The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food

by Dan Barber

  But for Klaas, who dines with Mary-Howell in the same seat at the kitchen table every evening, the view elicited an entirely different reaction. For many years, he told me, he’d looked out over his fields with a deep restlessness. He longed for a different view, one that included animals grazing the pastures, which is precisely what came into focus as I stretched for a slice of Mary-Howell’s homemade spelt bread. There were dairy cows foraging one of the fields, and just below a dilapidated barn I could make out pigs rooting in straw. Mary-Howell served the bread with butter made from the cows, alongside three hulking pork chops.

  During the previous year, Klaas had expanded the farm yet again by bringing in livestock, something he once had not wanted to do. Blue Hill was slated to buy most of what he raised, so I came to learn about how the animals added to the already robust farm and to understand why, in his late fifties—an age when most farmers scale back if not retire—Klaas decided to “complicate things just a bit” and engage in a part of farming he knew very little about.

  Over dinner, I reminded him that he was already doing groundbreaking, experimental work, not only by managing complex rotations for his soil and propagating important older varieties of grain but also by inspiring an entire community to farm without chemicals and, along with Mary-Howell, providing those farmers with an infrastructure to make it happen. How much better could he get?

  He spooned a helping of butter so large onto his bread that I thought he was joking. “I met you ten years ago,” he said matter-of-factly. “Our sound bite then was: Go organic, change the world. It was sort of said tongue-in-cheek, but since then what’s evolved is a better understanding of what’s actually needed to change the world.”

  Even if farmers are rotating their crops to support soil health and even if they are preserving vast landscapes for food production, they’re not doing enough unless they’re also feeding the maximum number of people directly, Klaas told me.

  “If they’re not doing that, they have more work to do,” he said. He and Mary-Howell had always made a conscious effort to grow as much as they could for human consumption. That’s why they started growing bread wheat in the first place and it’s why they’ve continued to grow crops like kidney beans, even though they haven’t been particularly profitable.

  “We wanted to balance the profits with the ethics,” he said. “And now that the bills are paid and the children have grown, we’re able to think more this way. So we looked at our farm more critically and went to work trying to figure out the right balance—feed people, feed the soil, and make a profit. The answer was staring me in the face. I just didn’t see it.”

  It wasn’t until Klaas and Mary-Howell traveled to Europe the previous summer that he was able to see. “Everywhere we went we passed animals, cows especially, and then walked over incredibly rich soil—the richest soil I’d ever seen.”

  Klaas took Mary-Howell to Laverstoke, where nearly a decade before I had first met him and the Fertile Dozen of visionary farmers. The former race-car driver turned über-farmer Jody Scheckter now had a thriving farm that fed thousands of people. From Jody’s dining room table, Klaas and Mary-Howell could see grain fields and pastures for cows, chickens, and pigs. There was even a small herd of buffalo. The soil was dark and rich. They ate lunch with everything sourced from the farm.

  Jody had apparently listened carefully to the Fertile Dozen’s advice. Klaas was struck by how in so short a time he had “closed the nutrient cycle,” creating a self-sustaining farm wherein the waste from one part became food for another. The crop rotations were finely tuned with the animal rotations. The whole farm revolved around supporting the biological health of the soil.

  Nothing is more typical of Klaas, or more estimable, than this: in that moment of humbling irony—the former student surpassing the teacher—he wanted only to return to his farm, because he realized there was more work to do.

  “All during lunch I kept saying to myself, This is the view I need to have from my kitchen window. This is what’s been missing.”

  Klaas and Mary-Howell started small, introducing a few dairy cows to the farm. Their daughter, Elizabeth, was especially drawn to cows and wanted at one point to become a vet. Pretty soon, more cows. Klaas grazed the animals on the cover crops that were meant to benefit the soil, like clover. The cows ate the tops—what Klaas calls “rocket fuel for ruminants”—and the rest of the plant was plowed in, along with the cows’ manure, to feed the soil’s microorganisms.

  I was surprised to learn that Klaas’s brothers were also beneficiaries of the new system. Profits on their dairy farm had been declining for years as feed costs continued to rise. Finally, they decided to transition to organic in order to sell their milk at much higher prices.

  I wondered if Klaas felt vindicated. After all, his brothers had once scorned his decision to go organic. When I suggested that a “Hey, bro, you blew this one” wouldn’t have been uncalled for, he merely shrugged. “It’s turned out to be a very good development for all of us.”

  Klaas harvests some of his cover crops and sells them to his brothers for high-quality feed. And his brothers, who are required by organic regulations to stop milking part of their herd for a certain period, can send these “dried-out” cows over to Klaas to graze with his daughter’s cows—adding even more manure to the soil.

  “We’re in a symbiotic relationship now,” he said, smiling. “As Joel Salatin said at Laverstoke, the goal is ‘more than the sum of its parts.’ I subscribe to that. I see the wisdom of that now in ways that I didn’t see ten years ago.”

  After dinner, Klaas and Mary-Howell laid out several large pieces of cheese that had arrived earlier in the day from their eldest son, Peter, who was interning at an organic dairy in Germany. Klaas praised the farm for its work in renewable energy and raw-milk cheese.

  “Cheese is a wonderful value-added product,” he said, hinting that Peter might one day further expand the dairy.

  I got the sense that Klaas was looking beyond just Peter. Bringing in livestock, creating an infrastructure for cheese-making, and reimagining how the farm draws its energy are projects for multiple generations. It was Mennonite-like thinking (When do you start raising a child?), preparing for a farm that will sustain the family one hundred years from now.

  Over the previous few years, I had seen how the very best farming systems—whether the oak-lined pastures of the dehesa or the intricate canals of Veta la Palma—are constantly in flux, adapting and readapting to balance the needs of a healthy ecology with the imperative to feed people. Sitting at the kitchen table, staring out at the view of Klaas’s fields, I could see evidence of that same evolution. It was (for me, anyway) a peaceful scene, but there wasn’t stasis.

  In just two decades, Klaas and Mary-Howell have gone from harvesting a few organic grains to complex rotations that include heirloom wheat, vegetables, and legumes—many of them farmed on newly leased land. They’ve added seed production to the mix, and a seed distribution company to supplement the thriving mill and grain distribution business. And now they’ve created a small dairy.

  One hundred years from now, I suspect that Klaas’s heirs will look out on a similar view. If I’m right, it won’t be because anyone fought against change. It will be because each generation embraced it.

  Perhaps the most dynamic transformations are yet to come. Klaas no longer thinks of the farm as an entity all to itself (not that he ever really did) but as an interlocking piece of a larger community.

  “I’m recognizing more and more that not every farm needs to, or should, do every operation,” he said, a large bite of the cheese punctuating his thoughts. “Which is really the point. Can you build a community where different enterprises fit into each other and make better use of resources? That’s the challenge.” By “challenge,” he meant his new challenge for the future—changing the farm, forever striving to make it more than the sum of its parts.

 
Of all the insights and observations I’ve gained from farmers, breeders, and chefs during the research for this book, I can’t help dialing back, again and again, to the one that sits with me most heavily.

  It was after I told Wes Jackson about Klaas’s farm, arguing that it was a good example of sustainability. Wes didn’t buy it. “It won’t last,” he said. And just like that, he rejected not only Klaas’s work but also a generation of farmers looking to transition their farms in similar ways. As much as I longed to dismiss him as an old crank, I had the nagging suspicion that he might be right. History shows that at some point, good farming unravels with just a few shortsighted decisions.

  The vagaries of our country’s food preferences don’t help. Even with the farm-to-table movement running high at the moment, we’re still guilty of reducing sustainability down to what we buy for dinner. Rarely do we imagine the whole picture, which means that rarely are we forced to realize that a truly sustainable food system is not simple. It is not built on one or two principles of farming, and it does not produce merely one or two good things to eat.

  That whole picture might look like my rooftop view of the dehesa. With its two-thousand-year history of diverse farming and its carefully cultivated landscape, even Wes acknowledges that the dehesa has lasted, and actually thrived, over generations.

  The Skagit Valley is perhaps another exception, if Steve Jones continues to have something to do with it. His work with farmers and his creation of the Bread Lab is about building a community around the right kind of farming and baking.

  I bet his vision will endure. But then in a funny sort of way, the time I spent with Steve only underscored Wes’s argument. Working together, farmers, chefs, and breeders can become part of a complex web of relationships that supports the health of the land. And yet, as Steve understands (and the dehesa got me to see), those relationships don’t last without a permanent food culture to sustain them. Few farmers have a Steve Jones to connect the pieces.

  Let me put a finer point on this, closer to home. Klaas has the opportunity to create something just as important and as lasting as what Steve created. But missing from his story are crops ingrained into people’s culture through good cuisine. That’s something only I, along with other chefs and home cooks, can provide.

  And it was clear I wasn’t doing a very good job. If the chef’s role is like that of a musical conductor, our goal is to create harmony—to avoid amplifying one section of the orchestra at the expense of others. As successful and enlightening as my wheat experiments had been, they were still too single-minded, too focused on promoting only one product of Klaas’s farm. I had yet to address the countless “bycatch” crops—the millet, flax, soy, buckwheat, rye, and dozens of other grains and legumes—that made his whole wheat so delicious. And, of course, now there were more additions to consider, such as dairy. Working with these crops seemed like an opportunity—and, the more I thought about it, an obligation—to support the land’s long-term ecological health.

  The same was true of my relationship to Stone Barns, and to the countless other farms that supplied Blue Hill. Like any farm-to-table chef, I supported these systems by purchasing the daily harvests. But by privileging only the ingredients I wanted to cook instead of championing a whole class of integral yet uncelebrated crops and cuts of meat, I had ignored what was really required to produce the most delicious food.

  In order for these farms to last, to be truly sustainable, I needed to learn to cook with the whole farm.

  What does whole farm cooking look like?

  The more I thought about it, the more I realized that whole farm cooking is what peasants around the world figured out thousands of years ago. They did not choose their dietary preferences by sticking a wet finger up to the prevailing wind, as we do today. They never had that kind of freedom. Instead, they developed cuisines that adhered to what the landscape provided.

  Take the cooking of Extremadura, with its regional variations of migas—a traditional dish of fried old bread that might include a lowly cut of braised rib meat from their famous pigs. It’s a plate as economical as it is delicious. Here in the United States, Hoppin’ John, Lowcountry cuisine’s combination of rice and field peas with a brassica like collard greens (and a small taste of pork) is based on the same logic. The dish is an ode to soil fertility: the cowpeas provided the soil with enough nitrogen to grow the rice, and the collards usually took up whatever salt was left over from the seawater that flooded into the basin. There are too many other culinary examples to count, but all of them took their shape and form from what the local landscape could offer.

  Not long ago, I sketched out a vision for a Third Plate with a similar ethic in mind: a “carrot steak,” flattened and roasted to resemble a juicy sirloin, with braised beef shank (an underutilized part of the animal) playing a supporting role as a sauce. I meant to invalidate our Westernized, meat-centric conception of a plate of food. As a first stab at the future of good cooking, it wasn’t bad. But it was merely one entry in a possible menu—a hit single without an album to sustain it. What would a meal look like?

  In a nod to the Mennonite belief that you begin raising a child long before it’s born, I set out to create a menu that Blue Hill will serve a generation from now. I wanted it to be in the spirit of my rooftop view of the dehesa, built around the sum of what a farm, or network of farms, can offer. It was a playbook for a new cuisine, one designed to create demand for soil-improving crops and enlarge our sense of what is delicious.

  I was picturing specific plates of food, yes, but beyond that, it was an exercise in imagining how the view outside my kitchen window would change as these new ideas took root on our menu.

  It will look something like this:

  A MENU FOR 2050

  MILKY OAT TEA AND CATTAIL SNACKS

  How do you begin a meal?

  Ángel León doesn’t start with fish. He starts with bread, infusing it with a homemade brew of plankton. It’s a first bite with a larger idea: without plankton, there won’t be any fish left in the sea.

  Like Ángel, I’ll begin with a larger idea—two of them, actually. The first will take the form of tea made from an infusion of milky oats. Milky oats are baby oats, very nearly mature but still soft and sweet. Klaas, like many farmers, grows oats as a cover crop, mowing them down before maturity so they can enrich the soil and become fertility for the next crop.

  Without restoring fertility to the soil, delicious food is not possible. Which is really the message of the milky oats. I’ll cook with just the tip of the plant, the immature oat, full of sweet oak milk that makes an aromatic infusion. The rest will remain in Klaas’s field to profit the soil.

  It’s a “take half, leave half” equation, just as with Eduardo’s geese. Eduardo explained how the birds eat half of his olives and figs and leave half for the harvest. “The geese are always quite fair,” he told me. We will be, too.

  If this works—which means if the tea is delicious and memorable—we may well create a market for cover crops, incentivizing more growers to incorporate them into their farms. But more important, we’ll create a consciousness about feeding the soil that feeds us.

  The second idea will take the form of something wild. It came to me when a forager showed up at the kitchen door with young cattails—native plants that grow next to ponds and lakes. Cattails are a filtering plant, which is why they’re so important next to water sources. They act like a sponge, absorbing chemical run-off from the soil and reducing water contamination. You don’t want to eat cattails originating from polluted places in the same way you wouldn’t want to eat mullet feeding from a polluted pond. Their flavor reflects the health of the environment.

  We’ll scrape the cattails and sauté their mossy skins in butter and lemon juice. Like scrambled eggs—runny, rich, uncomplicated, perfect—they’re a nice way to start any meal. They say: relax, you’re about to eat food that’s been grown in heal
thy soil.

  Milky oats are agriculture’s improvement crop; cattails are nature’s wild equivalent. Creating something delicious out of both makes food the measure through which we better understand nature. It defines cuisine around cooking with the whole farm.

  FIRST COURSE: Whole Wheat Blue Brioche with Blue Hill Farm Single Udder Butter

  The meal will formally begin with a slice of our whole wheat brioche, which will taste even better than it does now.

  How is that possible? If you’re thinking that the superior bread will be about improved versions of Barber wheat, you’re correct—sort of. Because by 2050 we’ll be baking our bread with Blue wheat, a delicious, nutrient-rich, disease-resistant variety developed for Blue Hill.

  Here’s what happened: Barber wheat matured and went through several years of selection—all under the watchful eye of Steve Jones in his Bread Lab—and eventually became a much better version of itself by marrying with a wild wheat relative (which happened to have an attractive blue beard).

  “A hundred years ago, breeders never stopped innovating,” Steve told me. “We shouldn’t either.” More lab work, more selection, and the resulting Blue wheat tastes like roasted nuts, with a bright, grassy finish.

  Steve sketched out his vision for the wheat in 2013 when he came to visit Stone Barns. I confess I had a larger plan in mind when I persuaded Steve to fly to New York. I wanted to grow wheat at Stone Barns, closer to home, instead of leaving it entirely in Klaas’s hands. It was a crackpot idea; cultivating wheat in Jack’s eight-acre vegetable field is like trying to fit a car-manufacturing plant into a tortilla factory. Then again, I knew from my time with Steve that our conception of wheat as a monoculture crop, much like our expectation of beef as a seven-ounce portion of steak, urgently needed to be turned on its head. What better place to do it than in Pocantico Hills, New York, thirty miles from midtown Manhattan?