The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food Read online

  In other words, if there’s no force-feeding, there is no foie gras.

  A RUMINANT’S-EYE VIEW

  For months, the article about Eduardo stayed posted to the corkboard above my desk, mostly forgotten. Foie gras wasn’t always on Blue Hill’s menu, but when it was, I never considered it controversial. Hudson Valley Foie Gras, an artisanal producer in upstate New York, provided impeccable and consistent livers to the best chefs in the country. For me, as for most of them, the foie gras debate consisted mostly of how best to prepare it.

  It wasn’t the mounting political controversy, or a heartrending PETA video, that sparked my conscience. Instead, it was an early July morning I spent with the lambs that finally had me reconsidering foie gras’s place on our menu.

  That morning, I walked out to the pasture and watched Padraic, the livestock assistant at Stone Barns, move the one hundred or so sheep to a new paddock of grass. I had thoughts, if not visions, of the Marlboro Man. Padraic is six feet four, with chiseled features and piercing eyes, and as he tipped his cowboy hat up to the sun, I waited for him to open a tin of Skoal or crack a leather whip to keep the sheep and their lambs moving. Instead he called out in a gentle coo, opened the fiberglass fence, and gently waved the first of the lambs onto the new grass. She excitedly trotted to her next meal.

  “That a girl,” he said, tapping her on the rump. The rest of the sheep crowded close together and herded themselves into the new paddock, bringing to mind a small bison charge.

  Until that moment I thought I knew good lamb. I had sourced plenty from local farmers over the years, and I had roasted enough lamb chops and braised enough shanks to recognize a well-raised lamb when I ate it. What I didn’t know, and—since Klaas had yet to introduce me to William Albrecht—what I’d never stopped to consider, was: What does a lamb want to eat?

  It’s a funny sort of question, but out in the field, watching the lambs excitedly drive to new grass, without being pushed or cajoled, it wasn’t hard to recognize that they actually cared quite a lot about what they ate. You could even call them picky. Just like the cows I once observed with my grandmother at Blue Hill Farm, they moved quickly over certain grasses to get to others—to nosh on clover and mustard grass, avoiding horse nettle and fescue along the way. They resembled hungry, slightly aggressive diners at a Las Vegas buffet, which is the point, really. Lambs on a grass diet don’t so much get fed as work to feed themselves, and the distinction is not small.

  I remember, when I was a young line cook, hearing the famed chef and owner of Le Bernardin, Gilbert Le Coze, explain the inspiration behind his seafood-only restaurant. “Nothing is more stupid than a cow,” he said, launching into a well-polished diatribe against cud-chewing ruminants. “To just stand there, grazing all day long—there is no spirit to that. But a fish is such a wild creature—that gives him another dimension.” Standing next to Padraic on that summer morning—the baby sheep dancing in circles around their mothers, their eyes bright, their fleeces shiny—it was tough to see Le Coze’s point.

  Padraic pointed to a sheep inches away from us that was running the bottom of its muzzle over the blades of grass—a rapid reconnaissance of what’s available for breakfast. The hairs right below the jaw act as a kind of radar for what a ruminant is looking for, and what it’s looking for depends on many factors, including the weather, the time of year, and even the time of day. Like us, they balance their diet, getting enough protein and energy by choosing which plants to ingest (only, as Albrecht’s field experiments proved with cows seventy years earlier, they do a better job of it).

  Padraic’s job, under the direction of livestock manager Craig Haney, is to rig the game. It’s to ensure that when the sheep get to a patch of grass—when they finally commit to a bite, and then another—they’re rewarded with rich, nutritious diversity. This is the “take half, leave half” rule of grazing: flood the pasture with the sheep when the grass is at its perfect point of development—just before its adolescent growth spurt, when it’s tender and full of sugars—but move them out quickly so the grass can recover before the next bout of grazing.

  The sheep, of course, have no idea that the grasses have been carefully tended to, that their delicious spread has been painstakingly prepared by seeding certain varieties of grasses, rotating in other animals, and adding natural supplements to the soil. In fact, as I stood there with Padraic, it seemed clear—for the first time I was seeing, not just tasting, the difference—that much of the pleasure the lambs enjoyed was because of the hunt itself. They needed (and wanted) to work for their meal. Which is perhaps why they looked so purposeful. They weren’t as wild as a fish evading a hook, but their drive gave them another dimension that Le Coze didn’t recognize.

  To be fair, Le Coze could have been referring to what we’ve managed to do to ruminants over the past several decades. Instead of allowing them to forage, we do the work of foraging for them. We feed them corn and other grains and generally restrict their urges by narrowing their diets. And their activity: in America, most ruminants start out on grass but finish their lives confined in animal feedlots. We dull them. And so, yes, we do sort of make them stupid.

  Take Colorado lamb, famous for giving us those uniform and fatty chops. Since fat carries flavor and retains moisture, it’s pretty easy to have a moist and juicy bite of feedlot-finished meat. But as Garrison Keillor said of the modern chicken, you can “taste the misery” in every bite. Great chefs will tell you the misery you’re tasting is greasy fat. Greasy fat coats your mouth. It’s sweet, soft, and nutty, tasting nothing like the animal you’re eating. And it surrounds a kind of watered-down version of what lamb could be, which is ironic considering the Cadillac-size chops.

  The added insult: most lamb recipes instruct you to “remove fat cap and discard.” We do this without thought, as if we’re unpacking groceries. When I was training to butcher meat at a restaurant in New York, part of my job included cleaning forty racks of lamb for dinner service. With each rack, the restaurant’s old French butcher had me pull off the solid inch of fat covering the loin. A small incision near the bone, a quick yank, and the fat layer tore off, like the peel from a grapefruit. On the way to the dumpster to throw out the discarded fat, I thought about the irony. The restaurant paid the highest price for this part of the animal, only to toss 10 percent of it in the garbage? (Since that fat was essentially a mountain of corn feed, wasn’t I really just throwing Iowa in the trash?)

  When I asked the butcher why the chef wanted the fat removed, he simply said, “It’s disgusting, so much fat.” He was right. Growing up in France, the butcher had undoubtedly never seen a one-inch cap of fat on a rib of lamb. Feeding an herbivore grain (intensively anyway) is a recent invention, and despite the fact that the practice has become so ubiquitous—and in the case of Colorado lamb, so coveted—it’s not actually delicious.

  Farmers like Padraic and Craig, standing in the field shepherding their herd, might look like portraits of America’s lost agrarian past, but, by giving the lambs what they want, they are in fact creating a modern recipe for delicious meat—complex and richly textured, without flab or a greasy aftertaste, and with a flavor that changes throughout the year.

  “The challenge of cooking in America,” Palladin once said, “is to discover the newest and best products from the different states—baby eels and lamprey from Maine, fresh snails from Oregon, blowfish from the Carolinas and California oysters—and then to learn how to integrate them into your cuisine.”

  But Palladin did more than simply integrate regional specialties into his cuisine; he created markets for them, too. Thomas Keller, the renowned American chef who as a young line cook made several pilgrimages to the Watergate, has said that Palladin was doing a kind of farm-to-table cooking before there was a name for it, and that his style—highly technical, cutting-edge, and artful—influenced the industry.

  “When you get the professional side involved,” Keller explained
, “it trickles down to everybody.” Increasingly chefs in America saw an opportunity to focus their cuisine on cultivating relationships with farmers to supply their menu. Before Palladin, Keller said, “chefs weren’t developing relationships with farmers, gardeners, and fishermen.”

  Joan Nathan, a cookbook author and former Washington Post writer, told me that Palladin’s greatest gift was never squandering the chance to connect with a new farmer. “When he heard about a farmer growing something new or something great—it didn’t matter what it was, a great ham, fresh zucchini blossoms—he’d hop on his motorcycle and think nothing of driving a few hundred miles to find it. By dinner service, it was on the menu.” And when he couldn’t find an ingredient, he persuaded other farmers to grow it.

  Palladin can’t take credit for persuading John and Sukey Jamison to raise grass-fed lamb, but he does deserve acknowledgement for discovering them. Long before farmers like Craig and Padraic got in the game, John and Sukey were perfecting the art of intensive grazing on their Pennsylvania farm. They quickly learned to celebrate the “inconsistency” of their product.

  “Oh, yeah, you can taste the difference,” John once told me of his lambs. “By age, by diet. You’ll get stronger-flavored lamb in May and June, based on the young wild garlic and onions, and then a leaner taste in late summer from the wildflowers. In fall you start to see the cold-season grasses, giving you the most mature and delicious fat of the year.”

  When I first met John, I asked him how he and his wife got started. “We were a couple of hippies who didn’t want Woodstock to end,” he said. It was in the aftermath of the 1970s oil crisis. Prices of gasoline had quadrupled in just a few months, and the combination of falling supplies and international unrest caused grain prices to double or triple.

  Along came the development of portable electric fencing that could be set up and moved by one person (a product of New Zealand, where grass-fed livestock was the only game going). “That was really the beginning of the intensive part of rotation grazing,” John told me, differentiating the practice from free ranging, where the animals pasture in enormous fields and are rarely moved. Portable fencing gave small farmers the chance to mimic what bison herds had been doing on a continental scale for thousands of years.

  The Jamisons set up a successful grass operation on two hundred acres in western Pennsylvania, but their philosophy never went mainstream. The oil crisis ended. The era of cheap fuel and grain returned, and so too did status quo methods of confined animal farming. We’ve been making our ruminants stupid ever since.

  For many years, it was difficult for the Jamisons to compete with the grain-fed operations—and lamb in this country was already a tough sell—but in 1987 their luck changed. That’s when Jean-Louis Palladin called to ask them to deliver a few lambs for a congressional dinner at the Watergate Hotel.

  “We entered the kitchen carrying the lambs on our backs,” John told me. “Palladin introduced himself—he was wearing Jordache jeans and high-top sneakers.” The chef placed the lambs on a table in the corner. John could see his arms waving wildly as a swarm of white coats surrounded him. At last Palladin called John over while examining the organs. He guessed the age of the lambs based on the layer of fat surrounding the kidneys. (He was off by three days.) Then he ran his hand along the carcass and poked his nose deep into its cavity. “Even with that enormous mane of wild hair, and thick, oversized glasses, he stuck his entire head into the carcass, breathing in, as if he was about to taste a vintage Bordeaux,” John said.

  From that day on, Palladin began ordering the Jamisons’ lamb for his restaurant, naming it on the menu, and soon John and Sukey were receiving orders from chefs around the country. Farmers began asking to visit, to learn how to incorporate the Jamisons’ methods on their own farms.

  “It’s a funny thing,” John said to me recently. “Here we were adhering to our ideals from the ’60s—living simply, improving the land, making the world a better place—and trying to farm in the great French peasant tradition. Along comes a chef, feeding some of the wealthiest and most influential Americans, who helps make what we do suddenly famous in America.”

  Jean-Louis Palladin’s contributions to gastronomy were enormous and well documented. But one of his most lasting and least heralded legacies might be helping to ensure the success of the Jamisons, who have gone on to inspire a small network of livestock farmers to wean their animals off grain. (Small is the operative word; true grass-fed lamb—which means the animal doesn’t get a lick of grain—accounts for less than 2 percent of all lamb raised in this country.)

  John credits Palladin with helping create a consciousness for a generation of chefs. “That first delivery day, Sukey and I stood there with Palladin in front of the lambs after the cooks went back to work. His eyes had welled with tears.” Tearing off a piece of butcher paper, the chef quickly drew an outline of France, dividing the country into a kind of regional taste map, describing the different flavors of the lamb based on the grasses they foraged. It was the first time John met a chef who understood how feeding grain flattens flavor. Palladin celebrated the inconsistency.

  “He got really animated again, pointing to the areas with the best grasses and wild herbs that produce the very best lambs in France. He studied the map, trying to situate what he had just tasted. These place-based flavors had been etched into his memory, and now he reveled in the thrill of adding new ones.”

  Palladin didn’t buy in to the grain-fattening mania of animal farming, not because it was inhumane or because it was destructive to the environment, but because it never produced anything really good to eat.

  A few months after my walk with Padraic and the sheep, I stood in the kitchen watching a cook devein an especially large foie gras liver. Suddenly I was thrown right back into the early July morning watching the Stone Barns lambs forage for grass. That pastoral scene—lambs hunting for their breakfast, the farmer masterfully orchestrating the right kind of meal at the perfect moment—was the antithesis to the fattened liver, which now reminded me more of that one-inch fat cap on a Colorado lamb rack.

  Of course, the two aren’t entirely analogous—geese and ducks are omnivores, for one thing, which means they’re better able to digest grain than ruminants—and I wasn’t about to haul my beloved foie gras off to the dumpster. But standing there in a moment of quiet contemplation, I wondered about the difference. How could I talk a free-choice game (as I did about all the animals we served at Blue Hill) and at the same time, on the same menu, support a system of not just corn feeding, but forced corn feeding? And a lot of it.

  Luckily for me, it wasn’t long after that moment that my friend Lisa Abend, a Time magazine journalist stationed in Spain, called to ask if I’d ever heard of a man named Eduardo Sousa. I looked to the right, and there on my corkboard was the Newsweek clipping my brother had handed me. Lisa had been assigned to write about Eduardo, to evaluate with a chef whether his natural foie gras was for real, and if it was any good.

  Palladin, the greatest champion of foie gras this country has ever known, might have simply hung up the phone at the preposterous (and, for a native of Gascony, offensive) idea. Or, when Lisa asked if he was interested in seeing his farm and tasting the livers, he might, as I did, have simply said, “I’ll come.”

  CHAPTER 8

  WE ARRIVED at Eduardo’s farm late in the morning, after an overnight flight from New York. Lisa picked me up at the Madrid airport, and we drove southwest toward Badajoz, traversing Extremadura, an arid region that looked the way I imagined El Paso might look if El Paso had a winter.

  Extremadura has two provinces—Badajoz to the south and Cáceres to the north—both sparsely populated. Lisa, a former European history professor, explained that when the Christians were reconquering their land from the Muslims in the Middle Ages, they referred to this area as the Extrema Dorii, Latin for “far side of the Duero River.” It’s a literal translation; Lisa said it was use
d in the same way Americans called everything outside the thirteen colonies “the West.”

  Less likely, though it would be technically accurate, Extremadura could also have referred to the “extra-hard” environment: hot, bitterly dry summers, cold winters, and high plains intersected by steep mountain ranges. Despite its difficult terrain, and undoubtedly because of it, the region was home to the original conquistadores, the famous soldier-adventurers who set off for the Americas. As I imagined the rugged television cowboys of my youth, Lisa’s comparison didn’t seem too far off.

  The scene outside my window was every bit a portrait of the Spanish wild west: vast expanses of open land were intercut with towns that revealed their Moorish influence—homes with plastered white walls and thick archways. Much of the land we drove through was barren, but by the time we pulled past Fuente de Cantos and began nearing Eduardo’s land, in Pallares, it had changed dramatically. Suddenly we seemed to be in the African savanna, but with greener pastures and healthier tree cover.

  An unmarked dirt road led up to Eduardo’s farm, or we guessed it did. No one was around. A furious barking dog tied to the side of a shed greeted us. The place looked deserted. We found Eduardo lying on his back in a small, open field, his cell phone raised above his head. Two dozen or so geese circled him in a raucous chorus of quacking and feather shaking.

  “Bonita!” I heard him say as we approached a bright orange fence. “Hola, bonita!” Thinking he was on speakerphone, we slowed down, only to realize he was snapping pictures of his geese. A black eagle flew threateningly low. Eduardo didn’t seem to notice.

  “Hola—Eduardo?” Lisa said. Eduardo snapped more pictures. By now I was close enough to see that he was laughing.