: game over. Glenn sat back in his chair, allowing his sunny expression to show brief concern at the idea that his life’s work could unravel so quickly.
Recovering, he pushed the grits to the side of the table. “The only reason the Italians knew this is because no Italian peasant was going to boil water for polenta,” he said. “It requires way too much wood. Basso, basso polenta. That’s slow cooking. Claudio says that all the time. Basso, basso, basso.”
I could not resist. “Who’s Claudio?” I asked.
“He’s Chris’s chef.”
“Who’s Chris?”
“Claudio’s boss.” Glenn ate the last of his quail and declared it delicious.
BECOMING THE NEIGHBOR
After lunch, Glenn drove us to one of the oldest plantations near Charleston to see how eighteen acres of his Carolina Gold rice had fared during the recent drought. We passed several plantations, one after another, o
n a tree-lined road off the main highway. Walls thick with vegetation surrounded the estates. Large gates opened onto long driveways and, more often than not, perfectly preserved mansions. These were vestiges of the old South, heavy with the memory of slavery.
“We’re a quarter-mile from where my mother grew up,” Glenn said. “Isn’t that beautiful?”
Glenn’s mother was fourteen years old when the Depression hit and her father was wiped out. “She still talks about that time in moments of incredible clarity,” he told me, explaining that she now suffered from dementia and lived in an assisted-living facility in La Jolla. “She went from being extremely well-to-do to having nothing, like that.” Glenn snapped his fingers. “It just happened. Her father called her up and said, ‘You gotta turn the car in, you gotta turn your clothes in. . . . That house that you’re in, that’s going away, too.” He pointed to the lush surroundings. “She was actually raised on all this. I wasn’t. I just had the stories and the cooking.”
It struck me as we continued driving that even though he grew up in California, Glenn was raised on this. Indulging in a little armchair psychology, I came to see his mother’s obsession with rice as more of an obsession with her lost childhood. Rice wasn’t just rice; it was her resplendent youth in the Lowcountry of the ACE Basin. In that sense, Glenn’s lifelong search has been about recovering both his mother’s loss and the cultural experience that came with it—to fill a void that became his own.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said, considering my theory momentarily. He looked like he wanted to move on. “Like I said, bringing back Carolina Gold on its own was impossible. Bringing back anything from the past takes more than just the seeds—if you want it to last. That’s key. Do you want this to last for your children’s children? If you do, then you have to complicate the picture more. That’s what I’ve done. I’ve made it more complicated.”