The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food (18 page)

When Eduardo said that chefs don’t deserve his foie gras, he was really saying that unless you serve his foie gras like Alice Waters served that peach, and call it what it is—Mas Masumoto’s Sun Crest peach—you’re arguing that the translation of the work is better than the original. Chefs don’t deserve his foie gras because the livers are already brilliant.

But if we want to respect nature’s gifts, we needn’t simply serve a lone liver (or a peach, or anything else on a plate). By transforming superior ingredients into something transcendent, chefs like Bocuse and Palladin showed how it was possible to make a gift from nature even more brilliant.

N
OT
LONG
after returning from Extremadura, I was standing at Blue Hill’s kitchen delivery door when Craig Haney pulled up to unload Stone Barns’ weekly slaughter of 150 chickens. Craig looked disheveled, exhausted, and—having just completed the nine-hour round-trip to the nearest slaughterhouse—rightly disturbed. “Running late?” I asked.

“Running on empty,” he said, sounding like a country song.

The subject of chickens can turn Craig into a temporary killjoy. It’s not that he doesn’t enjoy raising them. Or that he lacks a market: of the 150 birds, Blue Hill will buy 100, sometimes more if Craig is willing to sell them. The rest get sold at the Stone Barns farmers’ market, and since the chickens are delicious, demand is overwhelming.

The problem is profit. The 150 chickens were being unloaded at a retail price of $3 per pound, at an average bird weight somewhere in the neighborhood of three and a half pounds. That puts the gross revenue per bird at about $10.

But if gross receipts are misleading, in the business of farming they are often grossly misleading. Taking into account the cost of purchasing the chick ($1), the feed during its seven weeks of life (organic, in this case), electricity, gas (though not mileage and wear and tear on the vehicle, or on Craig’s mental state), the $2.25 to get the bird slaughtered, and on and on (and on and on), Craig will net, exclusive of labor, about $3 per bird—which is to say $450 per week for raising chickens.

“Add in labor,” he said to me as I jotted down the numbers on a piece of paper, “and I think this is pretty close to a not-for-profit business.”

“What about raising more chickens?” I asked, in a tone that suggested,
Have you thought of that?

“We could, but something else would have to give.”

I thought of the egg-laying chickens. Since the 1,200 laying hens essentially add the same benefits to the farm as the broiler chickens we raise for meat—namely, that they follow the sheep, spread the manure, eat the grubs and insects, and provide nitrogen for the grass—wouldn’t reducing their number, or maybe even eliminating them altogether, be one place to start?

“Yeah, I’ve thought of that,” Craig said. “But then we’d have less eggs . . .”

I nodded my head but quickly calculated adding another thousand broiler chickens to the bottom line. All of a sudden the net per bird increased by nearly fifty cents. Not bad.

I offered some other ideas, like filling the moving pens with just ten more birds each. I had been in one of the pens the day before with Craig. It wasn’t crowded. By New York City standards, you might call the living space generous. Could the chickens suffer a little less elbow room for the sake of the bottom line? I decided they could. As Craig put away the last of the delivery, I added ten chickens for every movable chicken pen, which when fed through the spreadsheet disproportionately bolstered the bottom line.

My brother, David, once helped me understand the restaurant business by explaining that it was much like the airline industry: the flight’s going to take off, and for the most part the costs are fixed, so once you fill the requisite number of seats to break even, every passenger after that is essentially pure profit. Was there a farming equivalent to airline vacation packages and a restaurant’s early-bird special? According to the spreadsheet, there was: Raise more chickens.

“What about the sheep?” I asked as Craig got ready to leave. For the moment I was kidding, and then somehow, just as quickly I wasn’t.

The amount of real estate required to raise sheep on an all-grass diet is
significant, and though I knew the intention was to grow the herd to the point at which Craig could process several per week, potentially turning a profit, maybe the capital investment could be better spent elsewhere. We’d gotten an average of one lamb a month since Stone Barns opened—one lamb that, on a busy night, would last about an hour. It was excellent lamb, but so was the lamb from other farmers. Considering the numbers, I had to ask myself, why wouldn’t we do this? Without lambs, I was proposing a tenfold increase in chicken production, maybe much more.

As Craig packed up to go home, I took the time to ask him more about the costs of raising the birds. Airlines try to get as many people to fly with them as they can, but they cut costs, too, and since, what the hell, I was already into these numbers, I could push a bit further. Where was the fat?

It looked as though the largest costs, aside from labor, were definitely the organic feed and the processing costs. A 40 percent bump to serve the chickens organic grain seemed, at first glance, awfully steep. But since Craig can label the chickens organic, it allows him to raise the price per pound. I figured it was a wash.

But $1 just to buy the chick? And $2.25 to process? Staring at the numbers, these choices seemed a little like serving hot food on a short flight—overkill. I made a note to investigate on-site breeding and slaughtering. (“Vertical integration,” my brother would later explain. “But vertically integrating a nonprofit farm raising a few hundred chickens sounds weird. The way to do it would be to contract with other farmers,” he said, scribbling some numbers on a notepad in an apparent gene-determined quest to push profits, “and use Craig’s protocol for raising chickens, which is unique. Less hassle, and much less risk.”)

The experience of studying the numbers so closely was putting me in a kind of trance. To earn more without adding any real costs was exhilarating to think about. The simple categories I sketched out—costs on one side, profits on the other—were no doubt the same Excel spreadsheet computations made by an industrial animal feedlot. Inputs in, profits out. Leaving all of nature’s frustrating complexities off the spreadsheet (how would the grass
degrade with a spike in the nitrogen-rich chicken manure, for instance?) wasn’t my intent, but for the moment it sure made the calculations easier to contemplate. I found myself really enjoying the exercise.

Which is my point. Why? Why, in this ten- or fifteen-minute, off-the-cuff exchange, did I fall into the trap of looking at the world of chickens through a spreadsheet? I didn’t own the farm. I wouldn’t have profited at all from this calculation. We weren’t talking about raising a better-tasting chicken. In fact, we were almost assuredly talking about raising a less tasty chicken, which, coming from a chef, made it all the more curious. What I wanted—ridiculously, now that I think about it—was to get to an impressive profit number for raising broiler chickens. Not for any shareholders or investors, and in the end not even for Craig. The spreadsheet was merely for me.

In
The Unsettling of America
, Wendell Berry mentions a reporter who writes about “
the bigness of modern agriculture—which he approves of, so far as one can tell, because it amazes him.” I had, if only for a few minutes, pushed the idea of turning Stone Barns into a chicken factory because the numbers amazed me.

I handed the spreadsheet to Craig. He studied the numbers before smiling. “So it’s either get big or get out,” he said, quoting Earl Butz, President Nixon’s secretary of agriculture in the 1970s. “We just retraced the last sixty years of American agriculture.”

Later that week, I read over my notes from the visit to Eduardo’s farm. There were exclamation points, double underlines, and sketches of the farm. Near the end I came to a page where I had written in the margins. I had asked Eduardo what he thought of conventional foie gras. Since 99.99 percent of the fattened goose liver in the world is produced with gavage, I asked, what did he think of normal foie gras?

I underlined his response: “It’s an insult to history.”

Of all the things that can be said about the way foie gras is produced, “an insult to history” struck me as oddly abstract. Thinking that some research might help decode his statement, I looked up the history of foie gras. It turns out, what I knew about foie gras didn’t go back far enough. In characteristic American fashion, my history only looked back a few hundred years. In fact, the practice dates back five thousand years, to when
ancient Egyptians observed how wild geese along the Nile gorged on figs before migrating. The meat from these birds was understandably more delicious, and quickly became popular among the ruling class.

Unfortunately, nature couldn’t keep up with human demand. Force-feeding was the answer, allowing the same results to be achieved year-round. Ancient frescoes discovered in the tombs of Egyptian officials show servants forcefully gorging geese with pellets of grain. Whether the force-feeding was intended to enhance the liver specifically or for the benefit of the meat, it’s difficult to know. (Some believe that the liver itself might not have been eaten until Roman times.) But the practice quickly spread throughout Europe, thanks in large part to the Jews, who used the rendered goose and duck fat as schmaltz.

Either way, Eduardo had a point. The discovery of fattened goose liver came from an observation about nature, a scene along the Nile so pure you can picture it. For Eduardo, to take what was natural—liver from geese gorging for the long migration—and turn it into a year-round industry is an insult to its history.

The story of the chicken in this country might just be the closest thing we’ve got to a living, breathing example of Eduardo’s insult to history.

Not that long ago, nearly every farm had a small flock of chickens, of
numerous varieties. They were laying hens, as opposed to broilers, as eggs were a dependable source of income, and broiler chickens had not yet been bred for meat production. At one time, at least sixty known breeds thrived across the United States. Raising only one breed, and raising only chickens at the expense of other animals, is an entirely new concept, and an industrial one at that. A farm raising only chickens would have been as unique and unlikely a hundred years ago as a multispecies animal farm like Stone Barns is today.

It all changed quite by accident, in the Delmarva Peninsula of Delaware, where in 1923
Mrs. Cecile Steele ordered fifty chicks from a hatchery, which misread the order and instead sent five hundred chicks. What do you do with five hundred laying chickens when you’re not set up to handle a mountain of eggs? You either send back the order or, in the case of Mrs. Steele, you build a small shed and raise the birds for meat. Eighteen weeks later, she sold the birds for sixty-two cents per pound—equal to more than $5 per pound today. The following year, her husband left his job and stayed home to raise the thousand chicks his wife ordered—this time intentionally. Within three years they were raising ten thousand birds per year, and their neighbors soon followed suit. Ten years later, this tiny, two-hundred-mile peninsula of Delaware was producing seven million broiler chickens a year.

Success meant that more farmers started raising only chickens. Looking at a map of what, after World War II, became the official “Broiler Belt”—extending from the Delmarva Peninsula down through North Carolina and across the South into Mississippi and Arkansas—you get the sense that the domino expansion of the chicken industry unfolded the old-fashioned way: farmers saw the success of their neighbors and jumped on board. It was the farming equivalent of keeping up with the Joneses.

Specialization certainly helped farm profits (my spreadsheet was clear on that), but it didn’t last. The stunning increase in production meant an eventual price reduction as supply outstripped demand. When profits fell, farmers looked for ways to cut costs and become more efficient.

The Perdue chicken company, of Salisbury, Maryland, came to epitomize that efficiency. In 1920, founder
Arthur Perdue went into the poultry business. At first, selling chickens was for Perdue a mere by-product of egg production. It wasn’t until his son, Frank, joined the business, in 1939, that the Perdue company radically transformed itself with a few key decisions. The first was to give up the egg business. When a rare disease, leukosis, wiped out their entire flock of egg layers in the 1940s, Arthur and Frank decided to switch to meat chickens, gambling that the price of meat would rise. It did—dramatically.

In part, the burgeoning success of the broiler industry was due to better broilers. By the 1930s, breeders were developing chickens that simultaneously grew faster and required less grain feed. The same advances in genetics that reshaped the foie gras industry achieved a kind of über-success with broilers and laying hens. Craig still benefits today. His broiler chickens grow from chick to market weight in an astonishing seven weeks, less than half the time Mrs. Steele’s chickens took to fatten and with less than half the feed.

As Steve Striffler notes in his book
Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of America’s Favorite Food
, this wasn’t just progress. It was a fundamental change in how we raise animals: “
The barnyard chicken was made over into a highly efficient machine for converting feed grains into cheap animal-flesh protein.”

Determined to maximize the profitability of this new machine, Frank experimented with mixing his own feed for the chickens—an exercise that quickly proved lucrative. His mixes were cheaper and put weight on his birds faster than anything he could purchase. Within ten years, Perdue owned its own feed mill, one of the largest grain storage facilities on the East Coast. It owned the processors, too—the companies that slaughtered, cleaned, and packed the chickens—after Frank concluded that Perdue paid other companies too much for the service. (For what it’s worth, that was my conclusion, too, when Craig and I looked at the $2.25 cost to slaughter each bird.)

But Frank Perdue’s most important innovation was yet to come. In 1968, Perdue became the
first poultry company to differentiate its product with a label. It was one of several transformative moments in modern agriculture—on a par with what the nouvelle chefs did to gastronomy by breaking with tradition and cultivating their own distinctive cooking styles. Frank bet that consumers would favor a particular kind of chicken and pay more for it, a radical idea at the time. Paul Bocuse might have helped shape the business of haute cuisine, but Frank Perdue ultimately revolutionized the business of food.