The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food (22 page)

But the impoverished land is only part of the story. For a place to produce such remarkable products, including
jamón ibérico
, and for a semiarid region to hold on to its remarkable biodiversity—so high it has been compared to that of a tropical rainforest—my rooftop view couldn’t fully explain the embarrassment of riches, nor why the riches have endured.

I thought back to John Muir, and his statement that “when we try to pick out anything by itself” in nature, “we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” That much was clear even from the rooftop. Remove, say, the sheep from grazing and the pigs would begin to feed on denuded grass. Eventually the
jamón
would change, too.
*

But
how
these things are connected—the hitching itself—is just as important. One way to measure the strength of these connections—which is to say, the sustainability of a place—is to look at how deeply they penetrate the culture.

Aldo Leopold, reflecting on America in the mid-1900s, believed that our culture had it mostly wrong. His anthology
A Sand County Almanac
, published shortly after his death in 1949 and considered by many scholars to be
the bible of American environmentalism, includes his now famous essay “The Land Ethic,” in which he argued that our idea of a community, prefaced on the interaction between human beings, was simply too limited. A broader definition of a sustainable community was needed to include soil, water, plants, and animals—“or collectively: the land.”

In other words, he defined community the way the Spanish use the word
tierra
, viewing each component of the system the way Klaas viewed his wild plants—as so critical to the other parts, they fit together like a living pyramid:

The bottom layer is the soil, an insect layer on the plants, a bird and rodent layer on the insects, and so on up through various animal groups to the apex layer, which consists of the larger carnivores. . . . Each successive layer depends on those below it for food and often for other services, and each in turn furnishes food and services to those above.

But Leopold was not entirely satisfied with this metaphor. Any complete understanding of the land, he argued, required an ethical component as well.

“That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is
an extension of ethics,” he wrote. Leopold saw it as our responsibility, as members of the community, to protect nature’s greatest gift: its capacity for self-renewal. “A land ethic, then, reflects the existence of an ecological conscience, and this in turn reflects a conviction of individual responsibility for the health of the land.”

Without an ethic, the connections invariably weaken. To Leopold’s American readers, this was a radical concept, but a sense of ethics is implicit in the culture of the
dehesa
. Farmers are raised to respect the land as nearly sacred ground. As Lisa told me, Spaniards find the
dehesa
nothing short of profoundly beautiful, in the same way that an American might find Yosemite or the Rockies beautiful—not only because it is, but because so much in their history and education tells them it is.

“It’s very much a question of
values
, not just value,” Miguel explained to me. “That’s what explains how the traditional farmers and producers have behaved for generations, and why still today they put tradition, nature, or instinct before technology, choosing to produce better, not just more.”

Today, farmers routinely plant new oaks to replenish natural loss. It’s not
done for personal gain—in their own lifetimes those trees will never produce an acorn. The practice is largely based on what their parents and grandparents did before them, a tradition in line with the Mennonite belief that you start raising a child one hundred years before he is born.

To truly see how deeply these values penetrate the culture, one need only look at what people are eating.
Extremaduran food is unadorned and simple, reflecting its peasant origins and the poverty of the land.

Start with ham. (The Spanish always do.) As Miguel explained,
jamón
is, in essence, a poor product. The meat is sliced paper thin. It is served sparingly. And it’s merely one preparation of one part of the pig. There are other regional
embutidos
(cured meats), like the
morcillas
(blood sausages, which come in numerous forms),
lomo
(cured tenderloin), and the famous chorizo. The ribs are often served in the regional variation of
migas
(a traditional Spanish dish of fried day-old bread crumbs). And then there is the
secreto ibérico—
a prized cut of meat near the shoulder blade that is prepared simply, cooked over a high flame.

Since great
jamón
cannot exist without the sheep, there are delicious uses for sheep’s milk (such as the renowned Torta del Casar and La Serena cheeses) and also the meat from older sheep once they no longer graze—
caldereta de cordero
is a slow braise of mutton, stewed with garlic and potatoes. The Extremaduran
chanfaina
is braised second cuts—brain, heart, kidneys, and liver—mixed with boiled eggs and bread crumbs.

The abundant wildlife of Extremadura—partridge, rabbit, deer, and wild boar—are also incorporated into the cuisine, and they are often served with locally foraged mushrooms and greens. Bee populations thrive, feasting on the plant diversity to produce exceptionally sweet honey. And of course there is the local olive oil, which makes its way into almost every dish.

The land never suffered from settlers imposing their dietary preferences on the ecology, as ours did during American settlers’ disastrous westward march across a fertile and undeveloped continent. It was just the opposite. People’s diets (as well as pigs’) evolved from, and with, the ecology.

Eduardo’s foie gras, while not a traditional product of the region, is informed by the same set of values. It’s difficult to argue that it is a poor product. One of Eduardo’s livers costs about $700—an exorbitant price, when you compare it with the $80 Moulard livers I can buy from suppliers. And yet, as Eduardo pointed out to me, he almost never sells his livers whole. Instead he makes them into pâté (a technique owed to chef Jean-Joseph Clause, the French culinary genius awarded twenty pistols by King Louis XVI), or confits single slices, cooking them in their own fat. In this way, he can preserve them for weeks or months, whereas a fresh liver has a lifespan of a few days. And, more important, he stretches them over many servings. Eduardo’s geese require quite a lot of time and care, and copious amounts of natural feed. Stretching one liver over multiple meals—over multiple weeks—means the liver
can be savored.

Compare that with the average restaurant preparation. With foie gras (especially Moulard duck liver) faster and easier to produce, the result has been a radical change in the way we’re able to enjoy foie gras. Most American chefs today lob off a large slab of the liver and sear it in a pan, just as they would a seven-ounce steak (though the fat is so meltingly tender, you can eat it with a spoon). In the words of Thomas Keller, that’s not cooking, that’s heating. The “transcendental act” of good cooking turns out to be more than just culinary. It’s an ecological act, too.

It took that rooftop view to get me to see something about Eduardo I hadn’t fully considered. His foie gras is so brilliant because of what it owes to the
dehesa
, a system of agriculture that is almost antithetical to farming as we know it.

Eduardo’s conviction that “all you need is to give the geese what they want and they will reward you” may sound sentimental, but he is referring to a universal truth about nature. When we allow nature to work, which means
when we farm in a way that promotes all of its frustrating inefficiencies—when we
grow nature
—we end up producing more than we could with whatever system we might replace it with. In a finely tuned system like the
dehesa
, it gives you
jamón
and beef and cheese and figs and olives, and enough will be left over to fatten your geese, too, if you let it.

When Eduardo said that conventional foie gras was an insult to the history of foie gras, he was not speaking about force-feeding. He was commenting on the affront to the natural world, on the destruction of what nature can provide. It is free for the taking, so long as you play by the rules. Playing by the rules means you act quietly on the land—some profits from olives and figs are forfeited for the geese, some geese are sacrificed for the hawks, cattle and sheep share the land with pigs, pigs share the acorns with geese, and so on. Conventional American agriculture mostly does not play by the rules. In its relentless drive for higher yields—more corn, more chemicals, more monocultures—it fixes the game. It de-natures nature. That’s the insult. It makes a mockery of what was a gift.

Wes is right: we live in a fallen world, and no matter how hard we try—no matter how brilliantly we feed the soil, or how ably we adopt Klaas’s masterful rotations—agriculture itself will always come into some sort of conflict with nature if we seek to control it. But what if we could coexist with natural systems rather than dominate them? What if the model for the
dehesa
—disrupt nature (flood the system with pigs, strip the cork off the oak tree) but also act with restraint (limit the pigs to whatever the acorn harvest dictates, harvest the cork sparingly and replant trees for future generations)—could become the template for the future of agriculture?

Looking out over the land, I realized that in front of me was an answer to a question at the core of Aldo Leopold’s land ethic: how do we keep in check our incentive to abuse the land for maximum economic return, and transition from a “conqueror of the land-community” to a “plain member and citizen of it”? We should start, he thought, by erasing any divisions between eating and farming. From my perch, that much seemed obvious. And yet the dictates of
the American diet have done exactly the opposite, demanding that the land produce what we most want to eat.

Our current template for changing the system is to opt out of it: eat seasonal, buy local, choose organic whenever possible. For all the virtues of farm-to-table eating, a rooftop view of the
dehesa
makes the shortcomings of that ethos easy to see. Our job isn’t just to support the farmer; it’s really to support the land that supports the farmer. That’s a larger distinction than it sounds like. Even the most sustainably minded farmers grow crops and raise meats in proportion to what we demand. And what we demand generally throws off the balance of what the land can reasonably provide.

Jamón ibérico
might have done the same if the culture didn’t dictate slicing the meat paper thin. Or if
jamón
was the only product of the region. Instead, a larger cuisine grew out of negotiations with the environment, and it has helped maintain the delicate ecological balance ever since.

A rooftop view of the
dehesa
almost inevitably raises the question, What if our ways of eating—not merely a plate of food, but a whole pattern of cooking—were in perfect balance with the land around us?

Eduardo hinted at the answer when he held that piece of
jamón
up to the light as the model for his foie gras. Until that point, I had understood
jamón
only insofar as I understood that the white lines of fat running through the ham meant the pig had been blessed with a diet rich in acorns. Now I was realizing that Eduardo really held up the entirety of an ecological system, a road map for a Third Plate. Chefs can narrate that message in the same way that those striations of fat, and the red meat that surrounded them, narrate a story as intricate, complex, connected, and—to borrow from Jack’s description of how soil works—
mysterious
as the landscape that made it.

J
UST
BEFORE
I left Cárdeno and returned to the airport, I asked Eduardo a question that had been lingering in my mind all day. Despite their best efforts, no one has been able to replicate
jamón ibérico
outside of the
dehesa.
Did he think it would be possible to replicate his natural foie gras elsewhere in the world?

“Yes, yes, of course,” he said, though he cautioned that the livers wouldn’t taste the same.

I asked him how they would taste. “It depends on what the geese chose to eat. They decide. In England, I know a producer that raises geese close to the sea. I hate this liver! It tastes like fish!”

“What about the lack of acorns?” I asked. “Wouldn’t that be a problem?”

“No, really, you don’t have to have acorns. In Denmark, there are no acorns; the geese eat tubers similar to a wild potato and the liver is beautiful, with the aroma of root vegetables. Raise them on a coffee plantation in the right way and the liver will taste like coffee.”

I wondered what a Stone Barns version would taste like—and then, almost as soon as the question occurred to me, I was already plotting how I would persuade Craig to sign on to the experiment.

“I have to tell you about the most amazing Spanish farmer!” I said when I bumped into him a few days later in the courtyard of Stone Barns. Craig
opened his mouth and his eyes widened, in what I thought was genuine interest. By the time I mentioned foie gras, he looked like an Edvard Munch painting.

“Can we raise geese?” I asked. The question put him at ease.

“Actually, we have fifty or so, arriving any day now,” he said. Apparently Craig had decided earlier in the year that geese would work well in his animal rotation at Stone Barns, and that their meat—he hadn’t considered fattening the livers—would be popular at the farmers’ market for Christmas.

I described Eduardo’s farm and the natural foie gras. “Interesting,” he said, looking at the ground and modulating his heavily stressed voice with frequent throat clearings. “I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to try.”
It wouldn’t hurt to try
meant that it would actually hurt a lot. But he would try.

He began in August. Craig and I settled on dividing the daily chores. Craig’s team would bring water; the cooks and the managers were assigned to the feed, twice a day. Though I hoped to mimic Eduardo’s system, allowing the geese to forage for themselves, Craig reminded me that our pasture wouldn’t provide the same assortment of acorns, figs, olives, and lupins that Eduardo’s geese enjoyed. Without additional feed, he said, the geese not only stood zero chance of producing fatty livers; they would eventually starve. Grass alone (even a diversity of grasses, treated to Craig’s methodical rotations) doesn’t fatten a goose any more than grazing a salad bar would prepare us to play right tackle for the Broncos. Craig was determined to feed corn, but free choice corn, without forcing anything.

The first day, he escorted me out to their sequestered paddock, deep in the corner of the main pasture. The geese moved about in a loose phalanx, heads held high, eyes darting around at their new surroundings. I took notes on his instructions for the feeding. There wasn’t much to it, Craig said, showing me the box that controlled the electric current for the fencing, and the bins where the grain should be dumped.

“Field gras,” Craig’s assistant Padraic said as he passed by the geese. “I can’t say I’ve ever heard of it, but it sounds delicious.”

Over the next several weeks, the feeding rotation went smoothly. After filling two large buckets with corn, the cooks would walk to the goose paddock, pour the grain into the troughs, and return the pails. There was never anything unusual to report, until one day our butcher, José, came to my office. He very seriously asked if he could talk about a “disturbing trend” and shut the door behind him.

“Chef, it’s the geese. They are not happy about the grain,” he said, his head bowed.

José has permanently disheveled black hair and sloped shoulders. Diminutive and painfully shy, he’s the antithesis of every burly, testosterone-fueled stereotype of a young butcher. He works near the entrance of the kitchen delivery door, an oxford shirt under his chef’s jacket to keep warm from the draft, hacking, sawing, and, most often, maneuvering his small boning knife around and in between the muscles of large carcasses. He’s patient, deliberate, and very talented.

“It’s not like it used to be,” he explained. “They used to run to you as you entered the fence. It was like they smelled hot food coming or something. And then they’d run all over the grain bin, fighting for a good spot. Now when I come they sort of, I don’t know, they ignore me or something.”

When I saw Padraic later in the day, he told me that he, too, had noticed a change in the geese. “Yeah, it’s the darnedest thing,” he said, removing his cap and scratching his head. “I’m no goose-ologist, but you’d think they’d just inhale the sweet stuff, like the pigs. Maybe they will when the cold kicks in—that’s what your goose whisperer guy said they’d do, right?” He didn’t wait for me to answer. “For now, they remind me of eating at one of those fancy Japanese restaurants, where they serve you a bowl of plain white rice at the end of the meal to make sure you’re satiated and all. That’s how they’re treating the grain—like filler.”

I went to investigate myself the next morning. On my way to the field, I passed a truck unloading the monthly order of fifteen thousand pounds of grain. There should have been nothing strange about standing in the shadow of the hulking load as I stopped to speak to Craig. I had seen dozens of deliveries before. The pigs and the chickens had been eating their fair share of those deliveries for many years. But on that morning, I peered over Craig’s shoulder and stared up into the back of the flatbed. The mountain of yellow corn looked imposing, formidable. It was not unlike the first time I took notice of the mound of white flour in the middle of Blue Hill’s kitchen. Like the flour, the corn was its own kind of landscape, and not a kernel of it had been grown on the farm. With two buckets, one in each hand, I carried the grain over to the goose paddock. It trickled off the tops of the buckets and left a trail behind me.

Aldo Leopold believed that land should be defined as “
a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants, and animals.”
But my role in transporting another farmer’s already exported energy was more like a circuit breaker, not a conduit. If we were feeding these geese—and, for that matter, the chickens and the pigs—grain grown however many thousands of miles away, on land that had nothing to do with the land I was standing on now . . . where was the flow?

I dumped the buckets of grain into the troughs. The geese approached the feed politely, pecking at it like day-old Chinese food, a take-it-or-leave-it kind of meal. When given the option of grain—normally a candy bar for the goose palate—they preferred the free forage. By late afternoon, when I returned with two more buckets, the geese had eaten almost all of the morning’s delivery, but they couldn’t have been less excited to see me. Several of them flapped their wings and turned away. They were eating the corn, but they were no more choosing it than an addict chooses his drug. We might as well have stuffed it down their gullets.

This clearly wasn’t “field gras.” This was grain gras, just not forced. It didn’t matter how noble our philosophy had been, or how big my idea had
started out; we’d ended up raising those geese in exactly the conditions I’d been trying to avoid. Cover the paddock with a barn, supersize the bird, and you basically had a recipe for a Perdue chicken.

“Why do you listen to this man you call Eduardo? Why?” I heard the familiar voice of Izzy Yanay as I bent over a case of turnips at the Union Square farmers’ market, a few weeks after my afternoon with the geese.

Of all the proponents of foie gras, Izzy is among the most active—and certainly the most convincing. Raised in Israel, he moved to America in 1980, determined to do something with his agriculture degree. He partnered with Michael Ginor, a chef by training, and opened Hudson Valley Foie Gras, becoming the country’s first producer of fresh duck liver. Before Izzy, chefs used imported foie gras from Canada or France, usually preserved in tins (unless they were smuggling fresh livers via monkfish, as Palladin was known to do).

Izzy, who is in his early sixties, wears black T-shirts that cling to his frame. With broad shoulders, bulging biceps, and a thin waist, he resembles a younger Jack LaLanne, were Jack LaLanne a member of the Mossad. At Hudson Valley Foie Gras, he fields all the questions pertaining to the humaneness of their product. If you’re a foie gras devotee and look forward to enjoying it in the future, you’re glad to know Izzy is defending your rights. He’s intense, assured, and dogged about refuting claims that foie gras is torture.

“If what I was doing was unethical,” Izzy said once, “if someone could come to our farm and show me one thing we do that’s inhumane, I would be the first one out the door. I don’t torture my ducks, because tortured ducks don’t make good foie gras.”

Izzy told me once how a group of skeptics visiting the farm (Izzy allows visits from anyone with a real interest in seeing foie gras produced) came to
an area where the ducklings were gathered. Many of the guests reached down to pet the babies, cooing over their cuteness. He told them that petting does not make the ducks happy. He said that dogs and cats like to be petted; ducks do not. His point? Fowls and mammals are different species. “Do not equate how you would feel getting a tube inserted into your throat with how the duck feels.”

In trumpeting the miracle of Eduardo’s natural foie gras (not to mention our own foie gras experiment at Stone Barns), I had unintentionally aligned myself with Izzy’s adversaries, which is why on this early Saturday morning he had come to find me.

“Why not go to France if you’re so interested in foie gras?” he demanded as I stood to greet him. “You know? Why a Spaniard? You want to learn about great cars, you don’t go to Turkey, do you? You go to Germany. No? Is this not true?”

“Hello, Izzy,” I said.

“No, come on now, tell me why if you want to know about foie gras you don’t go to France? I tell you I want to cry when I go to France. I go to France and I visit a man like Marcel Guachie’s foie gras plant, anywhere like this, and I want to cry. I want to cry, but I have to catch my tears because God forbid my tears touch the floor. It is a shrine, these places. These people are gods. They know foie gras. They look at a baby duck and they’ll tell you what kind of foie gras you’re going to get. Everything Eduardo knows, they’ve forgotten—that’s how much they know. Me? Next to these guys? I’m nothing. I’m a speck. Dirt. They are king. I’m a baby with my thumb in my mouth. I’m nothing!” Izzy put his thumb in his mouth and sucked loudly. “Nothing!” People passed by us and stared.

“Tell me, Dan Barber, what’s wrong with raising a goose inside? Because of this, now I can make the foie gras of my dreams. That’s what we do. We can make the foie gras of everybody’s dreams by putting them in one location under one roof.”

“Why is that better?” I asked.