The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food

by Dan Barber

  “Mistaking wisdom for backwardness”: Janine M. Benyus, Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 16.

  “the failure of success”: Jackson mentions this idea in his book New Roots for Agriculture (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980).

  wave of settlement became a tsunami: See Timothy Egan, The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006), 43.

  “The War integrated the plains farmers”: Donald Worster, Under Western Skies: Nature and History in the American West (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1992), 99.

  The soil . . . turned to dust: For more on the Dust Bowl, see Donald E. Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979); and Egan, The Worst Hard Time.

  “A cloud ten thousand feet high”: Egan, The Worst Hard Time, 113.

  “This, gentlemen, is what I’m talking about”: Egan, The Worst Hard Time, 227–8. See also Wellington Brink, Big Hugh: The Father of Soil Conservation (New York: Macmillan, 1951).

  “We came with visions, but not with sight”: Wendell Berry, “The Native Grasses and What They Mean,” in The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural (New York: North Point Press, 1981), 82.

  “have disregarded every means”: George Washington, President of the United States, to Arthur Young, Esq., November 18, 1791, in Letters on Agriculture from His Excellency, George Washington, President of the United States, to Arthur Young, Esq., F.R.S., and Sir John Sinclair, Bart., M.P.: With Statistical Tables and Remarks, by Thomas Jefferson, Richard Peters, and Other Gentlemen, on the Economy and Management of Farms in the United States, ed. Franklin Knight (Washington, DC: Franklin Knight, 1847), 49–50.

  “presented the scares of fierce extraction”: Stoll, Larding the Lean Earth, 19.

  “a spanning of the scale of genetic possibilities from A to B”: Richard Manning, Grassland: The History, Biology, Politics and Promise of the American Prairie (New York: Penguin, 1997), 160.

  Wheat Belt is emptying out: Wil S. Hylton, “Broken Heartland: The Looming Collapse of Agriculture on the Great Plains,” Harper’s, July 2012.

  enabling fewer farmers to farm even more land: See William Lin et al., “U.S. Farm Numbers, Sizes, and Related Structural Dimensions: Projections to Year 2000,” US Dept. of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, Technical Bulletin No. 1625 (1980).

  “what nature has made of us and we have made of nature”: Verlyn Klinkenborg, “Linking Twin Extinctions of Species and Languages,” Yale Environment 360, July 17, 2012.

  Leopold asked the same question: Aldo Leopold, “What Is a Weed?” (1943), in River of the Mother of God: and Other Essays by Aldo Leopold, 306–9.

  pests overtake its natural defenses: See Philip S. Callahan, Tuning in to Nature: Infrared Radiation and the Insect Communication System, 2nd rev. ed. (Austin, TX: Acres U.S.A., 2001).

  “The organic farmer would look for the cause”: Eliot Coleman, “Can Organics Save the Family Farm?” The Rake, September 2004.

  supposedly “dumb beasts”: William A. Albrecht, The Albrecht Papers, Volume I: Foundation Concepts, ed. Charles Walters, Jr. (Metairie, LA: Acres U.S.A., 1996), 279, 282.

  walked past what was commonly considered “good grass”: Charles Walters, Jr., “Foreword,” The Albrecht Papers, Volume I: Foundation Concepts, x.

  “The cow is not classifying”: Albrecht, The Albrecht Papers, Volume I: Foundation Concepts, 170.

  compared a good organic farmer to a skilled rock climber: See Coleman, Winter Harvest Handbook, 202.

  Soil is alive: For more on the life of soil, see William Bryant Logan, Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth (New York: W. W. Norton Limited, 2007); Fred Magdoff and Harold van Es, Building Soils for Better Crops, 3rd ed. (Waldorf, MD: SARE Outreach Publications, 2010); David Montgomery, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); and David W. Wolfe, Tales from the Underground: A Natural History of Subterranean Life (New York: Basic Books, 2002).

  “not a thing but a performance”: Colin Tudge, The Tree: A Natural History of What Trees Are, How They Live, and Why They Matter (New York: Crown Publishers, 2006), 252.

  the Law of Return: Sir Albert Howard, The Soil and Health: A Study of Organic Agriculture (1947; repr., Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2007), 31.

  soil its “constitution”: William A. Albrecht, The Albrecht Papers, Volume II: Soil Fertility and Animal Health, ed. Charles Walters, Jr. (Kansas City, MO: Acres U.S.A., 1975), 101.

  soils stopped producing: See Evan D. G. Fraser and Andrew Rimas, Empires of Food: Feast, Famine, and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations (New York: Atria Books, 2010).

  dowry measured by the amount of manure: Logan, Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin, 38.

  “Now a farmer just had to mix the right chemicals into the dirt”: David Montgomery, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, 184–5.

  “original sin” of agriculture: Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (New York: Penguin Press, 2006), 258.

  In 1900, diversification: See Bill Ganzel, “Shrinking Farm Numbers,” in Farming in the 1950s & 60s (Wessels Loving History Farm, York, Nebraska, 2007), www.livinghistoryfarm.org/farminginthe50s/life_11.html.

  three billion people depend on synthetic nitrogen: Fred Pearce, “The Nitrogen Fix: Breaking a Costly Addiction,” Yale Environment 360, November 5, 2009.

  “treating the whole problem”: Howard, The Soil and Health, 11.

  “learning more and more about less and less”: Howard, The Soil and Health, 250.

  “professors of agriculture”: Howard, The Soil and Health, 111.

  “tough, leathery and fibrous”: Sir Albert Howard, An Agricultural Testament (1940; repr., London: Benediction Classics, 2010), 82.

  “The maintenance of soil fertility is the real basis of health”: Howard, Agricultural Testament, 39.

  Artificial manures . . . “lead inevitably to artificial nutrition”: Howard, Agricultural Testament, 37.

  “innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes”: E. O. Wilson, Biophilia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 1.

  more antioxidants and other defense-related compounds: See Brian Halweil, “Still No Free Lunch: Nutrient Levels in U.S. Food Supply Eroded by Pursuit of High Yields” (Washington, DC: The Organic Center, September 2007), 33; and Charles M. Benbrook, “Elevating Antioxidant Levels in Food Through Organic Farming and Food Processing,” Organic Center, State of Science Review, January 2005.

  “more complex than we can think”: Frank Egler, The Nature of Vegetation: Its Management and Mismanagement (Norfolk, CT: Aton Forest Publishers, 1977), 2.

  “Imagine a wonderfully balanced Italian main course”: Thomas Harttung, “Sustainable Food Systems for the 21st Century” (Agrarian Studies Lecture, Yale University, New Haven, CT, October 2006).

  “substitute a few soluble elements”: Coleman, Winter Harvest Handbook, 197.

  mycorrhizal fungus: See David Wolfe, Tales from the Underground, and Albert Bernhard Frank, “On the Nutritional Dependence of Certain Trees on Root Symbiosis with Belowground Fungi (An English Translation of A. B. Frank’s Classic Paper of 1885),” Mycorrhiza 15 (2005): 267–75.

  “subterranean-impaired”: Wolfe, Tales from the Underground, 6.

  “industrial organic . . . shallow organic”: Pollan, Omnivore’s Dilemma, 130; Coleman, Winter Harvest Handbook, 205–7.

  “To be well fed is to be healthy”: Albrecht, Soil Fertility and Animal Health, 45.

  “You are what you eat eats, too”: Pollan, Omnivore’s Dilemma, 84.

  correlation between recruits . . . and soils: See Steve Soloman, Gardening When It Counts: Growing Food in Hard Times (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers, 2005), 19.


  nutrient declines . . . “biomass dilution”: See Donald R. Davis, “Declining Fruit and Vegetable Nutrient Composition: What Is the Evidence?” HortScience 12, no. 1 (February 2009); Donald R. Davis, “Trade-offs in Agriculture and Nutrition,” Food Technology 59 (2005); Donald R. Davis et al., “Changes in the USDA Food Composition Data for 43 Garden Crops, 1950–1999,” Journal of the American College of Nutrition 23, no. 6 (2004), 669–82; and David Thomas, “The Mineral Depletion of Foods Available to Us as a Nation (1940–2002),” Nutrition and Health 19 (2007): 21–55 (Thomas traces similar trends in the UK).

  840 million people suffer from chronic hunger: “The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2013: The Multiple Dimensions of Food Security,” Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Rome, 2013.

  “If we humans have this same basic tendency”: John Ikerd, “Healthy Soils, Healthy People: The Legacy of William Albrecht” (The William A. Albrecht Lecture, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, April 25, 2011).

  “The sedentary lifestyles of many Americans”: Ikerd, “Healthy Soils, Healthy People.”

  PART II: LAND

  equivalent to eating about forty-four pounds of pasta: Lee Klein, “Foie Wars,” Miami New Times, July 13, 2006.

  Palladin was smuggling: See Stewart Lee Allen, In the Devil’s Garden: A Sinful History of Forbidden Food (New York: Ballantine Books, 2002), 236.

  The French tradition of foie gras: For more on the history of foie gras, see Mark Caro, The Foie Gras Wars: How a 5,000-Year-Old Delicacy Inspired the World’s Fiercest Food Fight (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009); Michael Ginor with Mitchell A. Davis, Foie Gras: A Passion (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 1999); and Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat, A History of Food (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2009), 385–94.

  “The goose is nothing”: Charles Gérard, L’Ancienne Alsace à Table: Étude Historique et Archéologique Sur L’Alimentation, Les Mœurs et Les Usages Épulaires De L’Ancienne Province D’Alsace, 2nd ed. (Paris: Berger-Levrault et Cie, 1877). Quoted in Caro, The Foie Gras Wars, 35–6.

  thirty-five million Moulard ducks . . . eight hundred thousand geese: Caro, The Foie Gras Wars, 33.

  “This cannot be called foie gras”: Graham Keeley, “French Are in a Flap as Spanish Force the Issue over Foie Gras,” The Guardian, January 2, 2007.

  “Nothing is more stupid than a cow”: Alan Richman describes a similar diatribe in his article “A Very Unlikely Fish Story: Brother and Sister from Brittany Open Restaurant, Hook New York,” People, August 4, 1986.

  “take half, leave half” rule of grazing: Grass farmer Joel Salatin refers to this as the “law of the second bite.” See Pollan, Omnivore’s Dilemma, 189. In chapter 10, “Grass: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Pasture,” Pollan has an excellent discussion of grass farming and its history.

  “taste the misery”: Garrison Keillor, “Chicken,” Leaving Home: A Collection of Lake Wobegon Stories (New York: Penguin Books, 1990), 45.

  “The challenge of cooking in America”: Eric Asimov, “Jean-Louis Palladin, 55, a French Chef with Verve, Dies,” New York Times, November 26, 2001.

  “it trickles down to everybody”: Thomas Keller, quoted in Dorothy Gaiter and John Brecher, “The Genius That Was Jean-Louis,” France Magazine, Winter 2011–12. For more on Jean-Louis Palladin’s influence, see Justin Kennedy, “Raising the Stakes: Jean-Louis Palladin Pioneered Fine Dining in D.C.,” Edible DC, Summer 2012.

  mimic what bison herds had been doing: See Allan Savory with Jody Butterfield, Holistic Management: A New Framework for Decision Making, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1999).

  Restaurants, after all, are named: Rebecca L. Spang, The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 1. For more on the history of restaurants, see Elliott Shore, “Dining Out: The Development of the Restaurant,” in Food: The History of Taste, ed. Paul Freedman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); and Adam Gopnik, The Table Comes First: Family, France, and the Meaning of Food (New York: Knopf, 2011).

  “locked up, cloistered in his smoke-filled basement”: Paul Bocuse, quoted in Nicolas Chatenier, ed., Mémoires de Chefs (Paris: Textuel, 2012), 21 (translated from French).

  “a stifling, low-ceilinged inferno of a cellar”: George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933; rev. ed., New York: Mariner Books, 1972), 57.

  la nouvelle cuisine française: For more on nouvelle cuisine, see Chatenier, ed., Mémoires de Chefs; Alain Drouard, “Chefs, Gourmets and Gourmands: French Cuisine in the 19th and 20th Centuries,” in Food: The History of Taste, 301–31; and David Kamp, The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation (New York: Broadway Books, 2006).

  “Down with the old-fashioned picture of the typical bon vivant”: Julia Child, “La Nouvelle Cuisine: A Skeptic’s View,” New York, July 4, 1977.

  “extends on either side of the borders of simplicity and artifice”: Paul Freedman, “Introduction: A New History of Cuisine,” in Food: The History of Taste, 29.

  “the bigness of modern agriculture”: Berry, The Unsettling of America, 61.

  ancient Egyptians observed how wild geese: See Caro, The Foie Gras Wars, 24–7.

  The story of the chicken in this country: See Steve Striffler, Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of America’s Favorite Food (New Haven, CT: Yale Agrarian Studies Series, 2007); Donald Stull and Michael Broadway, Slaughterhouse Blues: The Meat and Poultry Industry in North America (Stamford, CT: Cengage Learning, 2003); Roger Horowitz, Putting Meat on the American Table: Taste, Technology, Transformation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); and Janet Raloff, “Dying Breeds,” Science News 152, no. 14 (Oct. 4, 1997), 216–8.

  Mrs. Cecile Steele: Donald Stull and Michael Broadway, Slaughterhouse Blues, 38.

  Arthur Perdue went into the poultry business: See Melaine Warner, “Frank Perdue, 84, Chicken Merchant, Dies,” New York Times, April 2, 2005.

  “The barnyard chicken was made over”: Striffler, Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation, 46.

  first poultry company to differentiate its product with a label: See Stull and Broadway, Slaughterhouse Blues, 47.

  “He had a weird authenticity”: “Frank Perdue: 1920–2005,” People, April 18, 2005.

  sales of chicken rose by nearly 50 percent: See U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “Poultry Production,” Ag 101, www.epa.gov/agriculture/ag101/printpoultry.html.

  cost-effective way to feed the troops: Horowitz, Putting Meat on the American Table, 119.

  about $18,500 per year: See Jill Richardson, “How the Chicken Gets to Your Plate,” La Vida Locavore, April 17, 2009, www.lavidalocavore.org/showDiary.do?dia ryId=1479.

  “protein paradox”: Paul Roberts, The End of Food (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), 208–12.

  thirty-three minutes a day preparing food: Karen Hamrick et al., “How Much Time Do Americans Spend on Food?” Economic Information Bulletin no. 86 (Washington, DC: US Dept. of Agriculture, November 2011). See also: Michael Pollan, “Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch,” New York Times Magazine, August 2, 2009.

  By the end of the 1990s those numbers had completely reversed: See Striffler, Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation, 19.

  “It’s easy to cook a filet mignon”: Thomas Keller, “The Importance of Offal,” The French Laundry Cookbook (New York: Artisan Books, 1999), 209.

  tripled its production of chickens: See Roberts, End of Food, 71.

  falsely low prices: See “China Launches Anti-Dumping Probe into US Chicken Parts,” China Daily, September 27, 2009; and Guy Chazan, “Russia, U.S. Are in a Chicken Fight, the First Round of New Trade War,” The Wall Street Journal, March 4, 2002.

  Jalisco’s poultry workers: See Peter S. Goodman, “In Mexico, ‘People Do Really Want to Stay,’” Washington Post, January 7, 2007.

  Jamón ibéri
co’s significance: For this point and more on jamón ibérico, see Peter Kaminsky, Pig Perfect: Encounters with Remarkable Swine and Some Great Ways to Cook Them (New York: Hyperion, 2005), 66.

  The dehesa system originated: See Vincent Clément, “Spanish Wood Pasture: Origin and Durability of an Historical Wooded Landscape in Mediterranean Europe,” Environment and History 14, no. 1 (February 2008): 67–87.

  “Any person caught chopping down”: Quoted in Clément, “Spanish Wood Pasture.”

  “immeasurable gift”: Wendell Berry, “The Agrarian Standard,” Orion Magazine, Summer 2002.

  “The bottom layer is the soil”: Aldo Leopold, “The Land Ethic” (1948), in A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 215.

  “an extension of ethics”: Aldo Leopold, Foreword, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There, viii–ix.

  Extremaduran food is unadorned and simple: For more on this cuisine, see Turespaña, “The Cuisine of Extremadura,” www.spain.info/en_US/que-quieres/gastronomia/cocina-regional/extremadura/extremadura.html.

  “a fountain of energy flowing”: Aldo Leopold, “The Land Ethic,” A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There, 216.

  PART III: SEA

  “like having a second tongue in my mouth”: Jeffrey Steingarten, It Must Have Been Something I Ate (2002; repr., New York: Vintage, 2003), 11–12.

  Atlantic tuna populations dropped by up to 90 percent: See Carl Safina, Song for the Blue Ocean: Encounters Along the World’s Coasts and Beneath the Seas (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1998), 8.

  The article ran that fall: Caroline Bates, “Sea Change,” Gourmet, December 2005.

  “sea ethic”: Safina, Song for the Blue Ocean, 440.

  “honest inquiry into the reality of nature”: Ibid.

  “soft vessels of seawater”: Ibid., 435.

  “nothing we do seriously affects the number of the fish”: Thomas Henry Huxley, “Inaugural Address” (Fisheries Exhibition, London, 1883).