The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food (56 page)

“die of its own too much”
:
Aldo Leopold, “Wilderness” (1935), in
The River of the Mother of God and Other Essays,
ed. Susan L. Flader and J. Baird Callicott (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 228–9. Leopold borrowed the phrase from Shakespeare’s
Hamlet.

“inescapably an agricultural act”
:
Wendell Berry, “The Pleasures of Eating,” in
What Are People For?
(New York: North Point Press, 1990), 149.

took root in the philosophy of extraction
:
For more on colonial American agriculture, see: Willard W. Cochrane,
The Development of American Agriculture: A Historical Analysis
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979); Arnon Gutfeld,
American Exceptionalism: The Effects of Plenty on the American Experience
(Brighton, UK: Sussex Academic Press, 2002); and Steven Stoll,
Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth Century America
(New York: Macmillan, 2003).

American cooking was characterized, from the beginning
:
See Harvey A. Levenstein,
Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 7. Levenstein writes, “To nineteenth-century observers, the major differences between American and British diets could usually be summed up in one word: abundance. Virtually every foreign visitor who wrote about American eating habits expressed amazement, shock and even disgust at the quantity of food consumed.” For more on early American cooking, see: James McWilliams,
A Revolution in Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); Trudy Eden,
The Early American Table: Food and Society in the New World
(Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2008); Jennifer Wallach,
How America Eats: A Social History of U.S. Food and Culture
(Plymouth, UK: Rowman, 2013).

“so much wasted from sheer ignorance, and spoiled by bad cooking”
:
Juliet Corson,
The Cooking Manual of Practical Directions for Economical Every-Day Cookery
(New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1877), 5.

“the attitude of the farmer”
:
Lady Eve Balfour, quoted in Eliot Coleman,
Winter Harvest Handbook: Year-Round Vegetable Production Using Deep-Organic Techniques and Unheated Greenhouses
(White River Junction, VT:
Chelsea Green Publishing, 2009), 204–5.

“hitched to everything else”
:
John Muir,
My First Summer in the Sierra
(1911;
repr.,
Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2004), 87.

the “culture” in agriculture
:
See Wendell Berry,
The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture
(1977;
rev. ed., San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1996).

pounds of grain to produce one pound of beef
:
See Erik Marcus,
Meat Market: Animals, Ethics, and Money
(Ithaca, NY: Brio Press, 2005), 187–8.

“whereas the foundations provided”
:
Peter Thompson,
Seeds, Sex & Civilization: How the Hidden Life of Plants Has Shaped Our World
(London: Thames and Hudson, 2010), 31.

we eat more wheat
:
See “Wheat: Background,” US Dept. of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, March 2009 briefing; and USDA, Office of Communications,
Agricultural Fact Book 2001–2002
(Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2003).

“the conjugation of seemingly unrelated events”
:
Karen Hess, “A Century of Change in the American Loaf: Or, Where Are the Breads of Yesteryear” (keynote address at the History of American Bread symposium, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, April 1994).

The Spanish were the first to bring wheat
:
See Charles Mann,
1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created
(New York: Knopf, 2011).

one for every seven hundred Americans in 1840
:
See Dean Herrin,
America Transformed: Engineering and Technology in the Nineteenth Century: Selections from the Historic American Engineering Record, National Park Service
(Reston, VA: American Society of Civil Engineers, 2002), 18.

grown in every county in New York
:
See Jared van Wagenen Jr.,
The Golden Age of Homespun
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1953), 66; and Tracy Frisch, “A Short History of Wheat,”
The Valley Table,
December 2008.

Massachusetts “Red Lammas”
:
For more information on heritage New England wheats, see Eli Rogosa, “Restoring Our Heritage of Wheat” (working paper, Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association, 2009).

nutritional benefits of whole grains
:
See David R. Jacobs and Lyn M. Steffen, “Nutrients, Foods, and Dietary Patterns as Exposures in Research: A Framework for Food Synergy,”
American Journal of Clinical Nutrition
78, no. 3 (September 2003): 508S–513S; and David R. Jacobs et al., “Food Synergy: An Operational Concept for Understanding Nutrition,”
American Journal of Clinical Nutrition
89, no. 5 (2009): 1543S–1548S.

“native to its place”
:
See Wes Jackson,
Becoming Native to This Place
(Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 1994).

Great American Desert
:
See Walter Prescott Webb,
The Great Plains
(Waltham, MA: Ginn and Co., 1931), 152; and Henry Nash Smith,
Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950).
In chapter 16, Smith has a good discussion of the prairie as both garden and desert in the American imagination.

“Mistaking wisdom for backwardness”
:
Janine M. Benyus,
Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature
(New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 16.

“the failure of success”
:
Jackson mentions this idea in his book
New Roots for Agriculture
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980).

wave of settlement became a tsunami
:
See Timothy Egan,
The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl
(New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006), 43.

“The War integrated the plains farmers”
:
Donald Worster,
Under Western Skies: Nature and History in the American West
(Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1992),
99.

The soil
 . . . turned to dust:
For more on the Dust Bowl, see Donald E. Worster,
Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1979); and Egan,
The Worst Hard Time.

“A cloud ten thousand feet high”
:
Egan,
The Worst Hard Time
,
113.

“This, gentlemen, is what I’m talking about”
:
Egan,
The Worst Hard Time
, 227–8. See also Wellington Brink,
Big Hugh: The Father of Soil Conservation
(New York: Macmillan, 1951).

“We came with visions, but not with sight”
:
Wendell Berry, “The Native Grasses and What They Mean,” in
The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural
(New York: North Point Press, 1981), 82.

“have disregarded every means”
:
George Washington, President of the United States, to Arthur Young, Esq., November 18, 1791, in
Letters on Agriculture from His Excellency, George Washington, President of the United States, to Arthur Young, Esq., F.R.S., and Sir John Sinclair, Bart., M.P.: With Statistical Tables and Remarks, by Thomas Jefferson, Richard Peters, and Other Gentlemen, on the Economy and Management of Farms in the United States
, ed. Franklin Knight (Washington, DC: Franklin Knight, 1847), 49–50.

“presented the scares of fierce extraction”
:
Stoll,
Larding the Lean Earth
, 19.

“a spanning of the scale of genetic possibilities from A to B”
:
Richard Manning,
Grassland: The History, Biology, Politics and Promise of the American Prairie
(New York: Penguin, 1997), 160.

Wheat Belt is emptying out
:
Wil S. Hylton, “Broken Heartland: The Looming Collapse of Agriculture on the Great Plains,”
Harper’s
, July 2012.

enabling fewer farmers to farm even more land
:
See William Lin et al., “U.S. Farm Numbers, Sizes, and Related Structural Dimensions: Projections to Year 2000,” US Dept. of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, Technical Bulletin No. 1625 (1980).

“what nature has made of us and we have made of nature”
:
Verlyn Klinkenborg, “Linking Twin Extinctions of Species and Languages,”
Yale Environment 360
, July 17, 2012.

Leopold asked the same question
:
Aldo Leopold, “What Is a Weed?” (1943), in
River of the Mother of God: and Other Essays by Aldo Leopold
, 306–9.

pests overtake its natural defenses
:
See Philip S. Callahan,
Tuning in to Nature:
Infrared Radiation and the Insect Communication System,
2nd rev. ed
.
(Austin, TX: Acres U.S.A., 2001).

“The organic farmer would look for the cause”
:
Eliot Coleman, “Can Organics Save the Family Farm?”
The Rake
, September 2004.

supposedly “dumb beasts”
:
William A. Albrecht,
The Albrecht Papers, Volume I:
Foundation Concepts
, ed. Charles Walters, Jr. (Metairie, LA: Acres U.S.A., 1996), 279, 282.

walked past what was commonly considered “good grass”
:
Charles Walters, Jr., “Foreword,”
The Albrecht Papers, Volume I: Foundation Concepts
, x.

“The cow is not classifying”
:
Albrecht, The Albrecht Papers, Volume I: Foundation Concepts
, 170.

compared a good organic farmer to a skilled rock climber
:
See Coleman,
Winter Harvest Handbook
, 202.

Soil is alive
:
For more on the life of soil, see William Bryant Logan,
Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth
(New York: W. W. Norton Limited, 2007); Fred Magdoff and Harold van Es,
Building Soils for Better Crops,
3rd ed. (Waldorf, MD: SARE Outreach Publications, 2010); David Montgomery,
Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); and David W. Wolfe,
Tales from the Underground: A Natural History of Subterranean Life
(New York: Basic Books, 2002)
.

“not a thing but a performance”
:
Colin Tudge,
The Tree: A Natural History of What Trees Are, How They Live, and Why They Matter
(New York: Crown Publishers, 2006), 252.

the Law of Return
:
Sir Albert Howard,
The Soil and Health: A Study of Organic Agriculture
(1947; repr., Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2007), 31.

soil its “constitution”
:
William A. Albrecht,
The Albrecht Papers, Volume II: Soil Fertility and Animal Health
,
ed. Charles Walters, Jr. (Kansas City, MO: Acres U.S.A., 1975), 101.

soils stopped producing
:
See Evan D. G. Fraser and Andrew Rimas,
Empires of Food: Feast, Famine, and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations
(New York:
Atria Books, 2010).

dowry measured by the amount of manure
:
Logan,
Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin
, 38.

“Now a farmer just had to mix the right chemicals into the dirt”
:
David Montgomery,
Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations
, 184–5.

“original sin” of agriculture
:
Michael Pollan,
The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
(New York: Penguin Press, 2006), 258.

In 1900, diversification
:
See Bill Ganzel, “Shrinking Farm Numbers,” in
Farming in the 1950s & 60s
(Wessels Loving History Farm, York, Nebraska, 2007), www.livinghistoryfarm.org/farminginthe50s/life_11.html.

three billion people depend on synthetic nitrogen
:
Fred Pearce, “The Nitrogen Fix: Breaking a Costly Addiction,”
Yale Environment 360
, November 5, 2009.

“treating the whole problem”
:
Howard,
The Soil and Health
, 11.

“learning more and more about less and less”
:
Howard,
The Soil and Health
,
250.

“professors of agriculture”
:
Howard,
The Soil and Health
, 111.

“tough, leathery and fibrous”
:
Sir Albert Howard,
An Agricultural Testament
(1940; repr., London: Benediction Classics, 2010), 82.