The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food

by Dan Barber

  “By ‘complicated,’ you mean what exactly?” I asked. “The rotation experiments at Clemson? The seed work with the rice geneticists? The milling techniques?”

  “Yeah, all of the above. Everything. And something more, too. What I discovered is tough to see when you’re in the middle of a mad pursuit for rice. It’s that modern agriculture has thoroughly separated the agri from the culture. They’ve killed the meaning of the word—bifurcated it, completely, in just the last thirty or so years. We’re producing grain strictly as a commodity, without its cultural heritage. Uniformity has replaced excellence. It’s replaced local distinction.” He paused, weighing his next thought. “You can’t just grow a bunch of heirloom vegetables. Not if you want it to last. That’s key.”

  Since Glenn had never been in the business of “just growing heirloom vegetables,” it wasn’t hard to recognize Stone Barns as the reference. It was a fair point. We were, at the time, growing mostly heirloom vegetables, and no grain.

  “So when you sent us the Eight Row Flint corn, it was with the hope that . . . what? We’d start growing grain?” I asked, reminding him that Jack has only eight acres to work with on the farm.

  “I was hoping for exactly what happened. That it would trip something and the consciousness for landrace cuisine would click in.” Landrace cuisine, he said, begins with fresh milling—“milling to order, milling à la minute, milling right into cookery.” He was right. Until Glenn sent us the Eight Row, I had never considered milling anything. Milling the Eight Row got us to milling wheat. It’s what inspired us to opt out of the conventional way of doing things.

  “Did you actually think Jack would grow grain on just eight acres?” I asked.

  “Well, yeah, of course I did. Hell, yeah. And you did it with the Three Sisters.” Glenn smiled at the memory of Jack’s riff on the Native American planting strategy. “I didn’t expect all of a sudden that you were gonna end up in production and I could buy some polenta from you, or some grain from you. That wasn’t the motive. The motive was to create community.”

  I must have looked confused. “Remember Tris?” he said. “Same thing. We were the neighbor—we gave him the seed for the Hopi corn, and now he’s making a profit on it and saving seed every year. And the farms around him have gotten into the game, too. They saw what he did and they went for it. What’s wrong with repatriation, to get started, is you don’t have any neighbors. We were the neighbor. We were the community.”

  “But Stone Barns was already a community,” I said.

  Glenn gyrated his lower jaw, weighing how to respond. “Let me rephrase that: you already had the community—that’s true. But I was after a larger community that recognized grain as instrumental to cuisine. That’s what I meant by having to make it more complicated. It answers the question of why I didn’t just plant the Eight Row myself, and why what drives me has changed. Because bringing back Carolina Gold rice by figuring out the right rotations and working with the right geneticists doesn’t amount to a hill of beans if it isn’t going to last. By ‘last,’ I mean a couple hundred years or more.”

  “So you paid us to plant Eight Row to . . .”

  “To become the neighbor. The idea was for you to become a beacon. You’re the little light I put down in the darkness.”

  We arrived at the plantation with the drought-threatened crop of Carolina Gold. Through the 1800s, the farm had grown rice, cotton, corn, and wheat. Glenn persuaded the plantation owners to farm just eighteen acres of rice in the same way he had convinced Tris to farm corn; he donated the seed and equipment, and guaranteed a market.

  I asked what would happen to the rice if he succeeded in harvesting it. “Same as what happened to the Eight Row I sent you. I’ll pay someone, somewhere, to grow this out.” Glenn now distributes grain seeds in over thirty states, and as far away as Mexico and Canada.

  “And the business model for all of this?” I asked. “I mean, for Anson Mills. It sounds like you’ve become a company that donates seeds and pays farmers to grow them out. Where’s the profit in that?”

  “There’s no profit. We’re up to three million in revenue, based on the sales to thirty-two hundred chefs. Chefs are driving this, literally. Every year we turn around and zero out the bank account. All the money goes to seed work at this point.” It was humbling to see how, in Glenn’s hands, the power of chefs could be harnessed for such good.

  As we walked back to the rental car, Glenn tried to make sense of what Anson Mills had become. “Fifty years from now, that’s when my work starts having some kind of meaning. And if I drop dead this instant, it carries on, because it’s out there now. I don’t even know who’s growing my rice anymore. How cool is that? I send out tons of seed, I don’t charge for it. I couldn’t get anybody to take free seed five years ago. So I know it’s working. It’s happening at the speed of light, because people are putting it together and saying, ‘Oh, these things made it through thousands of years of screwing up. And by golly, it tastes out of this world.’”

  The seeds he distributes are blueprints for a certain kind agriculture, and a certain kind of culture, too. Which means, over time, a certain kind of cuisine.

  Without cuisine, Glenn said, farming systems can’t last. “They don’t,” he said. “Maybe for our lifetime, or for our children’s lifetime, but eventually, forget it. Food and cuisine have to be an important part of our culture, and not just something that fuels the culture in one way. Food as fuel is a dangerous concept. That’s where we are right now—food as fuel. It’s why nothing tastes good, and why our farming systems are collapsing.”

  He stopped before we got to the car to underscore his point. “I’ve learned above all else that if what I’m doing is going to work, the culture of food is as important, if not more important, than the production of food.”

  Several months after my visit to Charleston, I called Glenn with a question about Wapsie Valley corn, a variety Klaas had recently delivered. “Wapsie put open-pollinated back on the map,” he said. “Thank Steinbronn for that.” (“Open-pollinated”: varieties pollinated naturally, by the birds and the bees. Adolph Steinbronn: midcentury corn breeder, Fairbanks, Iowa.)

  He said he was in La Jolla, and I joked about landrace field trials in Southern California. “Maybe someday,” he said. “No, I’m here because Mom recently passed. We eulogized her this morning.” He sounded nearly apologetic to be giving me the news.

  I told him how sorry I was. I asked if his mother had ever had the chance to taste his Carolina Gold rice.

  “She did, yes. I sent the grits to her first, which she liked a lot. Then she said, ‘Now that you got the corn right, are you going to get the rice right?’ That was just like Mom. I told her I would. It took a few years, much longer than I thought. But eventually I flew out for a visit and brought some newly harvested Carolina Gold. Of course, she wouldn’t let me cook it. She did the cooking.”

  I asked Glenn what she said about the rice.

  He was silent for a minute, something I couldn’t recall having experienced with Glenn before. “She didn’t say anything, actually,” he said finally. “Not a word. We just sat and shared it. Quiet reflection over a bowl of rice is something to behold.”

  CHAPTER 30

  IN THE SPRING OF 2009, several tractor-trailer loads of tomato plants left a wholesale nursery in Alabama, destined for large-scale retail centers in the Northeast—places like Walmart, Home Depot, and Kmart. There is nothing particularly strange about a phalanx of eighteen-wheelers trucking thousands of tomato plants. It happens every spring. Big-box stores routinely stock from large breeders rather than grow the plants from seed. And in 2009, the first full year of Michelle Obama’s White House garden project, there was a significant spike in the number of people looking to create their own gardens, so an even greater number of tomato plants were on the road.

  But there was a problem with the cargo. Many of these plants harbored
a fungal disease called late blight, which attacks potatoes and tomatoes. Late blight is devastating. It looks innocent at first—a few brown spots here, some lesions there—but it quickly multiplies. Plants that appear relatively healthy one day, with abundant fruit and vibrant stems, can turn Chernobyl-like within a few days. Think Irish potato famine—it was caused by the same fungus.

  Most farmers in the Northeast, accustomed to variable conditions, have come to expect late blight in some form or another. Like a sunburn or a mosquito bite, you’ll experience it sooner or later. And while there are things farmers can do to minimize its damage and sometimes even avoid its effects entirely, the disease is almost always present, if not active.

  But 2009 turned out to be different. For one thing, the disease appeared much earlier than usual. Late blight usually comes, well, late in the growing season as fungal spores spread from plant to plant. So the outbreak caught just about everyone off guard. And the perniciousness of the disease was unprecedented. The pace with which it spread (it covered the Northeast in just a few days, as opposed to over several weeks, which is the norm) and its ferocious strength (topical copper sprays, a convenient organic preventative, were less effective than they had ever been) were a shock to even hardened Hudson Valley farmers. Several described the damage as “biblical.”

  Organic farmers were forced to make a brutal choice: spray the tomato plants with fungicides or watch their crops disappear. (One local grower, who had never used a chemical application on his fields, told me he didn’t hesitate to spray. “If I lose my tomato fields,” he said, “my daughter doesn’t go to college this year.”) But fungicides only suppress the disease; they don’t cure it. Even for farmers who routinely sprayed, or who reluctantly sprayed precautionary amounts, the blight drastically lowered yields.

  Many blamed the weather for the outbreak, as record rain and high humidity that June made for the fungal equivalent of a four-star hotel. But even the weather didn’t explain the severity of the disease. Early summers had been warm and humid before. Late blight is always destructive; it’s rarely, if ever, utterly devastating.

  One theory had it that those tractor-trailer loads of tomato plants were roving incubators of fungal spores. The infected plants dispersed millions of the spores in transit (spores travel up to forty miles), showering the Northeast. The infected starter plants arrived at the stores, and before anyone was aware of the danger, they were purchased and planted, transferring their pathogens like tiny Trojan horses into backyard and community gardens.

  By the second week in June, Jack had heard that there might be late-blight outbreak of historic proportions. He checked his plants carefully on a Saturday. “They were clean,” he told me. “Good fruit set. It actually looked like it was going to be a great year.” Four days later, he called with a different story. “It’s here, and it’s spreading like locusts.”

  On a gray, rainy day a few weeks later, I stood in the field with him—the same field that Eliot Coleman had appraised several years earlier—in a spot once occupied by one thousand heirloom tomato plants: Brandywines, Cherokee Purples, and Black Krims. It now looked either tortured or bombed out. Jack had removed most of the infected plants to prevent the fungus from spreading to the potatoes, which happened anyway. Surveying the scene, with the full weight of a tomato-less summer menu settling in, I suddenly saw something at the other end of the field: a small row of what appeared to be perfectly shaped bright red tomatoes that had somehow escaped the carnage surrounding them. I walked over for a closer look.

  “Weird, right?” Jack said, catching up to me. “I’ve been waiting to show you these. They’re Mountain Magics, an experimental seed I got from Cornell, bred for resistance to late blight.”

  The new variety had been developed and trialed by land-grant university plant breeders to benefit farmers. And yet despite this, and against the logic that beggars can’t be choosers, I eyed the tomatoes skeptically. They looked not only ripe and ready to burst, but almost too good. Too manicured, too uniform, too much fruit set per vine. In other words, too much like supermarket tomatoes. It was an ungrateful sentiment, considering the circumstances. But misshapen heirlooms, with their celebrated lumps and bumps, have become the standard for good flavor. We see the blemishes and flaws of heirloom fruits and vegetables—whether they’re tomatoes or peaches or peas—as indicators of something more natural, and more delicious, than manicured, mass-produced varieties.

  Jack tried to cure me of my prejudice as we collected a few of the ripe Mountain Magics. Heirlooms, he said, are like a set of sterling silver trays your grandmother might pass down. “They’re great to have, and they were saved for a reason. But they capture a moment frozen in time. That can be a burden as well as a joy.”

  My expectations were still low. Assuming the too handsome tomatoes would carry all the flavor of a pencil eraser, I figured we would make them into sauce. But the Mountain Magics were sweet and fruity, with an aroma and an acidity that are sometimes missing even from heirlooms. They were drier than heirlooms, too, with a more concentrated flavor. And no bruising or wrinkling appeared for more than a week, sometimes two. By that standard they were, in fact, magic.

  The tomatoes were so delicious, diners began asking about them. Many wanted to know how Jack could grow them organically in the face of late blight. We put together a small tray—Mountain Magics on one side and a few late blight infected heirloom tomatoes on the other—and brought it to the tables to explain the experimental trial. We might have trumped up the technological ingenuity of Mountain Magics too much, because often the reaction was startlingly negative. Instead of Yum, can’t wait for the next course, we got Yech, Frankenfood. We somehow had diners thinking that Mountain Magic was a genetically modified tomato.

  Given the misunderstanding, their reactions were not surprising. Genetically modified foods—bred by recombining genes in a laboratory rather than allowing varieties to cross naturally—have been controversial since the idea was first introduced in the 1980s. It was a tomato with the unfortunate name of Flavr Savr that gave American consumers their first real taste of the new technology, in 1994. By manipulating the gene that causes ripening, genetic engineers at the biotech company Calgene created a tomato plant in which natural rotting was delayed. So farmers could let them ripen in the field before harvesting them, rather than pick them while they’re still green and push them to ripen by spraying them with ethylene gas, which is the norm. It was marketed as a coup, better for the farmer and the consumer. But while the political and bioethical debates raged about genetic engineering (Frankenfood, the popular term coined at the time, reflected the general horror felt by the public at the manipulative nature of the technology), the Flavr Savr failed for another simple but important reason: there was no flavor to savor. In 1995, Monsanto bought Calgene and discontinued the revolutionary tomato.

  To avoid confusion, I realized I needed to better explain—and understand for myself—the difference between the Mountain Magics, bred the old-fashioned way at a land grant like Cornell, and GM tomatoes from a company like Monsanto.

  LAND GRANTS

  Land-grant breeding programs were, for many years, considered cutting-edge. You might argue that they were created, at least in part, to avoid the kind of disaster late blight brought to our tomato crop.

  In the mid-1860s, agriculture was considered unworthy of study and rarely taught. Of the three hundred colleges in America in 1860, nearly all were private and rooted in the liberal arts. Congress recognized that in order to make farming more efficient, it would have to act.

  Their decision culminated in one watershed year of legislation. The Homestead Act was passed in 1862, encouraging the swell of westward settlement. Also in 1862, Congress created the USDA. But in many ways, the most important legislation of that momentous year was the Morrill Land Grant Act, which provided public land for the formation of land-grant colleges around the country to educate Americans in agricultu
re and the “mechanical arts,” such as engineering. Today, every state has at least one land-grant institution.

  The Hatch Act of 1887 followed, mandating funds for agricultural “experiment stations” where researchers could investigate everything from new crop rotations to plant pathology. And in 1914, the Smith-Lever Act added a third component to the land-grant complex: the extension service, which brought the teachings of the college and the research of the experiment stations directly to farmers in the field. Agricultural extension agents visited farms to share the latest technological advances and, yes, check fields for early signs of disease. (Which in the case of our late-blight disaster could have made all the difference. To an audience with even the most rudimentary gardening experience, those purchased tomato plants weren’t Trojan horses at all; they were sick plants flashing sirens of impending doom.)

  Hoping to improve on farmers’ efforts, plant breeders working for the USDA and state agricultural colleges used scientific selection methods to increase yields and improve pest and disease resistance. New varieties of grains, vegetables, and fruits were developed and trialed at regional experiment stations, and successes were shared with farmers, encouraging the exchange of information and better varieties.

  The sweeping legislation of 1862 created a feedback loop of experimentation and learning for farmers in every part of the country. With improvements in seeds and the application of the most current technological advances, something profound happened: harvest yields increased; prices dropped. The quality of food improved. These advances did not come about without foreclosures and consolidation, and eventually—with the advent of chemical agriculture—great environmental destruction. But the land-grant system was conceived as an instrument for public good. And it was, for well over one hundred years, incredibly successful.