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

  taking too many fish from the sea: For information and statistics on the decline of world fish stocks, see FAO Fisheries and Aquaculture Department, The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2012 (Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2012); and Wilf Swartz et al., “The Spatial Expansion and Ecological Footprint of Fisheries (1950 to Present),” PLOS ONE 5, no. 12 (December 2010).

  depleting certain populations of fish for ages: See W. Jeffrey Bolster, The Mortal Sea: Fishing the Atlantic in the Age of Sail (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2012). Bolster identifies the degradation of some fisheries as far back as the Middle Ages.

  “too far” and “too deep”: Carl Safina and Carrie Brownstein, “Fish or Cut Bait: Solutions for Our Seas,” in Food and Fuel: Solutions for the Future, ed. Andrew Heintzman and Evan Solomon (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2009), 75.

  “dragging a huge iron bar across the savannah”: Charles Clover, The End of the Line: How Overfishing Is Changing the World and What We Eat (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 1.

  Estimates of “bycatch”: See Dayton L. Alverson et al., A Global Assessment of Fisheries Bycatch and Discards, FAO Fisheries Technical Paper no. 339 (Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 1994).

  dead zones worldwide: See R. J. Diaz and R. Rosenberg, “Spreading Dead Zones and Consequences for Marine Ecosystems,” Science 321, no. 5891 (August 15, 2008): 926–9.

  “decomposing bodies lying in sediment”: Nancy Rabalais, quoted in Allison Aubrey, “Troubled Seas: Farm Belt Runoff Prime Source of Ocean Pollution,” Morning Edition, National Public Radio, January 15, 2002.

  food web begins with phytoplankton: For more on the role of phytoplankton, see Sanjida O’Connell, “The Science Behind That Fresh Seaside Smell,” The Telegraph, August 18, 2009; I. Emma Huertas et al., “Warming Will Affect Phytoplankton Differently: Evidence Through a Mechanistic Approach,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B—Biological Sciences 278, no. 1724 (2011): 3534–43; and John Roach, “Source of Half Earth’s Oxygen Gets Little Credit,” National Geographic News, June 7, 2004, http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/06/0607_040607_phytoplankton.html.

  decline in phytoplankton: See Daniel G. Boyce, Marlon R. Lewis, and Boris Worm, “Global Phytoplankton Decline over the Past Century,” Nature 466, no. 7306 (July 29, 2010): 591–6.

  El Niño climate cycles: See Mike Bettwy, “El Niño and La Niña Mix Up Plankton Populations,” NASA, June 22, 2005, www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/lookingatearth/plankton_elnino.html.

  one-third of the seafood . . . ordered in restaurants: See The Marketplace for Sustainable Seafood: Growing Appetites and Shrinking Seas (Washington, DC: Seafood Choices Alliance, 2003), 9.

  Rising CO2 levels: Bärbel Hönisch et al., “The Geological Record of Ocean Acidification,” Science 335, no. 6072 (March 2012): 1058–63.

  rise in the trophic levels of the fish used in recipes: See Phillip S. Levin and Aaron Dufault, “Eating up the Food Web,” Fish and Fisheries 11, issue 3 (September 2010): 307–12.

  “Does this matter?”: Clover, End of the Line, 189.

  The business of fish farming: For statistics on aquaculture, see FAO Fisheries and Aquaculture Department, The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2012; and R. L. Naylor et al., “Effects of Aquaculture on World Fish Supplies,” Nature 405 (2000): 1017–24.

  substituting grains and oilseeds: See Emiko Terazono, “Salmon Farmers Go for Veggie Option,” Financial Times, January 21, 2013.

  Veta la Palma was born: See J. Miguel Medialdea, “A New Approach to Ecological Sustainability Through Extensive Aquaculture: The Model of Veta la Palma,” Proceedings of the 2008 TIES Workshop, Madison, Wisconsin; and J. Miguel Medialdea, “A New Approach to Sustainable Aquaculture,” The Solutions Journal, June 2010.

  “the primeval meeting place”: Rachel Carson, The Edge of the Sea (1955; repr., New York: Mariner Books, 1998), xiii.

  writing “the wrong kind of book”: Sue Hubbell, introduction to The Edge of the Sea, xvi–xviii.

  most important private estate for aquatic birds in all of Europe: Carlos Otero and Tony Bailey, Europe’s Natural and Cultural Heritage: The European Estate (Brussels: Friends of the Countryside, 2003), 701.

  “A gastronome who is not an environmentalist is stupid”: Carlo Petrini, Report from the European Conference on Local and Regional Food, Lerum, Sweden, September 2005.

  bird populations . . . have decreased: See Robin McKie, “How EU Farming Policies Led to a Collapse in Europe’s Bird Population,” The Observer, May 26, 2012.

  seabird populations: See Jeremy Hance, “Easing the Collateral Damage That Fisheries Inflict on Seabirds,” Yale Environment 360, August 9, 2012.

  long before industrialized agriculture: See Christopher Cokinos, Hope Is the Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds (New York: Penguin 2009), 53. As Cokinos observes, “Prehistoric islanders in the Pacific killed off some 2,000 bird species, diminishing by one-fifth the global number through a variety of activities, including habitat destruction.”

  “the world has lost at least eighty species”: Colin Tudge, The Bird: A Natural History of Who Birds Are, Where They Came From, and How They Live (New York: Random House, 2010), 400.

  “a knock-on effect”: Alasdair Fotheringham, “Is This the End of Migration?” The Independent, April 18, 2010.

  “The birds of Walden”: Jonathan Rosen, The Life of the Skies: Birding at the End of Nature (New York: Picador, 2008), 94.

  fifteen pounds per person: Alan Lowther, ed., Fisheries of the United States 2011 (Silver Spring, MD: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 2012).

  “Gravity is the sea’s enemy”: Carl Safina, “Cry of the Ancient Mariner: Even in the Middle of the Deep Blue Sea, the Albatross Feels the Hard Hand of Humanity,” Time, April 26, 2000.

  longtime advocate of traditional diets: Sally Fallon Morell, “Very Small Is Beautiful” (lecture, Twenty-eighth Annual E. F. Schumacher Lectures, New Economics Institute, Stockbridge, MA, October 2008).

  Cowan spent twenty years contemplating the question: See Thomas Cowan, The Fourfold Path to Healing: Working with the Laws of Nutrition, Therapeutics, Movement and Meditation in the Art of Medicine (Washington, DC: Newtrends Publishing, 2004). Cowan discusses Steiner’s understanding of the heart in chapter 3.

  “the heart as a pump”: Rudolf Steiner, “Organic Processes and Soul Life” (1921), in Freud, Jung, and Spiritual Psychology, 3rd ed. (Great Barrington, MA: Anthroposophic Press, 2001), 124–5.

  “It is the blood that drives the heart”: Rudolf Steiner, “The Question of Food” (1913), in The Effects of Esoteric Development: Lecures by Rudolf Steiner (Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1997), 56.

  scientific revolution . . . masters and possessors of nature: Frederick Kirschenmann, “Spirituality in Agriculture” (academic paper, Concord School of Philosophy, Concord, MA, October 8, 2005).

  “fishing down the food chain”: For more on this idea, see Taras Grescoe, Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood (New York: Bloomsbury, 2008).

  “International Conspiracy to Catch All Tuna”: Safina, Song for the Blue Ocean, 13.

  “reminding one of barn-yard fowls feeding from a dish”: Alan Davidson, North Atlantic Seafood: A Comprehensive Guide with Recipes (New York: Ten Speed Press, 2003), 115.

  PART IV: SEED

  “a town with a bombed out center”: Jim Hinch, “Medium-Size Me,” Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture 8, no. 4 (Fall 2008), 72.

  in another decade most of them will be gone: For more on midsize farms, see Fred Kirschenmann et al., “Why Worry About the Agriculture of the Middle? A White Paper for the Agriculture of the Middle Project” (n.d.), http://grist.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/whitepaper2.pdf.

  nothing “intrinsically sweet” about sugar: Daniel C. Dennett, Breaking
the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (New York: Viking, 2006), 59.

  refined wheat in sociocultural terms: For more on the sociocultural history of white bread, see Aaron Bobrow-Strain, White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf (Boston: Beacon Press, 2012); H. E. Jacob and Peter Reinhart, Six Thousand Years of Bread (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2007); Steven Laurence Kaplan, Good Bread Is Back: A Contemporary History of French Bread, the Way It Is Made, and the People Who Make It (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Harold McGee, On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen (New York: Scribner, 2004); Michael Pollan, Cooked: The Natural History of Transformation (New York: The Penguin Press, 2013); and William Rubel, Bread: A Global History (London: Reaktion Books, 2011).

  “The bread is as soft as floss”: Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 13.

  The countercuisine movement: See Warren J. Belasco, Appetite for Change: How the Counterculture Took on the Food Industry (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 46–50.

  “The worst loaf of bread”: Jeffrey Steingarten, “The Whole Truth: Jeffrey Steingarten Searches for Grains That Taste as Good as They Are Good for You,” Vogue, November 2005.

  rice kitchen: See Karen Hess, The Carolina Rice Kitchen: The African Connection (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1992), 3.

  agriculture in the South became largely experimental: For information on the South’s age of experimental agriculture, see Burkhard Bilger, “True Grits,” The New Yorker, October 31, 2011, 40–53; Interview with Glenn Roberts, “Old School,” Common-place 11, no. 3 (April 2011); David Shields, “The Roots of Taste,” Common-place 11, no. 3 (April 2011); and David Shields, ed. The Golden Seed: Writings on the History and Culture of Carolina Gold Rice (Charleston: The Carolina Gold Rice Foundation, 2010).

  Carolina Gold was exported: See Hess, The Carolina Rice Kitchen, 20; and Richard Schulze, Carolina Gold Rice: The Ebb and Flow History of a Lowcountry Cash Crop (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2005).

  plant breeders discovered a way to farm more efficiently: For more on the history of plant breeding, see Noel Kingsbury, Hybrid: The History and Science of Plant Breeding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Jonathan Silvertown, An Orchard Invisible: A Natural History of Seeds (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); and Jack R. Kloppenburg, First the Seed: The Political Economy of Biotechnology, 2nd ed. (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2004).

  the Green Revolution: See Susan Dworkin, The Viking in the Wheat Field: A Scientist’s Struggle to Preserve the World’s Harvest (New York: Walker & Company, 2009); Cary Fowler and Patrick Mooney, Shattering: Food, Politics, and the Loss of Genetic Diversity (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1990); Richard Manning, Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization (New York: North Point Press, 2004); Peter Thompson, Seeds, Sex & Civilization; and Roberts, The End of Food.

  Borlaug began growing new semidwarf crosses: See Gregg Easterbrook, “Forgotten Benefactor of Humanity,” The Atlantic Monthly, January 1, 1997; and Henry W. Kindall and David Pimentel, “Constraints on the Expansion of the Global Food Supply,” Ambio 23, no. 3 (May 1994).

  Borlaug next sent his dwarf wheat to India: Roberts, The End of Food, 148–9.

  From 1950 to 1992, harvests increased: Easterbrook, “Forgotten Benefactor of Humanity.”

  more than 70 percent of the wheat grown in the developing world: See Maximina A. Lantican et al., “Impacts of International Wheat Breeding Research in the Developing World, 1988–2002,” Impact Studies 7654 (Mexico City: International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center [CIMMYT], 2005), 30.

  global increase in diet-related diseases: See Knut Schroeder et al., Sustainable Healthcare (Chichester, West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons, 2013).

  From 1950 to 2000, the amount of irrigated farmland tripled: See Lester Brown, Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009); and Sandra Postel, Pillar of Sand: Can the Irrigation Miracle Last? (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999).

  “Although high-yielding varieties”: Vandana Shiva, “The Green Revolution in the Punjab,” The Ecologist 21, no. 2 (March–April 1991).

  “akin to the relationship of the chicken and the egg”: Fowler and Mooney, Shattering, 60.

  synthetic fertilizers . . . not exactly green: See Donald L. Plucknett, “Saving Lives Through Agricultural Research,” Issues in Agriculture no. 1 (Washington, DC: Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, May 1991).

  more chemicals are needed to get the same kick: Stuart Laidlaw, “Saving Agriculture from Itself,” in Food and Fuel: Solutions for the Future, 10–11. Laidlaw writes, “Decades of monoculture had robbed the soil of its nutrients so that it now needed regular nitrogen applications to keep productive. Nitrogen also increases soil acidity, which slows biologic activity, hurting the soil’s ability to produce food on its own, so even more nitrogen must yet again be applied. The land, in short, is addicted to nitrogen.”

  “They’re looking at the swollen belly”: Interview with Susan Dworkin, Acres U.S.A., February 2010.

  “so-called miracle varieties”: Vandana Shiva, Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2000), 12.

  achieved with old-world farming techniques: See Colin Tudge, Feeding People Is Easy (Grosseto, Italy: Pari Publishing, 2007), 75–6.

  “the result of intelligent, innovative minds”: Fowler and Mooney, Shattering, 139. For more on Vavilov, see Gary Paul Nabhan, Where Our Food Comes From: Retracing Nikolay Vavilov’s Quest to End Famine (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2009).

  peasant farmers working with nature: See Shiva, Stolen Harvest, 79. Shiva cites a few remarkable examples: “Indian farmers have evolved thousands of varieties of rice. Andean farmers have bred more than 3,000 varieties of potatoes. In Papua New Guinea, more than 5,000 varieties of sweet potatoes are cultivated.”

  developed and trialed by land-grant university plant breeders: The Mountain Magic tomato was developed by Dr. Randy Gardner at North Carolina State University’s Mountain Horticultural Crops Research and Extension Center (hence the “Mountain” in its name).

  Genetically modified foods: For more on the controversy surrounding genetically modified foods, see Daniel Charles, Lords of the Harvest: Biotech, Big Money, and the Future of Food (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing, 2001); Brian J. Ford, The Future of Food: Prospects for Tomorrow (London: Thames & Hudson, 2000); Craig Holdrege and Steve Talbott, Beyond Biotechnology: The Barren Promise of Genetic Engineering (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008); Peter Pringle, Food, Inc.: Mendel to Monsanto—The Promises and Perils of the Biotech Harvest (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003); Pamela C. Ronald and Raoul W. Adamchak, Tomorrow’s Table: Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); and Josh Schonwald, The Taste of Tomorrow: Dispatches from the Future of Food (New York: HarperCollins, 2012).

  land-grant colleges: For more on land-grant institutions, see Jim Hightower, Hard Tomatoes, Hard Times (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman Publishing Company, 1973); George R. McDowell, Land-Grant Universities and Extension into the 21st Century: Renegotiating or Abandoning a Social Contract (Ames: Iowa State Press, 2001); and Roger L. Geiger and Nathan M. Sorber, eds., The Land-Grant Colleges and the Reshaping of American Higher Education (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2013).

  “prefer to talk in terms of a ‘division of labor’”: Fowler and Mooney, Shattering, 138.

  funding of agricultural research: See Food and Water Watch, “Public Research, Private Gain: Corporate Influence on University Agricultural Research” (Washington, DC: Food and Water Watch, April 2012); P. W. Heisey et al., Public Sector Plant Breeding in a Privatizing World (Washington, DC: US Dept. of Agriculture, Econom
ic Research Service, 2001); and Jorge Fernandez-Cornejo, “The Seed Industry in U.S. Agriculture: An Exploration of Data and Information on Crop Seed Markets, Regulation, Industry Structure, and Research and Development,” US Dept. of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, Agriculture Information Bulletin No. 786 (2004).

  older varieties contained more micronutrients than newer breeds: See Kevin M. Murphy, Philip G. Reeves, and Stephen S. Jones, “Relationship Between Yield and Mineral Nutrient Content in Historical and Modern Spring Wheat Cultivars,” Euphytica 163, issue 3 (October 2008): 381–90.

  “I think that the bread community”: Gabe Ulla, “Pizzaiolo Jim Lahey on Fire, Craft, and Tactile Pleasure,” Eater Online, May 8, 2012, http://eater.com/archives/2012/05/08/pizzaiolo-jim-lahey-on-fire-craft-and-tactile-pleasure.php#more.

  “midway between youth and age”: George Bernard Shaw, Too True to Be Good (New York: Samuel French Inc., 1956), 118.

  “his eyes lit up with delight”: Anka Muhlstein, Balzac’s Omelette: A Delicious Tour of French Food and Culture with Honoré de Balzac (New York: Other Press, 2011), 7.

  EPILOGUE

  “keep every cog and wheel”: Aldo Leopold, “Conservation,” in Round River: From the Journals of Aldo Leopold (1953; repr., New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 147.

  FURTHER READING

  SOIL

  Ausubel, Kenny, with J. P. Harpignies, ed., Nature’s Operating Instructions: The True Biotechnologies (San Francisco, Sierra Club Books, 2004).

  Balfour, Lady Eve, The Living Soil (London: Faber and Faber, 1943).

  Buhner, Stephen Harrod, The Lost Language of Plants: The Ecological Importance of Plant Medicines for Life on Earth (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2002).

  Carson, Rachel, Silent Spring (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1962).

  Coleman, Eliot, The New Organic Grower: A Master’s Manual of Tools and Techniques for the Home and Market Gardener (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 1989).