The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food Page 16

  In a funny way, Perdue wasn’t just giving up on the whole chicken; it gave up farming chicken in the first place. What was apparent to Frank early on in his career—I say that with a little confidence only because I was aware of it by the time I had completed my own rough spreadsheet—was that the basic business of chicken farming is beset by a problem: it’s not a good business. Today, Perdue’s annual sales are more than $4.5 billion. According to its website, the company “partners with more than 2,200 independent farm families.” That means they essentially outsource risk, contracting farmers to raise birds for them. In doing so, they avoid overhead and tying up capital in land ownership. They avoid the burdens of disease and bad weather. In other words, they avoid farming.

  For the farmers that raise the birds, Craig had it right: get big or get out. Poultry companies contract with a variety of different-size farms. But the numbers speak for themselves, and they say it all: a small grower will net about $18,500 per year; the larger growers are double the size but earn nearly quadruple the income, netting almost $71,000 per year.

  And my brother had it right, too. Vertically integrate the entire business—in Perdue’s case, that meant control the breeding, the processing, and the marketing. Own everything, but don’t own the farm.

  CHAPTER 11

  NOT SO long ago I visited a highly regarded avant-garde restaurant. The menu was cutting-edge, the dishes small and exacting. After a thirty-course meal, the chef brought me back to the kitchen for a tour.

  Standing at the pass, he signaled to a cook, who carried a freshly plucked chicken carcass swaddled in cheesecloth. The chicken, the chef explained, had been sent to him from a farming cooperative in France, which had raised the rare bird with the hope of preserving its superior genetics. He admitted that it was probably the best chicken he had ever tasted. But then he turned to me, almost apologetically, and said, “What the hell am I going to do with an entire chicken?”

  That the chef could even ask this question is largely due to men like Frank Perdue, who found profit in breaking up the bird and taught us to cherry-pick only the most desirable parts. But it’s due also to the legacy of Fritz Haber; without the endless supply of cheap grain feed allowed by his synthetic fertilizers, our modern meat-eating ways could never have materialized.

  Americans have now arrived at a point that was once unthinkable: there is no upper limit to the amount of meat we can consume. That’s because the choices we make about which parts of the animal to eat—the breast over the legs (or the chops over the hocks)—determines how many animals are produced. When we can afford to eat “high on the hog”—the costliest cuts of meat on any animal—the relative worth of the other parts plummets. There’s no ceiling on the number of animals raised because suppliers—producers, processors, retailers, and, yes, we chefs—then throw the bulk of the carcass away.

  This happens all the time. Supermarkets in the United States offer mountains of cutlets and steaks and loins—restaurant chefs feature them in seven-ounce portions—but unless you venture to a specialty market (or dine at an ethnic restaurant), you’ll find getting your hands on liver, heart, or tripe difficult to do.

  Once a senior position in kitchen hierarchy, the butcher’s job has been diminished by the convenience of ordering meat in primal parts. (During my first apprenticeship with that French butcher, I was only cleaning racks of lamb, not breaking down the whole animal.) A restaurant butcher is like the guy behind the meat counter at your local supermarket. He may look the part of someone who just hacked up a steer to fill your order of steaks; more than likely he’s simply unwrapped pre-packaged meat delivered directly from the processor.

  It’s a classic example of what Paul Roberts, in his book The End of Food, calls the “protein paradox.” Meat production has outstripped people production. With all the stupefying advances in breeding and grain feeding, the cost of one pound of meat is cheaper now than at any time in history. That hasn’t alleviated world hunger or led to any kind of meat-eating democracy. In fact, if anything it’s enabled—and at this point it encourages—not just the American appetite for eating high on the hog, but a kind of pork chop dictatorship (call it white meat supremacy). We eat too much meat, all right, but we also eat way too much of the wrong parts.

  Agriculture’s great efficiencies are partly to blame for this. They’ve become too good at producing a lot of animals. Or they’ve become too good at producing a lot of animals too cheaply. But American consumers are also to blame. As more women entered the workforce, the responsibilities of the kitchen weren’t so much reassigned as they were abandoned. Today the average American spends about thirty-three minutes a day preparing food; that’s half the time spent when Frank was first hawking his tender birds. Eighty percent of chicken sold in the 1970s and ’80s was in its “unprocessed” form (read: natural, with bones and skin), and 16 percent was sold in processed varieties. By the end of the 1990s those numbers had completely reversed.

  Since pre-prepared and heavily processed products flooded the market, kitchens have become more like assembly rooms. In other words, Ranch Flavored Chicken Fries became both possible and inevitable. We didn’t become a nation of precooked eaters so much as we became a nation of eaters who don’t cook.

  The ones who do cook, chefs, are to blame here, too. We’ve helped shape American cuisine, particularly when it comes to eating meat, by putting center cuts at center stage. The seven-ounce slab of protein on your dinner plate is as much an American invention as it has become an American expectation. Compare it with ethnic cuisines, where, when meat appears, it does so modestly.

  Our excess has been made possible by the largesse of industrial agriculture, but nothing about it has been inevitable, and in the end there’s very little that’s truly delicious. The best parts, as most chefs will attest, come from the supposedly lesser cuts. These nonprimal parts suffer from a disadvantage, however, which hobbles their stardom: they require you to chew. And in some cases, to chew and chew.

  Chicken breast, lamb loin, filet mignon, rack of pork—in other words, the cuts we covet most—come from muscles that rarely work when the animal is alive. It’s what makes them desirably tender, but also bland. With little activity, these cuts develop very little intramuscular fat; without the fat there’s nothing to carry flavor. By contrast, all the hard labor imposed on lowly muscles—the exercise required of the legs, or the cleansing work of the liver and kidneys, or the requisite pumping of the heart—lead us, the eaters, to have to work as well. If prepared correctly, the payoff is meat that’s pungent, rich, and dense. And, yes, tender too. But that payoff requires a lot more cooking, and a lot more craft.

  “It’s easy to cook a filet mignon and call yourself a chef,” chef Thomas Keller once wrote. “But that’s not real cooking. That’s heating. Preparing tripe, however, is a transcendental act.”

  We can, and perhaps sometimes we should, expect transcendence from chefs, in the same way that we expect it from artists. To lift us out of our usual understanding of things, of what we know. Which is why Palladin’s chicken dish that night in the Los Angeles restaurant, with its lowly, unrecognizable parts, is so often replayed in my mind. If the story of America’s beloved bird is like that of Humpty Dumpty—fallen and broken apart—Palladin showed us one way to put it back together, deliciously.

  Of course, that’s easier to say than to sell. I can tell you that a chicken gizzard (the thick, muscular organ that pulverizes the bird’s food before it gets to its stomach) has more flavor per half bite than what you might get from an entire breast, but I can hardly get anyone to order it.* It’s no wonder so few chefs buy whole animals.

  The poultry industry would argue, What’s wrong with that? What’s wrong with Americans eating the parts of the animal they want to eat? Isn’t that what being in the food-service business means? If a man wants boneless, skinless chicken breasts for dinner, the culture of American business is to figure out how to let him do
it. And that may be true, up to a point. We’ve reached that point.

  In just the past thirty years, the poultry industry has tripled its production of chickens, from 11.3 billion pounds to 37 billion pounds. But we don’t eat 37 billion pounds of chicken, and the excess chicken has to end up somewhere. Processed food—Chicken McNuggets, for example—heroically soaked up the imbalance for a time. So did pet food.

  More recently, excess chicken is fed to cattle (an eyebrow raiser, since cattle aren’t carnivores) and now increasingly even to fish. Why? Because while the price of wild fish—the traditional feed for aquaculture—has risen dramatically in the past decade, the relative cost of chicken has gone down. It’s cheaper to feed chicken. What emerges is a nightmare version of the loaves and fishes—an agriculture system out of control, in which the loaf (grain, in this case fed to chickens) is produced in such excess that it gets fed to fish. I once asked an aquaculture biologist what was sustainable about feeding chicken to fish. There was a long pause. “Well, Chef,” he said, “there’s just too much chicken in this country.”

  Another solution has been to look abroad—to dump unwanted parts onto other countries. The United States is the largest exporter of chicken products to China because, luckily for Perdue and other poultry companies, the Chinese prefer dark chicken meat. By the 1990s we were producing 90 percent of all the chicken China imported, which led Chinese authorities to argue that U.S. poultry companies were dumping their excess production at falsely low prices. Russians did as well, calling the chicken parts nozhki Busha (“Bush’s legs”) after then U.S. president George H. W. Bush’s aggressive efforts to export them to Russia.

  In recent years, Mexico has become another popular outlet for America’s overabundance. In 2008, the country eliminated tariff protection on imports, opening the floodgates to hundreds of thousands of tons of chicken legs. The decision immediately wreaked havoc on small states like Jalisco, one of Mexico’s largest areas for poultry farming. Some Mexican poultry producers were forced to consolidate to lower their costs, in effect repeating the path Perdue pursued in the 1960s. In the meantime, Jalisco’s poultry workers, displaced from their communities, began entering the United States illegally in larger numbers. And they’ve found employment where they have skills to match: at poultry-processing facilities like Perdue.

  Wouldn’t it be easier to cook every part of the bird?

  Instead, the end result is a food system that plays out like an ongoing national tribute to Rube Goldberg. The overproduction of grain helps enable the overproduction of chicken, which lowers the price of chicken, which means even more chickens are raised to make up for declining revenue. That leads to even more unneeded chicken. So it’s fed to other animals it probably shouldn’t be fed to, like fish (which are increasingly farm-raised, in part due to the offshore pollution caused by producing too much grain). And then the overproduced chicken gets dumped to places like Mexico. To compete, Mexico turns to the same kind of system, the get-big-or-get-out system that feeds on itself: produce more chicken at lower prices. Laid-off poultry workers seek work in America, often illegally, which drives down wages and helps poultry companies produce . . . more chicken.

  CHAPTER 12

  IN EARLY OCTOBER, Lisa called to tell me Eduardo had been in touch to invite me to see the slaughter of his geese. He asked that I be in Spain on the tenth of November to witness “the sacrifice, with gas.”

  I remembered Eduardo emphasizing the importance of the slaughter to the success of the livers. Done wrong, the livers would be ruined. He explained that his killings happened all at once and then added, cryptically, that they were performed “in a state completely absent of stress, like when a person slits their wrist in a bathtub—the sweetest form of death.” I wasn’t sure I agreed with his comparison, but I was definitely intrigued.

  But a few days before I was to leave, Lisa called to report that the slaughter apparently wasn’t going to happen as planned. She said Eduardo had given no reason. Too late to cancel, I went anyway. I figured the adult geese, prepped, if not fully loaded with the requisite fat for slaughter, were still worth seeing.

  When I arrived at the farm, Eduardo greeted me with surprising affection, like someone reconnecting with a childhood friend. I suspected he felt badly about changing the date of the slaughter.

  “Eduardo, it’s no problem about the geese,” I said, wanting to put him at ease. “I’ll see the processing another year.”

  He raised his eyebrows when Lisa finished translating. “Sí, sí,” he said, without apology or explanation. He suddenly launched into a description of the slaughter, perhaps thinking I wanted a reenactment of events I couldn’t witness firsthand. “They go to sleep,” he said. He closed his eyes and tilted his head slightly, resting it on his right hand to mimic a soft pillow.

  “Together?” I asked, more skeptical than inquisitive.

  “No, no, it’s true,” he said. “They go to sleep together and they feel nothing. Nothing.”

  Eduardo described a mazelike system of fiberglass fencing that he erects in front of a large, insulated room. He showed me how he sprinkles corn to lure the geese and how he calls out to them, clapping his hands. Then he ran through the invisible maze, carefully imitating a goose’s waddle.

  “When one has gone in, the others see that it’s okay, that they’re eating, which is when they follow,” he said. “They must enter the room with free will.” The geese don’t struggle, they never lose self-control. Free will, he explained to me patiently, is why the livers taste so sweet.

  How did he know for sure that the animal hadn’t suffered?

  “The taste!” he said. “That liver you had—did it taste like a goose that struggled?” Of course it hadn’t. It tasted like a goose that had been coddled and massaged to death, but how was I supposed to know the difference? Until I met Eduardo, I didn’t even know it was possible to produce foie gras without at least some discomfort. I pushed him for proof.

  He nodded. “The year my son was born, I was feeling a little unsure myself. I wanted a clean conscience. So after I gassed them, I opened up the door and let the air circulate. Twenty minutes later they woke up. They were dazed . . .” He tilted his head back and shook it very slowly from side to side, looking convincingly befuddled. Then he righted his head, his eyes closed for a very long blink. When he opened them, he looked at me excitedly. “Then they went right back to gorging. They acted as if absolutely nothing had happened!”

  Eduardo’s methods may sound extravagant, but many studies have shown the connection between suffering and degraded meat. If an animal is stressed—during its life, and especially in those last moments before death—it manifests, just as Eduardo claimed, in the flavor and texture of the final product.

  It’s something I saw firsthand when we opened Blue Hill at Stone Barns. Back then, Craig was taking one Berkshire pig a week to the slaughterhouse, but what came back was often far from delicious. José, our butcher, pointed out red streaking in some of the muscles, and I found the pork mostly dry, tough, and much less tasty than expected. Craig realized the lone pigs were unduly stressed by the travel, so he decided on a few changes. He took two pigs along for the ride (a macabre version of the buddy system) and made sure to provide them with extra feed. And he hung enlarged photos of the farm’s woodland inside the trailer. Craig still had only one pig slaughtered; the other traveled back to the farm. The following week, the same pig, now acclimated to the trip, accompanied yet another pig back to the slaughterhouse for his last ride. The streaking disappeared, and the Berkshires’ incredible flavor returned.

  I asked Eduardo if his efforts were meant to ensure the highest-quality livers or to guarantee the welfare of his geese. He shook his head slightly and smiled, a sign that he didn’t understand the question. I tried again: “What motivates you? If you had to choose, is it sweet livers you want, or a painless end to life?”

  Eduardo raised his eyebrow
s. “What’s the difference?”

  Eduardo had arranged for us to stop for lunch that afternoon, but first (naturally) he suggested that we stop to visit the almost-ready-for-slaughter geese.

  We drove in and out of different pastures for about twenty minutes, until we came to a group of Iberian pigs. On a hunt for acorns, heads low to the ground, they moved in unison across the landscape. Eduardo had me turn off the car. The geese, he said, should be close by. We stood under an oak tree and waited. Carpeting the ground were cracked acorn shells, like spent bullet casings.

  “The pigs were just here,” Eduardo confirmed, bending over to inspect the leftovers. I found an intact acorn that the pigs had missed and held it in my hands. It was enormous.

  “The geese eat this whole thing?” I asked.

  He smiled and pointed off in the distance. Twenty or so geese, in single file, emerged from a patch of tall grass, quacking loudly.

  “They’re huge!” Lisa gasped.

  It was true: the geese looked almost prehistoric, like small dinosaurs. They must have tripled in size since I’d seen them in spring. The birds honked loudly, suddenly gathering together and flapping their wings as they came to an area of untouched acorns.