The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food (10 page)

Along with the new monocultures, meat production was transformed as well. Cows no longer needed to roam the fields and supply manure for soil fertility, so there was no reason for them to leave the barn. The farmer brought the field to them. As the system became more refined, and the animals’ living conditions more confined, farmers gained far greater control over protein production. Feed mills, feedlots, slaughterhouses—the entire animal food chain became industrialized.

Not coincidentally, flavorful food dies a little, too, at this point. What Pollan called the original sin of monoculture also helped pave the way for the original sin of food preparation: large-scale food processing. The specialization of farming, and the reduction in crop prices, allowed the food-processing industry to take hold. Using technology developed to feed the military
during World War II, the industry created processed food that saved time and liberated women from cooking.

The rise of the American processed-food industry is nearly always examined through the lens of convenience, and of course there’s truth to the claim. But at the heart of these changes was Haber’s invention, which, by freeing the farmer from the constraints of nature, allowed the industrialization of the food industry to flourish. Some see Haber’s invention as the savior of mankind. Today about
three billion people depend on synthetic nitrogen to grow the crops they eat, and in coming years the number will likely only grow. Others argue that Haber’s science has saturated the planet with excess nitrogen, creating a profound chemical dependency in agriculture and, in the process, precipitating many of the most vexing environmental problems we face today: soil erosion, global warming, pollution of streams and rivers, and the fouling of the world’s oceans.

For good or ill, it’s hard to think of many scientific discoveries that have had a more profound effect on the world. It’s also hard to think of a discovery that’s been more disastrous for the flavor of food.

Not everyone bought into the degradation of soil life. The problems with the chemical approach to farming (what we now call conventional agriculture) were apparent almost from the beginning. As early as 1924, Rudolf Steiner, the Austrian philosopher and father of biodynamic agriculture, was warning farmers against a reductive approach to growing food, because he believed it harmed subtle ecological relationships that were not fully understood.

But the opposition might have found its most influential spokesperson in an English botanist named Sir Albert Howard. Like William Albrecht, Howard saw soil health as a kind of universal string theory, a belowground
answer to everything possible aboveground. Howard’s prescription was to begin “
treating the whole problem of health in soil, plant, animal and man as one great subject.” He studied soil science but also botany, plant science, animal science, medicine, and, late in his career, economics, because he felt all of these disciplines were ultimately connected.

Disenchanted with the narrowness of university research (he found the work of “
learning more and more about less and less” stifling), Howard decided to put his learning into practice. At the age of thirty-two, he was sent to India as a development worker to teach Indian peasants some of the modern ways of growing food. He remained for twenty-five years and ultimately determined that it was the Indian peasants who had taught
him
. Nature, he came to understand through close field observation, was the “supreme farmer.” Weeds and pests were his “
professors of agriculture.”

His book
An Agricultural Testament,
published in 1940, later emerged from this work and became the bible for the organic movement. If healthy soils were to last—if they were to be “sustainable,” as we now say—they would need constant feeding. Howard advocated on behalf of the soil’s tiny underground livestock. When fed well, he argued, they do their work to support the fertility of land and lead to a lot of good things, including more flavorful food. According to Howard, vegetables raised on a diet of N-P-K are “
tough, leathery and fibrous: they also lack taste.” But vegetables grown with humus are “tender, brittle, and possess abundant flavour.”

Howard’s virtue was neither pious nor self-serving. He was calm and steady
in his faith in nature, and his writing is so matter-of-fact (this from a lab scientist, remember) and effortlessly contemporary that his books read more like thoughtful journals than the organic manifestos they would become.

“
The maintenance of soil fertility is the real basis of health and of resistance to disease,” he wrote in
An Agricultural Testament
. Howard saw farmers heading in the other direction. He saw the chemical trend as, at best, shortsighted and, at worst, a folly that would result in the collapse of soil’s
productive capacity.
Artificial manures, he believed, “lead inevitably to artificial nutrition, artificial food, artificial animals and finally to artificial men and women.”

Healthy soil brings vigorous plants, stronger and smarter people, cultural empowerment, and the wealth of a nation. Bad soil, in short, threatens civilization. We cannot have good food—healthy, sustainable, or delicious—without soil filled with life.

B
ACK
WHEN
THE
S
TONE
B
ARNS
Center opened for business in the spring of 2004, the soils growing the vegetables for Blue Hill were already filled with life. That wasn’t just luck. Ten years after I first read Eliot Coleman’s advice on growing healthy plants, he was hired to consult on the center’s creation. Eliot’s charge was to identify the best land on the property for cultivating vegetables.

The first time he came to visit the site was on a crisp fall afternoon in 2002. As the daylight faded in the cold, slow burn of late November, Eliot seemed anxious. He had decided on a relatively flat, healthy field running the length of the property. But then we came to the bottom of another long field, sloping upward from the largest of the stone barns (Blue Hill’s future dining room), where the dairy cows had been milked in the 1930s and ’40s. Eliot stopped and scanned the six-acre expanse.

“The cows probably pastured here,” he said softly, almost to himself. When I turned to look, Eliot had dropped his bag and started running. He traversed the old pasture, slaloming back and forth, dodging rocks and thistle, all along rotating his head to study the position of the waning sun. He ran past what would later become home to rows of tomatoes, cucumbers, fava beans, parsnips, and eventually the Eight Row Flint corn, until he arrived at the highest point, where he raised his finger to the sun. Then he was off again, to the northeast corner of the field, where he stopped, hands on hips, and scanned the land intently. Even in his early sixties (and still today), there
was something hopeful and blithe in his pursuit. Eliot is like a wild horse—curious, observant, sly, and energized by an intuitive connection to nature. I watched him in awe.

“Hey, fucking cool,” he said on his return, his dirty blond hair gleaming in the dull light. His eyes were wide and nearly pulsating; he looked to be breathing through them. He had a fistful of soil, and he turned his hand up so I could have a look.

“Black enough for you?” he asked. “
This
is the field. Forget the other one. It’s making me hungry just thinking about what you’re going to grow here.” I asked if he had changed his mind based on the field’s position in relation to the sun.

“The sun? Oh, hell, no. I was looking at the sun because it’s so damn beautiful right now.” He squinted his eyes, admiring the last of it setting in the distance. “No, I wanted to make sure this had been pasture for the cows.”

Eliot explained that the field closest to the milking barns was usually the one most grazed by the cows (why walk the cattle farther than necessary at 5 a.m.?) and therefore the most mineralized by manure. In this case, he was right. The field, we later confirmed, had once been grazed by the Rockefeller family’s dairy cattle.

“I bet there’s a deep layering of organic matter,” Eliot said. “It’s going to grow vigorous, absolutely delicious plants.”

Having mapped out the land, Eliot was assigned his second task: help find a farmer. Here he had the good sense to consult Amigo Bob Cantisano, the legendary and widely influential sage of California organic agriculture. I first met Amigo at Laverstoke—he had been among Eliot’s Fertile Dozen. Mutton-chopped and mustached, he has thick, silvery-black Rasta hair down his back, and he speaks through a spitball of chewing tobacco, making him look more Pancho Villa–like than plain old Bob-like. (Which may explain why he’s simply called “Amigo”—the name his girlfriend gave him in high school.)

Amigo recommended Jack Algiere, a young farmer he had grown to admire after consulting with him on an organic olive farm. “I’ve worked with
so many farmers over time, I can’t remember one from the other,” he told me, though I wondered if his years spent under the herbal influence might also account for the haziness. “Sometimes I’ll work with a guy who could have been a rocket scientist if he had wanted—you know, they’ve really just got it going on up here,” he said, drilling his index finger into the side of his skull. “Jack’s one of those.”

Jack turned out to be as gifted as Amigo Bob promised, and as curious as Eliot about how to grow great-tasting food.

One day, during an especially cold stretch of winter in 2006, a few years after Blue Hill at Stone Barns opened, Jack came running into the kitchen, smiling big. Jack has curly hair and—especially back when his beard was still full and flowing—the look of a man who works closely with nature. You might say (although he wouldn’t) that he’s sort of a cross between Paul Bunyan and a young Bob Dylan.

On this particular day, he held two big handfuls of bunched carrots, their green tops waving in the air like pom-poms. It’s hard not to be taken by Jack’s electric good cheer in moments like these—showing off a new variety, or a perfectly ripe vegetable. You’d think such displays would happen often in a kitchen that’s connected to a working farm, but the truth is that we tend to ignore one another, the farmers and the cooks, precisely because we’re so close. The morning harvest arrives, it gets organized in the receiving room and stored in the coolers, and by the end of dinner service it’s gone.

“We’re sort of like a marriage,” Jack once said. “We need to do one of those date nights every week just so we can actually talk.”

Jack placed the carrots on a cutting board and took a step back, allowing us to admire his work. The last time he’d displayed his wares like this, it was an exotic variety of ginger, and before that an “extra dwarf” bok choy that fit into my palm. But carrots? They were always growing—in the field during
the spring and summer and in the greenhouse most of the winter and spring. They were usually good carrots, sometimes exceptionally good, but did they deserve such swagger?

“Sixteen-point-nine, pal,” he finally said. “Sixteen-point-freakin’-nine.”

“Sixteen-point-nine?” I repeated, not understanding.

“Brix,” Jack said, removing a small handheld refractometer from his pocket as evidence. Refractometers, which look like high-tech spyglasses, are popular tools for measuring the Brix, or amount of sugar present, in a fruit or vegetable. They’ve been used for years to verify levels of sweetness in grapes, helping winemakers determine ideal harvest times.

But Brix also indicates the presence of healthy oils and amino acids, proteins, and—this is key—minerals, those ingredients that Albrecht recognized were so critical for flavor. A 16.9 reading means the carrots were 16.9 percent sugar—and bursting with minerals. It’s an extraordinarily high number, which Jack made sure I understood, even as the cooks, being cooks, drifted away to get back to work.

“Off-the-charts high,” Jack said, watching me take a bite. He wasn’t kidding. The variety, mokum, had been shown to reach a Brix of 12, a fact Jack discovered before his visit to the kitchen. So the astonishingly delicious mokum carrots I tasted that day were, in fact, off the charts.

Jack grew up on a farm tucked away at the end of a mile-long driveway along the Pawcatuck River in southern Rhode Island. In the mornings, his mother would open the kitchen door to shoo her son into the forest and fields, not to return until dinnertime. His carefree explorations gave him a passion for nature that the biologist E. O. Wilson, who enjoyed the same kind of childhood, calls “biophilia”—an “
innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes.”

By the time Jack graduated from high school, he had decided to farm for
a living. That summer, he worked in a large greenhouse close to home, growing vegetables, shrubs, trees, and a variety of flowers, all started from tissue cultures rather than seed.

“That’s how greenhouses generally work,” he explained to me. “You grow five thousand plants that are carbon copies of one another.” Genetic uniformity like this—a super-monoculture, essentially—under a closed roof is extremely susceptible to plant disease, which is why organic farming in greenhouses is so rare.

Jack saw the failings of the system up close. “One morning I went to water the geraniums,” he told me. “I noticed a tiny black spot on one of the stems, which means you’re about to be in major doo-doo.” The black spot was made by a type of mold. And because of the crop’s uniformity, Jack knew that none of the plants would have a natural defense against it. By noon that day the black spots had covered all the stems.

Jack consulted with the farm’s owner, Bud Smith. “Bud was traveling at the time, but he had me go to this closet where we kept the full arsenal of chemicals and load up the strongest fungicide they had. I remember he said: ‘Jack, don’t fuck with this stuff.’ If Bud was saying that, this had to be toxic as all hell.” Bud had him wear a special protective suit and instructed him to seal the openings with duct tape.

“I caught a glimpse of myself as I walked out to the greenhouse. Like a space monster,” Jack said. And then he sprayed—four entire houses filled with geraniums. “By the time I had finished spraying the first half of that first house, I was weeping. And I wept again inside when we realized the chemical had failed,” Jack said. “The geraniums that survived looked really weird and ended up going to a local cemetery’s urns, if you can believe the irony. But the memory of spraying stayed with me. It’s the closest I’ve felt to being in the middle of a battlefield during a totally senseless war. I walked out of there and said to myself,
I don’t want to be doing this
. And do you know what? I never did it again.”

He intended to quit but was torn by his respect for Bud’s great talent as a
greenhouse grower. So Jack went to Bud’s office to talk to him. “I walked in and saw Bud sitting at his desk, looking up at me,” Jack said. “He knew. He absolutely knew what had happened. It was the first time I’d ever seen an adult look vulnerable. So instead of quitting, I blurted out, ‘Isn’t there another way?’ I realized at that moment that Bud didn’t want to be spraying chemicals—he hated it, actually, and so does every farmer farming conventionally. All Bud said was, ‘What can I do? The customer wants geraniums, a lot of them, and they’ll only pay so much.’”

Jack convinced Bud to let him take over a few of the greenhouses and convert them to organic. “I made a million and a half mistakes,” he said, “but converting those greenhouses totally changed my life. Without the license to try—to see that it could really work, organically—I probably would have quit farming altogether.”

Realizing he needed to learn more, Jack studied horticulture at the University of Rhode Island. During his second year of studies, he had another epiphany. “The departments, the professors—they were all there acting as enablers, keeping the chemical industry going because someone somewhere had determined it was worth keeping alive,” he said. “It was as if I was in school to learn how better to kill the geraniums instead of how to prevent the fungus.”

Then he discovered the library’s collection of agriculture books, which included works by Sir Albert Howard and Rudolf Steiner. “I read them and it clicked,” he said. “I mean, it all just came together. Steiner was crying out to farmers in the mid-1920s, basically saying, ‘Don’t be fooled by chemicals!’ He really spoke to me, because that’s exactly what I was trying to say to Bud:
Don’t be fooled by all of this.
I didn’t know enough at the time to know that I was right, but when I read Steiner I suddenly took on a kind of confidence I had never experienced before.”

When Amigo Bob contacted him about the job at Stone Barns, Jack and his wife, Shannon, were happily farming someone else’s land in Connecticut. He took the job mainly for the chance to bring together the ideas of Howard
and Steiner on a farm of his own design, one that connected the soil to everything around it—the flora and fauna, as he likes to say, but also the culture of the place.

The project didn’t start off well. “Literally just before Stone Barns is to open, on my first day of work, 9 a.m., I drive up to the gate at the entrance to the farm and I find myself behind a large herbicide-spraying truck,” Jack told me.
“Spray the Problems Away Inc.
or something like that. We sit there, both of us waiting for the gate to open, and I’m thinking,
Who’s this guy?
So I honk my horn and get out of the car. ‘Excuse me,’ I say to the guy. ‘What are you doing here today?’ He looks at me all confused and says, ‘I’m here to spray,’ just like that. I’m thinking, wait a second, this is supposed to be a freakin’ organic farm, right? The gate opens and we both drive in, the chemical truck and me, and I’m banging the dashboard, screaming, ‘
This can’t be fucking happening.’
I had just left a great job, moved with my wife to a place where we didn’t know a soul, and the first minute of the first day on a farm I’m about to spend—oh, I don’t know, the next forty years—is going to get showered with an herbicide.

“We pull up to the offices, and I tell the guy to hang out a second. There are like three hundred people running around in construction hats, but no one to deal with this. Finally I get to the head of the construction company and ask about the chemical guy with the big truck. He consults his work sheet for the day. Sure enough, right there on the schedule is a 9 a.m. appointment to spray Rodeo in the pond between the future greenhouse and the future outdoor vegetable field. Supposedly there was an outbreak of phragmites, an invasive grass, and since the Stone Barns Center hadn’t officially formed yet, these construction guys were just doing what they needed to do. It was like I was walking into the Wild West.

“I said, forget it. This is going to be an organic farm. If the guy sprays this stuff, game over. The head of construction looks at me, sympathetic, even though he has absolutely no idea what Rodeo is or how toxic it could be for the farm, or even that I’m barely ten minutes into the first hour of the first
day of my new job. I got ready to send the chemical guy home when the construction head discovers that the Rodeo spray, and a whole schedule of spraying for the next month, had already been contracted for. Thirty-five thousand dollars. Done, papers signed. I left and called James [Ford, the founding executive director of the Center], and he and I hatched a plan right there. The chemical company could keep their money, but they wouldn’t spray. And that’s what happened: $35,000 to do essentially nothing. I keep thinking, even to this day, what if I had showed up late for work?”