The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food Page 20

  I wrote Izzy and asked if he might be open to the idea. “Of course, come and see our small operation,” he wrote. “Having Señor Eduardo here will be interesting.” He followed up with a phone call, adding that he had one condition: Would the señor be kind enough to bring a sample liver for all of us to see? I asked him if he wouldn’t want to taste them as well? “I want to see them. Sure, taste too, why not?”

  Three weeks later, Eduardo left his farm at 3 a.m. and drove through the darkness to the Seville airport, where he boarded a flight to New York City, with a stopover in Lisbon to change planes. As he passed through customs, security guards demanded that he open his refrigerated bag. They took one look at the contents and, according to Eduardo, went into high alert, yelling at the bewildered farmer for not carrying proper documentation and threatening to arrest him. “They treated me like a terrorist,” Eduardo said. “And it was just a couple of livers.” They eventually let him on the flight, but not before making him throw the livers in the garbage.

  Eduardo and Lisa arrived at Stone Barns early the next morning. I first spotted them in the courtyard, standing off to the side. Eduardo smiled politely as I explained the history of the barns. After a few minutes, Lisa turned to me. “I really think he just wants to see the geese.”

  We met up with Craig and Padraic and walked to one of the pastures. “This is it. You’ve got the land. This would be perfect,” Eduardo said, his head tilted back, admiring the tall trees of the woodland surrounding the pastures. “Not only geese. You could have monkeys living in these trees!”

  Behind me, I heard Craig say, “Don’t give Dan any ideas.”

  Kneeling at the sight of the geese, Eduardo beckoned just as he had that first morning in Extremadura. “Hola, bonita! Hola!”

  Despite his affection for the birds, his diagnosis for our project was far from optimistic. The fence surrounding the flock had to go. The geese were spoiled, he said simply. Craig and Padraic looked on, befuddled by the complaint.

  “If you want to raise Rambo,” he said, “he cannot be coddled and fussed over.” He went on. We suffered, he said, from our anthropomorphic tendencies: humans (perhaps especially Americans) will gorge on unlimited calories, but geese won’t. At least not if they’re pampered. We fed the geese grain twice a day, expecting that when the weather turned cold they’d gorge on the corn in preparation for the long winter.

  “But what’s winter to a goose that’s had food delivered to him for six months?” he asked. “Geese are too smart for this. Why gorge when they know the next meal is coming? They cannot be tamed. They have to feel wild to kick-start that instinct for gorging.”

  Eduardo pointed to the woods, insisting that the answer to fattening the geese lay in foraging the forest, not only the pasture. “You can have a great liver. Once the weather changes, they’ll eat compulsively. Boom, boom,” he demonstrated, pecking the air.

  Craig explained that there were some acorns in the forest, but not like in the dehesa. Eduardo waved his hand. “The problem is not what you feed it. The problem is convincing it that it’s wild. If you create the right environment, the fattiness will take care of itself.”

  We set off to see Izzy. Craig and Padraic and several Blue Hill chefs came along as well. I watched Eduardo in the backseat as he wiggled his legs in excitement. (I later learned he had never been to America, and rarely traveled anywhere outside of Spain, which explained some of his enthusiasm for the perfunctory drive.)

  Passing a group of tall trees, Eduardo craned his neck, turning around in his seat to get another look at the thick woodlands. “Wow,” he said to Lisa, reiterating what he saw as our ecological advantage. “If I had a farm here, I’d make really good foie gras.”

  Arriving in the small town of Ferndale, New York, we pulled into Hudson Valley Foie Gras and parked our cars across from a row of long, white barracks. Izzy came out to greet us, introducing himself to Eduardo.

  “Welcome, Señor Sousa,” he said warmly. “I am happy to have you.” He put his hand on Eduardo’s shoulder. “But please, not a word about geese around here. I don’t want to hear even the word!” I watched as Eduardo listened intently. “Every time one comes around, something bad happens. Every time. I’m telling you—every time. I once bought twelve hundred geese. Then the barn collapsed. Twelve hundred geese, and I only got six livers.” Eduardo smiled and laughed, agreeing by way of a thumbs-up sign.

  We began the tour with Marcus Henley, the farm’s operations manager, who led us into a narrow building swarming with young ducks. He pointed to a wire rise on one side of the room. “We keep their water on top of that, and their feed on the other side, so they get exercise,” he said. “Just like on your farm, Eduardo.” Lisa and I looked at Eduardo, who raised his eyebrows up and down like Groucho Marx.

  By the time we arrived at the gavage room, we’d met plenty of happy workers (so far as I could tell), seen clean conditions (Marcus told us proudly that, should any indication of pathogens become present, “we can blow the whistle and immediately lock the whole place down”), and observed ducks that proved Izzy’s conviction that he didn’t torture his animals.

  Even in the gavage room, where the controversial twenty-one days of force-feeding takes place, I found the ducks comfortable, in a sleepy, after-brunch, Sunday-afternoon kind of way. Eduardo looked on impassively as a woman inserted a tube deep into the throat of a bird and poured in the grain. She worked with military precision. The exercise lasted five seconds or so, and then she moved on to the next duck in line.

  I had imagined this moment for weeks. Here was Eduardo, the representation of two centuries’ worth of free-ranging fowl, face to face with the insult to history—the process many animal activists call torturous and inhumane. How would he react? With outrage? Or tears? I envisioned him tackling Marcus, throwing open the doors, and shepherding the ducks back into nature. Instead he only shrugged his shoulders.

  “The feeding is not a problem.” He shook his head at the idea that the ducks were experiencing pain. “The problem is that the ducks don’t even know they are ducks.” And that was that. No drawn-out philosophical observations or shrill diatribes. Just the facts. The ducks lacked self-awareness.

  Marcus walked over. He must have misread the expression on our faces as disapproval. “We need to be very careful here about anthropomorphizing,” he said, looking at me. “And we need to be very, very careful not to extend our own preferences.”

  I didn’t bother correcting him. It occurred to me that in focusing on the cruelty of gavage, we make ducks and geese human, and their treatment becomes intolerable. But this more than misses the point. What’s intolerable is the system of agriculture that it reflects.

  On the drive home, I watched Eduardo press his wide smile against the passenger-side window. He whistled and pointed at the packed parking lot of a shopping mall, the wonder of the drive-through bank, the thick forest interrupted by the valley’s iconic pastures. He kept turning around to make sure I hadn’t missed it. “Mira, mira, mira,” he said—look, look, look—in exactly the same way he had pointed out a goose about to home in on an acorn.

  I realized then that Eduardo’s work has a lot to do with creating a consciousness—not only in his geese, but in us, too. To taste his foie gras is to kick-start a chain of understanding about the geese (their natural instincts), the ecology that supports them (the dehesa), and the centuries-old culture that supports the whole system (the Extremaduran way of life and its varied cuisine).

  Our modern way of eating supports the opposite. It dumbs down nature. It makes a duck liver—or a loin of lamb, a chicken breast, or a cheeseburger—taste the same whether you’re in Scarsdale or Scottsdale, in June or January. Which, in a way, dumbs us down, too. I saw that soon after we left Hudson Valley Foie Gras, as we drove past a fast-food drive-through. It was lunchtime; cars idled in the line to order, inching forward together like widgets moving down an assembly
line. The people in the cars waited in silence, their heads facing forward. No one looked any more, or less, excited about their impending meal than the ducks who had just been lined up in front of me, or, for that matter, than the geese at Stone Barns I had brought grain to a few weeks earlier.

  I had to leave for Blue Hill in the city late that afternoon. Eduardo told me he was desperate to see New York and our sister restaurant, and though he would love to spend more time with Craig, he asked if he and Lisa could accompany me on the ride to the city. He shook Craig’s hand and wished him luck. “Remember,” he said gently, “we’re not raising geese. We’re not their caretakers. We have geese. They raise themselves.”

  It was just before 4 p.m. when we arrived at Washington Place. We planned on a 5:30 p.m. dinner at the bar—allowing enough time for Lisa to show Eduardo around the West Village.

  “Eduardo had his camera out, snapping pictures every few seconds of the ‘real New York policemen’ and the ‘real New York basketball players’ on the West Fourth Street courts,” she recounted later. When they finally returned to Blue Hill, Eduardo was still buzzing with excitement. They sat for a drink at the bar, and Lisa asked if he was ready to start the meal.

  “Lisa,” he said to her gently, “right now all I want is a real American meal. I want a hamburger.”

  They left a note for me—“Off for a walk,” it said—and crossed the street to the Waverly Diner. Eduardo ordered a hamburger, fries, and a Coke.

  “He loved it,” Lisa told me after they’d both returned to Spain. “He loved everything about it. He loved the bad lighting and the loud music. He loved ordering at the counter and waiting for our number to be called. He loved having to fill his own paper cup from the soda dispenser. He loved the roasted peanuts, still in the shell. But mostly he loved his burger. He licked his fingers as he ate it. ‘The food Dan makes isn’t bad,’ he said. ‘But this is really delicious.’”

  It was the happiest she had ever seen him.

  FAILED GRAS

  Craig slaughtered the geese the following December. José soaked the livers quickly in milk and salt to remove any trace of blood and brought them to the meat station for the evening’s service. The cooks gathered around, staring at the liver lineup as if they were artifacts from an archaeological dig. They were the size of Ping-Pong balls.

  “Failed gras,” one of the cooks said, breaking the silence. José shook his head in disappointment as a line cook patted him on the back, a gesture that said, We’ll get ’em next time, son.

  Craig has been raising geese for several years since then, and, not sharing my Ahab-like obsession with natural foie gras, he’s been untroubled by the consistently small livers. He likes geese because they work well in his animal rotation on the pastures, and because they’re profitable. Having lost hundreds of chickens and turkeys to coyotes, he never adopted Eduardo’s advice to remove the electric fencing and activate their built-in ability to gorge in the fall. “It wouldn’t make them eat more,” he told me. “Around here, it will just get them killed.”

  Meanwhile, back in Extremadura, Eduardo’s geese have faced tougher times over the years. Predation from wild animals has increased significantly, wiping out larger percentages of the flock. And more recently, global climate change has meant milder winters. Without a jolt of cold to jump-start their natural instincts, the geese are less inclined to gorge during those critical weeks.

  “It’s very strange, this laid-back attitude of theirs,” Eduardo told me. “It’s lazy. They sort of just sit around like—what’s the expression? American couch potato? Except they don’t really eat.”

  Nonetheless, the last I heard from Eduardo, he was looking to sell his foie gras in South America, possibly even the United States. He’s also methodically downloading what he knows of natural livers to his two children.

  “Every day,” he told me. “But no more than fifteen minutes. I tell them stories, mostly, about the geese, about the dehesa, about their grandparents. More than that, they will resent me for burdening them. The key, I think, is to tell them something new, and to do it every day.”

  I have to admit that after five years of failed gras, I started to lose hope of ever carrying on Eduardo’s tradition. But then one afternoon I heard that Chris O’Blenness, Craig’s new assistant, was headed out to a farm in Kansas to investigate a heritage breed of goose called Toulouse. Less domesticated than the modern breed we had been raising, the geese were purportedly large and fiercely protective, their natural instincts more firmly intact. The first time I got a glimpse of them, in the back pastures at Stone Barns three months later, I thought there was a striking resemblance to Eduardo’s geese.

  Still, it wasn’t until later that same year that my excitement returned in earnest. Chris approached me in September, just as the days turned cooler. What did I think of letting the geese out of their fences to roam the back pasture? Of course I thought it was a great idea. But Chris really wanted to know if I’d be willing to pay if the coyotes got to the flock.

  “Pay in advance?” I asked him.

  “Yes,” he said. “Pay to play.” I said I would.

  The next week, with no fence for protection, the geese roamed the back pasture. I don’t think I was reading into things when I observed a certain swagger I hadn’t noticed before. If freedom wasn’t making them hungry, it at least had kick-started a confidence gene.

  Chris furtively spread some corn feed on the grass in random places around the field, to encourage their appetites. “They come on it suddenly,” he told me after a few days of trialing the new method, “and all hell breaks loose. They really believe that they’ve discovered spoils from a hunt.”

  In early January, Chris picked three of the largest geese for the first slaughter of the year. They were enormous birds, to José’s delight. He went to work. Foie gras? No, not really. Instead of Ping-Pong balls, we got small lightbulbs. They were strikingly red and looked distinctive, almost regal compared with previous years, with streaks of yellow fat clinging to the liver. It wasn’t integrated, but the lobes appeared fattier, more in line with foie gras.

  Izzy didn’t agree. After I described the livers to him on the phone, he said, “Let me tell you: it is not foie gras. Call it a nice liver. Call it a delicious, lovely liver. Call it anything you want, just don’t call it foie gras, because it’s not.”

  Instead of our usual preparation—a quick sauté, which meant enough for only a few lucky diners—I decided we would stretch the livers by preparing them as pâtés. They were preserved in small glass jars and sealed, as hundreds of years of culinary tradition dictates, by melting some of the excess goose fat and pouring a thick layer of it over the pâté. A few days later, I dug my spoon deep into one of the jars and, without giving it any thought, spread the meat and the glistening fat onto a warm slice of bread.

  Some of the most memorable moments as a chef—at once revelatory and revealing—are provoked by tasting something delicious. This was one of them. Though I want to say I was brought back to the tiny restaurant in Monesterio where I first tasted Eduardo’s foie gras, I wasn’t really. The liver didn’t taste as sweet, nor did it benefit from Eduardo’s natural seasoning in the field (I admit to adding some salt and pepper).

  But the flavor was nonetheless deep and pronounced, and the fat itself was unctuous and not the slightest bit greasy. At the risk of anthropomorphizing, it tasted more assertive, more sure of itself, than previous seasons’ livers. And more of its place, too.

  Izzy was right after all. My blind pursuit of foie gras had ignored something fundamental in all of this: why had I insisted on calling it foie gras? I had, unwittingly but assuredly, set the geese up to disappoint us. It was me who had failed the geese, not the other way around. Demanding that the livers live up to the archetype, or to a standard based on the riches of the dehesa, was not only impossible, it was a fool’s errand. The ham we make from Craig’s pigs at Stone Barn
s is delicious. Is it jamón ibérico? No, it’s not, but we don’t call it failed ham because of it.

  Looking at the pâté, I was reminded again of the brilliance of that well-marbled slice of ham Eduardo held up to the light. In a way, both represent what’s possible when gifts from nature become filtered through culinary tradition. Jamón, as with good pâté—as with almost anything produced by good cooking—relies on simple craft, attained and applied. And yet sometimes, with any luck, it transcends craft. It becomes more than the sum of its parts.

  In the same way that Eduardo stimulated the geese’s consciousness, a recipe or a meal or even a single plate of food can stimulate our own consciousness—about the animals we eat, the system that supports their diet, and the kind of cuisine a chef needs to create to support it.

  PART III

  SEA

  The Heart Is Not a Pump

  CHAPTER 14

  THERE IS A PHENOMENON in nature called the edge effect. The edge is where two distinct elements in nature meet and thrive. A continent’s coastlines are a good example. The most productive and diverse habitats for marine life are where the vast sea finally meets the shore. These edge zones are hotbeds of energy and material exchange, thriving with life in a way that makes the deep sea or a large stretch of land seem dull by comparison. “Fragile ecosystems,” as these areas are often called, is something of a misnomer. They are fragile because they’re so full of life.