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

  Eliot, a widely revered organic vegetable farmer and author from Maine, is a Gandhi-like figure for the sustainable agriculture movement. He did not invent organic farming, of course, just as Gandhi did not invent the doctrine of nonviolent resistance, but countless small farmers and gardening enthusiasts have absorbed the philosophy through his teachings. I was given a copy of Eliot’s back-to-the-earth guidebook, The New Organic Grower, in college, and in my early twenties I took it with me when I went to California to apprentice in a bread bakery.

  Jody commissioned Eliot to identify the twelve most important farmers in the world—half from the United States, half from Europe—and bring them, at Jody’s expense, to England for a three-day discussion on how best to use his land. Eliot framed the event as a once-in-a-lifetime summit of the world’s greatest agricultural minds. He called the group “the Fertile Dozen.”

  Eliot, who by this point had become a friend (and later would be a trusted adviser during the creation of the farm at Stone Barns Center), called me a few weeks before the meeting to ask if I’d be interested in preparing the final dinner. It wasn’t so much a question as a foregone conclusion.

  I spent the day at Laverstoke shuttling between the kitchen and a corner of the large room where the twelve men sat around an old English table (King Arthur’s Round Table came to mind) explaining their farming methods and philosophies. They were brilliant, engaging, passionate, and inspiring in a way that you know will stay with you for a lifetime.

  There was Joel Salatin, in the days before he was made famous by Michael Pollan in his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, speaking about energy exchange and pasture-based farming; Willem Kips, from Denmark, who married traditional biodynamic farming with modern technology for high yields; Frank Morton, an Oregon seed breeder who quietly revolutionized American salad with his new varieties of greens; Thomas Harttung, whose pioneering community-supported agriculture program today supplies organic vegetables to more than 45,000 homes in Denmark and Sweden; Fons Verbeek, of the Netherlands, who spoke about animal-vegetable relationships; Joan Dye Gussow, the nutritionist and innovative organic gardener considered by many to be the founding voice for the local-food movement; and Amigo Bob Cantisano, a California organic farmer, adviser, and creator of the Ecological Farming Conference, with a résumé almost as impressive as his salty-gray Tom Selleck mustache. One after another, without pretension or exaggeration, these farmers described their unique contributions to farming.

  No one spoke directly about how their work translated into crops with more flavor, because it was simply understood. I got hungry just sitting there.

  And then Klaas Martens rose to tell his story. Standing six foot three, with his John Deere baseball cap askew and his overalls hiked alarmingly high, he looked more Gomer Pyle than agricultural statesman. I decided to get back to the kitchen, but as I turned to leave, Klaas offered the group a simple question: “When do you start raising a child?” Just like that. It was an oddball opening to a talk about his life’s work, but Klaas’s humble, practical tone drew everyone’s attention. I stayed for the answer.

  Klaas said he’d come to the question through his interest in the Mennonite community, a group he had known over the years and greatly respected. He explained that Mennonites forbid the use of rubber tires on their farm tractors. The Fertile Dozen shook their heads in near unison. Klaas smiled, acknowledging the severity of the decree—steel-tired tractors inch along, slow as oxen.

  He said one day he got up the nerve to ask a Mennonite bishop why rubber tires were forbidden. The bishop answered Klaas’s question with a question: “When do you start raising a child?” According to the bishop, Klaas told us, child rearing begins not at birth, or even conception, but one hundred years before a child is born, “because that’s when you start building the environment they’re going to live in.”

  Mennonites, he went on, believe that if you look at the history of tractors with rubber tires, you see failure within a generation. Rubber tires enable easy movement, and easy movement means that, inevitably, the farm will grow, which means more profit. More profit, in turn, leads to the acquisition of even more land, which usually means less crop diversity, more large machinery, and so on. Pretty soon the farmer becomes less intimate with his farm. It’s that lack of intimacy that leads to ignorance, and eventually to loss.

  Around the table, heads nodded in silent recognition: Klaas had just described the problem with American agriculture.

  CHAPTER 2

  IF FEELING humbled in the face of nature is what you’re after, skip the Grand Canyon and stand in a large field of wheat. Or stand in any grain field next to dozens of other, contiguous grain fields. The wide, ripe expanse doesn’t just surround you, it envelops you. It makes you feel small. I once heard the environmental lawyer and activist Robert Kennedy Jr. speak of an epiphany he had. God talks to human beings through many vectors, he said, but nowhere with such clarity, texture, grace, and joy as through a growing field of wheat.

  A few years after meeting Klaas at Laverstoke, I stood in the middle of one of his wheat fields in Penn Yan, New York, and saw what Kennedy meant. I had never been to Penn Yan—didn’t even know it existed until I met Klaas—and though it’s only forty-five minutes from downtown Ithaca and the hubbub of Cornell University, it feels more like central Kansas than upstate New York.

  The scene reminded me of a painting I once saw in grade school. A crew of seamen, sailing at a time when conventional wisdom had it that the world was flat, quaked with fear and knelt in prayer as their ship slowly approached the edge of the horizon. Their expressions of despair would be appropriate if you found yourself about to fall off the face of the earth, but I had trouble sympathizing. To my adolescent mind, the men looked a little silly, their fear exaggerated.

  And yet from the vantage of that wheat field, I thought maybe those men had been on to something. The idea that the world is not flat seemed, at that moment, sort of radical. I raked my gaze back and forth, enormity and abundance in every direction. The rain had just cleared, and the air was still thick with odor and color. To the east, beyond Klaas’s fields, I could see his neighbor’s fields—a figure of a man on a tractor was no larger than a grasshopper—and, beyond this, his neighbor’s neighbor’s fields, until eventually the grass just dropped off into a kind of oblivion.

  Klaas leaned over, broke off a stalk of emmer wheat, and brought it to his mouth for a taste. He chewed thoughtfully, separating the wheat kernel from its chaff and rolling it around in his mouth. Klaas’s features sometimes seem to have outgrown his frame. His hands flap around like empty ski gloves when he speaks, and his shoulders are so wide you’re tempted to inspect the back of his jacket to make sure he didn’t leave the coat hanger in. He embodies a particular brand of solidness—the German immigrant farmer who plowed our country’s midsection with nothing more than grit and determination. And yet Klaas is an irrepressibly cheerful man, generous and humble.

  I asked Klaas why he found it important to grow wheat. He paused to examine another stalk. “The nice thing about wheat is how it’s tied to Western civilization, to the cradle of civilization. The history of wheat is the history of a sociable crop.”

  He was right. For centuries, wheat was a community builder, a grain whose benefits were reaped only through cooperation and effective social organization—farmers grew it, millers ground it, and bakers turned it into sustenance and pleasure. In his book Seeds, Sex & Civilization, Peter Thompson says all three of the world’s great grains—wheat, corn, and rice—provided the foundations for civilization. But, he wrote, “whereas the foundations provided by maize and rice were sufficient to build walls,” wheat’s inherently communal qualities “provided the keystones of arches to support the edifices of urban civilizations.”

  The story of wheat is the story of who we are.

  Klaas broke off a kernel and held it in his big hand. “This is probably what someone was threshing whe
n Ruth showed up,” he said, adding that emmer was one of the first domesticated crops. He shook his head. “It humbles me just holding it.”

  God may or may not communicate through wheat, but for sure we communicate by carpeting so much of our landscape with grain. The middle of the wheat field in Penn Yan was insignificant—a mere nursery compared with the Corn Belt of the Midwest, or the plowed-up prairie of the Plains. Today more than 80 percent of American farmland is in grain production—corn, wheat, and rice, mostly. Wheat—which, worldwide, covers more acreage than any other crop—is planted on fifty-six million acres in the United States. Vegetables and fruits, by comparison—what most everyone, including chefs, fixate on—occupy just 8 percent of our farmland.

  Why haven’t we talked more about wheat? While we’ve been obsessed with record corn harvests—as impressive and record-breaking as they are—wheat still blankets much of our country’s midsection. It also constitutes a large percentage of our diet—more than 130 pounds per person, every year. That’s more than beef, lamb, veal, and pork put together. It’s more than poultry and fish, too. If you don’t count corn sweeteners, we eat more wheat than every other cereal combined.

  But rarely do we consider how it’s grown. If we want to improve the condition of our food system and create a food tradition that thoughtfully ties together the disparate parts, focusing only on fruits and vegetables is like planning a new house but designing only the doors and windows. It misses the big picture.

  Klaas acknowledged the disconnect. “I see people go to all the trouble to visit the farmers’ market and really take the time to pick out the best peach, or stand in line for a grass-fed steak that’s treated the way a cow ought to be treated,” he said. “And then on their way home they buy packaged bread in the store.” He removed his cap and ran his hand over a mop of matted-down hair. “That’s bread made with wheat that’s adulterated and dead, even more than the fruits and vegetables they successfully avoided purchasing a half hour before. And I mean dead, like a rotten tomato, which you would never eat.”

  He turned to me. “So how is this possible? How do we get to the point that we willingly, even happily, eat the equivalent of a rotten tomato?” He paused, looking out at his fields as a gentle breeze made the wheat sway in unison. “It happens,” he said, “because we’ve lost the taste of grain.”

  My office sits in the corner of the kitchen at Blue Hill at Stone Barns. The drafting chair at my desk faces out so I can observe the cooks, catch mistakes, and sometimes even head off small disasters.

  One night, not long after my fateful conversation with Klaas, I was sitting at my desk and watching the kitchen wind down for the end of service. It’s a scene I’ve witnessed a thousand times before, the cooks slowing to the rhythm of the late orders. But for some reason, on that night I noticed something I hadn’t been conscious of before. Wheat was everywhere.

  In one corner, a waiter cleaned the bread station for the evening, saving the unused loaves for the pigs’ dinner. Over by the stove, Duncan the fish cook sprinkled the last order of trout with flour before roasting it. Across from him, the meat cook wrapped a loin of pork with an herb dough. An intern organized trays of fresh ravioli and thick-cut spaghetti. And there was Alex, the pastry chef, serving his white-chocolate-and-cardamom cake with dried fruit strudel. Trays of after-dinner cookies and small pastries flew past on the way to the dining room.

  Suddenly Jake, the pastry sous chef, came into view hauling a fifty-pound bag of all-purpose flour, which he heaved into the flour bin just outside my office. It was his second fill of the day. A white flurry hovered in the air, as in a just-shaken snow globe. As it drifted toward the window of my office and fell away, I was reminded of standing with Klaas and watching his fields stretch to the end of the horizon. Back then I’d been struck by how much the story of agriculture is really about grain. The kitchen scene that night had me realizing that the story of our menu is really about grain, too, particularly wheat.

  When Klaas complained of his neighbors’ visiting the farmers’ market for fruits and vegetables, only to then carelessly purchase bread at a supermarket, he might as well have been complaining about me. As the owner of a farm-to-table restaurant—actually a restaurant in the middle of a farm—I’ve gone on and on (and on and on) about local fruits and vegetables with no more apologies for repetition than a peanut vendor in a ballpark. Like most chefs, I can name the heirloom variety of this or that tomato, or the breed of cattle with the most flavorful grass-fed steaks. We root around obsessively for all these things because they taste better, and because we know the people, and the practices, that produced them. The soft, white dust dumped into the container bin twice a day was the most generic thing in our kitchen, but I knew more about the construction of our stove than how the flour had been farmed.

  I wanted to learn the taste of wheat (or relearn it), and to do that, I needed to learn its history. What could account for its odd duality—the all-purpose little grain that is everywhere on my menu but about which I knew close to nothing?

  CHAPTER 3

  IN THE MYTH OF PYGMALION, a sculptor falls in love with his female statue and helps bring her to life. The story of wheat is the anti-Pygmalion: in our ten-thousand-year effort to sculpt a more perfect grain, we’ve succeeded mostly in making it more dead.

  Can something be more dead? Technically, no. And yet as I began to dig into the story of wheat in the United States, I learned that it suffered exactly that: several stages of degradation and death. Who’s responsible for killing wheat? It’s no mystery—what makes the story of American wheat so interesting, and so tragic, is just how obvious it all was. Culinary historian Karen Hess once called it “the conjugation of seemingly unrelated events.” Everyone and no one killed wheat. It was the perfect murder.

  It began innocently enough. Domesticated wheat wasn’t even here when Columbus arrived, as opposed to corn, which flourished. The Spanish were the first to bring wheat to the New World, and other European immigrants did the same when they settled the colonies. It failed miserably at first, but with great effort on the part of the early settlers, it eventually took hold. Long before wheat became synonymous with the Midwest, the East Coast was America’s breadbasket. Gristmills dotted the countryside—one for every seven hundred Americans in 1840. Once ground, flour had a shelf life of only about one week, and if you wanted a loaf of bread, you baked your own. That meant bringing your wheat to the mill or milling it yourself.

  With the help of farmers, wheat adapted itself to specific regions. But it thrived especially in the milder climate of the mid-Atlantic—Pennsylvania, Maryland, and New York. As of 1845, wheat was grown in every county in New York, including four acres in Manhattan. Wheat had distinctive characteristics, flavors, and baking qualities, not just from state to state (Massachusetts “Red Lammas” versus Maine “Banner wheat”) but from farm to farm, and from year to year. Diversity flourished. Farmers tasted the raw kernels in the field to assess their protein content and when it was time for harvest. Women adjusted recipes according to the condition of the flour. These were good times for wheat. After all, what more could a grass seed want than to find itself thriving in a new world?

  The opening of the Erie Canal, in 1825, completed the link between the Eastern Seaboard and the Midwest, establishing new trade routes and creating a milling hub around Rochester, New York—soon to be known as the Flour City. Railroads soon followed, which coincided nicely with our nation’s longing for cheaper and less crowded farmland. And wheat went along for the ride. This was nothing sinister, just inevitable. But something significant happened here that served as a harbinger of times ahead: for the first time in America, wheat started to be grown far away from where it was consumed.

  The roller mill appeared in the late 1800s, just in time to expand the divide between the wheat field and the table. It was a technological breakthrough that revolutionized the wheat industry just as the cotton gin had done for th
e cotton industry a century earlier. Until its widespread use, people used stone mills. Stone mills, like the one we use at Blue Hill, work like molars, crushing the kernels between two large stones. They are effective, but slow and tedious, and they do little to separate the kernel into its component parts, a key development in the drive to industrialize flour.

  A few years ago, Klaas’s wife, Mary-Howell, showed me a picture of a wheat kernel in cross section. It looked like an ultrasound image of a six- or seven-week-old human gestational sac, which isn’t a bad comparison; a wheat kernel is a seed, after all. The grain’s embryo, or “germ,” is surrounded by the starchy endosperm—the stuff of refined white flour—which stores food for the germ. Surrounding the endosperm is the seed coat, or bran, which protects the germ until moisture and heat levels indicate it’s time to germinate. (Later that same day, I returned to the field with Klaas and saw, in a bizarre neonatal vision, the wheat as a phalanx of plant stalks holding their embryos up high in the air, as if they were torches.)

  Whereas stone mills had crushed the tiny germ, releasing oils that would turn the flour rancid within days, roller mills separated the germ and bran from the endosperm. This new ability to isolate the endosperm allowed for the production of shelf-stable white flour, able to be stored and transported long distances. Overnight, flour became a commodity.

  It’s hard to fathom that merely removing a temperamental little germ could revolutionize a staple grain. But that’s just what happened. The settling of the Great Plains and the advent of roller-mill technology meant that white flour was suddenly cheaper and more readily available. Small wheat farms, including those in the former grain belt of New York, couldn’t compete. Farmers chewing kernels in the field and gristmills dotting the landscape became the stuff of folklore. The homogenization of the U.S. wheat industry had begun.