The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food

by Dan Barber

  A few weeks after our Mountain Magic revelation, Jack went to Cornell to meet the university’s plant breeders in search of more opportunities to collaborate on new varieties of fruits and vegetables.

  “They actually want to talk,” Jack told me when he got back. “They’re a bunch of foodies.” The breeders needed to hear more from us, he said, and we—the farmers, the chefs, and the waiters—needed to hear more from them. When Jack suggested inviting the group for dinner, the answer was obvious. How had we not thought of that before?

  A team of breeders arrived at Stone Barns two months later. After touring the farm, they joined the farmers, cooks, and waitstaff gathered before service to explain their work. Each breeder specialized in a particular crop. There was Bruce Reisch (grapes), Margaret Smith (corn), Courtney Weber (strawberries and raspberries), Walter De Jong (potatoes), and a young rising star named Michael Mazourek (squash, melons, and peppers).

  Michael spoke about the challenges of breeding in a world disconnected from its food. “The breeder has to make decisions about which way to breed—it’s like spinning a wheel and deciding which direction you’re going to go,” he said. “And the direction we’re being told is: yield and uniformity.” The other breeders nodded.

  Mountain Magic, he pointed out, was an exception. Usually, breeders have to look for the largest market. “Actually, before we even begin with an idea for seed, we need to prove there is a market,” he said. “One hundred years ago, we were breeding seeds for farmers in our region. Now we have to think about the seed growing not just in New York but in Texas and Oregon, too. With 1 percent of the population feeding the other 99 percent, I suppose it’s inevitable.” More nodding heads.

  “We don’t have a face to breed for,” he continued, “so we breed for the two-sentence description on a seed package. That’s what the whole universe of breeding possibilities gets whittled down to: two sentences, and one of them has to be about yield and the other has to be about uniformity.”

  Breeders are architects, and seeds, as I learned from Glenn, are the blueprints for the farming system. Even before farmers actually farm, before they employ their rotations, improve their soils, and choose their varieties, the seed sets the foundation. If yield and uniformity are the determining factors, then the system, from field to distributor to marketplace, pretty much falls into place. We say, “It begins with the seed,” and really it does, but it also begins with the idea for the seed.

  It’s not a great reach to say that in the burgeoning local-food movement, breeders have been ignored. And while cooking the meal that night, I realized that chefs were partly to blame. We might have brought innovation and modernity into the kitchen, but where ingredients are concerned, we’ve tended to look to the past. We’ve idealized heirlooms and heritage breeds as paragons of flavor. And we’ve put farmers on pedestals as their custodians. But we’ve overlooked the breeders, the people writing the original recipes, and by virtue of that neglect we have helped prevent the development of new and delicious varieties that could thrive in particular regions.

  At the end of the meal, I sought out Michael and asked him if a winter squash could be bred to have the concentrated flavor of Mountain Magics. “Would it be possible,” I asked, “to shrink the squash but improve the flavor?”

  He told me he was in fact working on such a variety and would send over a sample in the fall. And then he laughed and, fidgeting with his glasses, looked down at the floor. “It’s a funny thing, or maybe a tragic/funny thing,” he said, “but in all my years breeding new varieties—after maybe tens of thousands of trials—no one has ever asked me to breed for flavor. Not one person.”

  BREEDING FOR FLAVOR

  Can wheat be bred for flavor?

  The thought occurred to me not long after our visit from the Cornell breeders, when I received a phone call from Lisa. I was expecting an update on Eduardo or Miguel, but instead she was calling about Aragon 03, an old Spanish variety of wheat she had read about, which had all but disappeared in the past fifty years.

  Farmers in Spain abandoned Aragon 03 in the 1980s because its yields were lower than those of modern varieties. But a family in one small northeastern Spanish town had continued to grow it for personal use, each year selecting the best seeds to plant the next year, thus making the wheat even better over time. Now it was being rediscovered, and demand from bakers had farmers wanting to grow more of it.

  Aside from its relatively low yield, Aragon 03 exhibited all the characteristics modern breeders look for: high protein content (a whopping 17 percent), formidable disease resistance, and drought tolerance. (Lisa said Aragon 03 was described to her as wheat that “nourishes itself with the morning dew.”) Even better, it was said to be delicious.

  Lisa thought Aragon 03 would make a good idea for a story—a valuable heirloom that had almost disappeared in agriculture’s single-minded pursuit of yield. And I thought it might make a good addition to our menu. Saving Aragon 03 meant flavors that would otherwise become extinct. The project seemed right up Glenn’s alley, but my mind was still on breeders and the possibility that they could help not merely restore an endangered variety but reinvent it.

  That’s how I found myself e-mailing Steve Jones, a breeder for Washington State University whose name I’d heard tossed around by several people, including Glenn. Steve was renowned in the field for his interest in small-scale wheat breeding and his commitment to flavor. I introduced myself and told him I was interested in learning more about his work. His response came the same afternoon.

  Steve described his efforts to empower farmers to breed their own varieties and recounted the story of a local farmer whose son had died in a tragic accident ten years ago. The farmer wanted Steve’s advice on getting his twelve-year-old granddaughter, Lexi, involved with the farm.

  “I told him: Why not have her breed a new wheat variety?” he wrote. Steve had Lexi assist in making some crosses in his greenhouse. And eventually she helped plant the wheat in her grandfather’s fields, each summer selecting the plants that looked best to improve the variety. A few years later, Steve entered Lexi’s wheat variety—Lexi 2—in a statewide program to test the top sixty varieties in the Pacific Northwest. The entries came from companies such as Monsanto and Syngenta, as well as the university programs. In Douglas County, Lexi 2 was the top-yielding variety, beating out the fifty-nine other lines.

  “There are old, cranky wheat breeders who’ve spent their lives doing this work that have never, and will never, have a top yielding variety anywhere,” Steve wrote.

  Convinced that I’d found a kindred spirit, I sent the information about Aragon 03 to Steve the next day. And I offered to have Lisa act as an intermediary with the Spanish family that preserved it. But apparently he required no assistance. “Aragon 03 is in hand,” he wrote back a few days later. “I’d like to make a cross with a wheat variety local to you. Please advise if you have something in mind.” Then he added, “This could be fun,” but I got the sense it was with the wan enthusiasm of someone agreeing to look after a neighbor’s houseplant.

  I phoned him the next afternoon and asked how he’d managed to find the seed. “After I got your e-mail, I called my friend at the seed bank. He mailed it to me,” Steve said, his enthusiasm suddenly sounding more genuine. “I’d like to honor Aragon 03. I can do that by showing its worth as a parent.” He said we could take the characteristics Lisa described and make them even better. By crossing Aragon 03 with a local wheat variety, we could ensure that its strengths would be well expressed in New York. “To get the qualities you’re looking for, we may even ménage à trois it.”

  So I introduced Steve to Klaas—they had already heard of each other but had never met. Klaas spent several weeks researching varieties that Aragon 03 might pair well with. “Like a good marriage, you want the same worldview but distinctive traits,” he said, a Jane Austen of good agronomy. In the end he recommended Jones Fife, a wheat hig
hly adapted to the weather and soil conditions of the Northeast. “I believe Jones Fife is a worthy candidate for this cross,” Klaas wrote to me.

  I didn’t object. Who was I to stand in the way of two interesting varieties creating a potentially valuable offspring? But the nagging worry that we—that is, Steve—had given up on perpetuating the pure Aragon 03 seed left me wondering if I had the stomach for modern breeding. Supporting Mountain Magics over heirloom tomatoes had felt ingenious and modern. But imposing on the actual breeding process suddenly felt clinical and, to be honest, a little creepy.

  I thought of Glenn and his landrace breeding, the chaotic unpredictability and painstaking selection of admirable traits. The capability to bypass all that and select two varieties that had never felt the same breeze or touched the same soil, and force their offspring—I wasn’t so sure this was the right thing to do. Glenn worked to honor what nature intended, just as Eduardo and Miguel did. Wasn’t that the best recipe for the most delicious food? And wasn’t I, as the sorcerer’s apprentice to Steve, interfering with nature’s will?

  A few weeks later, Steve sent a photo of the Aragon 03 and the Jones Fife cohabitating under a blanket of thin plastic. “Making the cross,” Steve wrote as the caption. “Come out and see for yourself.”

  It was late afternoon by the time I arrived at the Washington State Research and Extension Center, in Mount Vernon, an hour north of Seattle. Steve was standing outside the building’s entrance with his hands in the pockets of his khakis, looking serious. He is six foot five, but with his baseball cap tipped back slightly, he appeared even taller. He welcomed me to the Skagit Valley, looking less like a brilliant breeder or a graduate professor than a high school basketball coach.

  Steve walked me through the newly rebuilt research center, with its plush offices, carpeted hallways, and sleek lighting. It seemed like a tech company, flush from its IPO. In fact, that’s a little like what had happened with this place. Lacking funds for research—a function normally filled by the state’s land grant—the farmers of the surrounding Skagit Valley paid for much of the center themselves. They donate a certain percentage of their profits to a foundation and invest the money in the agricultural equivalent of start-ups: crop research, new seed varieties, and pest-resistance strategies. All the benefits flow back to the farmers, giving them an advantage in the marketplace.

  You’d think ninety thousand acres of pristine farmland, with some of the best soil in the nation (Skagit Valley’s soil is rated among the top 2 percent in the world), would ensure success, but the Skagit farmers lack the marketing muscle of the big commodity growers.

  “Most of these farmers worked the land as grandchildren,” Steve told me. “They’re not getting any handouts or subsidies, so they have to work together and invest in their future. In a way, that’s freed them from getting locked into some kind of funky system where it’s one crop being planted again and again. It’s forced them to be creative.”

  I asked how much of the valley is organic. Not much, he said. But he warned me against drawing conclusions about the quality of the farming. He said that all the farmers practice mixed agriculture and feed their soil through good rotations. They consider wheat a good rotation because it breaks up disease cycles and aerates the soil for their main cash crops, like fruits and vegetables and flowers.

  “My job is to make wheat an integral part of a sustainable farming system, not just a good rotation crop,” he said. “To do that, I need to breed wheat that tastes good and performs well in a bakery. In terms of how much is planted, wheat will always be a minor crop around here—it will never be the most profitable—but I want to make it a major minor crop, if you will. Wheat isn’t a tomato, yet I’d argue that there’s a lot of value in looking at it that way. That’s my goal. That’s why I’m here.”

  ON DR. JONES

  Steve’s interest in wheat started in college, when he entered a program that offered students five acres to farm whatever interested them and pocket the profits.

  Steve planted wheat and dry beans and, on the side, marijuana. “All buds,” he told me in a whisper. “It was good stuff.” The marijuana netted $400. He struggled with the beans: “I worked my ass off, waking up at 2 a.m. to irrigate those things. I never worked harder, and I made no money.” But Steve’s wheat, planted in November, was ready to harvest by June—with little effort on his part. He earned $450. “I was like, I got to get into this.”

  It was Steve’s grandmother, a Polish immigrant, who inspired his initial interest in farming. The week after they moved to Brooklyn, his grandparents ripped out the lawn and parking strip in front of their new home and planted potatoes and cabbages. His grandmother cooked often and baked Eastern European–style breads. When Steve was eight years old, she moved in with the family and taught him to make bagels, which he continued to do for many years. “Besides growing wheat in college, I ended up making a lot of bagels. People thought that was weird.”

  Other than his grandmother’s influence, and a talent for mowing the grass of the local golf course, there was little in Steve’s childhood that foreshadowed a life devoted to agriculture, and nothing that would have suggested his becoming one of the leading wheat breeders in the country. And yet that’s exactly what happened.

  Steve came to the Skagit Valley after heading the wheat-breeding program at Washington State University for nearly twenty years. In that job, he had worked in eastern Washington, where the wheat farms would look right at home among the tabletop monocultures of Kansas. At first he had felt energized and challenged to help the large, commodity wheat farmers improve their yields and increase their profits. By all accounts, he was very good at it. But he was also interested in helping small-scale wheat growers—farmers who were too small to compete in the commodity game—and organic growers, who have an even greater need for new seeds to keep ahead of pest and disease pressures. The university, however, didn’t encourage these efforts.

  “Maybe I was a little naive or whatever, but I considered my job to be a public servant, which means I serve the entire public,” he said. “But the university—every land-grant university now—is locked in with the largest constituency. For us, that was the eastern Washington growers. Two and a half million acres of wheat destined for industrial flour—most of that leaving the country. Anonymous wheat is what I was expected to continually improve.” Steve didn’t fight to change the system, at least not at first. But quietly he began to work on alternative wheat breeds for organic and small-scale production.

  Then one day, several years into the job, he was called into a meeting. “The department chair was sitting there, and the associate dean, and three guys from Monsanto. I walked in and I thought, Oh, shit. Right away, first thing they say? All the land grants are going to put Roundup in their wheat. It was like, You’re going to do this, too—essentially change the way wheat has been bred for ten thousand years—and isn’t that great?”

  Roundup is Monsanto’s best-selling herbicide, developed in the 1970s and used widely all over the world. At the time of the meeting, nearly all of Steve’s wheat farmers used Roundup on their fields before planting (today, to farm wheat conventionally, there’s really no choice), but the group was suggesting something momentous for wheat. They asked Steve to breed a genetic modification into his wheat seeds to make them resistant to Roundup. This would enable farmers to spray both their crops and surrounding cropland with the herbicide—killing the weeds without killing the crops. The logic is simple: eliminate weeds when they compete most with the wheat, and increase harvests.

  Genetically modifying other grains to withstand a dousing of herbicide had already been done successfully with cotton, corn, soybeans, and alfalfa. Even though GM wheat was not approved for commercial release, Monsanto and others were lobbying for its development. Steve heard that they were reaching out to university wheat breeders around the country, confidently predicting an imminent change in policy. But he was still su
rprised by the tone of the Monsanto representatives, who assumed that Steve would happily comply.

  “They said: We want you to put these genes in your wheat, and then we’ll commercialize them together. They had the scientists; they didn’t have the germplasm,” he told me, referring to the genetic information stored in a collection of seeds. “That was their problem.”

  He added that private companies still rely on public genetics for their seeds. “So they needed university breeders with access to the gene pool. And they needed the trust we have with the growers. We’ve been breeding wheat at WSU since 1894. For a hundred years, we’ve developed that trust. So they needed me for that. And they figured I’d be a willing participant because they were offering royalties.”

  At the time, paying public breeders a royalty for their seeds was a relatively new idea. The 1980 Bayh-Dole Act made it legal. For the first time in the history of land grants, breeders entered into the business of commercializing their work rather than simply making their seeds available to farmers for free. As Steve described it, the Bayh-Dole Act amounted to a friendly takeover of public research, with the devastating, if unintended, consequence of tilting universities toward profit-making projects.*

  By the 1990s, private industry had surpassed the USDA in the funding of agricultural research at land-grant institutions. And the spending gap continued to expand. In a little more than a century, the spirit of a regional food system encouraged by land-grant colleges was effectively turned on its head.

  Steve had a more immediate—and, in many ways, more far-reaching—worry as he sat across from the Monsanto executives offering him the deal of his life.