The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food (55 page)

I imagine we’ll serve the trout the same way Ángel might: in a pool of phytoplankton sauce. As luck would have it, a biology graduate student at Dartmouth recently heard of my interest in phytoplankton and offered to sell us his home brew. The first attempts were fine, nothing approaching what Ángel had introduced me to, but I have no doubt that in the next few decades, Ángel’s new restaurant—with its fish farm and phytoplankton facility
attached—will ignite even more worldwide interest in protecting and promoting “the origin of life.” 

It will be part of this menu of the future because, speaking to Ángel’s point, without it there will be little else to serve.

We don’t end tasting menus these days with a vegetable course, but a generation from now we probably will, or we’ll come close, just as I predicted with the carrot steak.

As with everything on this menu of the future, the reason to turn away from a meat-centric plating strategy will be based on the demands of the ecology. If our menus are going to work in partnership with what the land can provide, vegetables and grains will inevitably take center stage.

My vision for a vegetable steak came to life recently when Jack harvested a crop of parsnips in the dead of winter. They’d been in the ground for nearly a year, about five months longer than required. The parsnips were as big as hulking T-Bones and, in the cold conditions, had converted nearly all their starches into sugars.

They were sweet enough to pass as dessert, but we showed off the bravura roots by roasting them like steaks and carving them for our diners tableside. In a few decades, we’ll still be serving something like it—only this time with poached marrow, a bit of braised beef shank, and richly flavored Bordelaise sauce made with the bones.

The addition of the beef will be based on Craig’s decision to raise beef cattle at Stone Barns. As the health of the system improves—as the grass becomes even more abundant because of the complexity of the rotations—there will be an opportunity to expand it even further by adding a new herbivore to follow the sheep.

But that expansion won’t happen without the right kind of cooking to
support it. So the lowly shank, a tough cut (to eat and to sell), will act as a kind of sauce for the parsnip. Sauce-making, like the kind Jean-Louis Palladin practiced, will have returned to prominence by then, a perfect way to create a deeply flavored, resonant dish out of these disparate and lowly cuts.

The other day I looked out the kitchen window and spotted Glenn Roberts standing in the courtyard. He was dressed in his usual white Polo and khakis, staring up at one of the stone buildings and smiling to himself.

It was a Sunday in late spring, and he and his wife, Kay, had spent the morning walking around Stone Barns. I got the sense that he was a little embarrassed not to be on his own farm, planting. When the conversation turned to Steve Jones and his new variety of Blue wheat, Glenn’s eyes nearly popped out of his head.

Not to be outdone, he casually offered something himself. “How about getting Jack to plant some black rice?” he asked. Kay, knowing her husband, left us to talk.

“Rice?” I said. “I don’t remember Jack having access to a paddy field.”

“This is for dry rice farming,” he said. I told him I didn’t know there was such a thing. “Oh, hell yeah. You think they have flooded fields in the Himalayas?”

I almost told him I didn’t know they
grew
rice in the Himalayas, but luckily Jack happened to pass by. Sensing an opportunity, I corralled them both into the restaurant’s bar and asked Glenn to explain.

It turns out he had his hands on a rare class of black rice, an aromatic short grain that grows like a row crop in regular topsoil—no flooding required. He offered Jack the opportunity to be the first farmer in America to trial the seed, just as he had done with the Eight Row Flint corn after we first opened.

Jack agreed, but not before hesitating. He may have been hoping that
Glenn would offer a couple of thousand dollars to plant it, as he had done for the corn. Finally, he stuck out his hand. “I’m in,” he said, and they shook on the deal.

Three weeks later I visited Jack in the greenhouse. The sprouted rice was already in seeding trays, awaiting transport to the soil. Jack was planning to plant it in the farthest corner of the vegetable field, in the same spot where Eliot Coleman had turned and raised his arm to the setting sun on that frigid November afternoon more than ten years ago.

In the midst of forecasting the future, it’s worth noting that the present would have been difficult to envision even a decade ago. Would Eliot have predicted that this small farm could support not only the diversity of new breeds of animals and vegetables but also three of the world’s major commodity grain crops—corn, wheat, and rice?

And yet these grains, and others, have become integral additions to the landscape. In the months after Jack decided to plant wheat and rice, we received three calls, in quick succession. One was from Philipsburg Manor, an eighteenth-century grain mill turned museum five miles from Stone Barns, offering to grind our wheat with their newly refurbished stone mill.

Another call came from a new malting company, requesting barley to malt for beer. Microbreweries are exploding in the Northeast—many of them driven by young entrepreneurs motivated to improve the quality of what we drink—and there is a severe local barley shortage. They wondered if Jack might consider adding barley into his wheat rotations.

And then a local microbrewery called to inquire about Jack selling some of his wheat for a new beer. They asked whether Craig would have interest in feeding his pigs spent wheat from the beer-making process.

I’m as confident about these opportunities materializing in one form or another as I am about Glenn’s black rice finding itself in useful partnership with the grain rotations around the farm.

That’s the day we’ll marry the beer and the rice together in a dessert, if for no other reason than to celebrate these late-inning additions to our menu
and the revitalized community of producers and distributors they’ve helped to build.

Sitting at the bar with Glenn and Jack that afternoon, I asked Glenn if he saw rice playing the role of an adopted Fourth Sister on the farm. Native American farmers had seen the wisdom in the companion planting of corn, squash, and beans. Could rice join into this symbiotic relationship?

“Oh hell, I don’t know,” he said, throwing up his arms. “But since there was never a Three Sisters, I doubt it.” I figured he was joking, but when I looked over at Jack, he signaled agreement.

“What do you mean?” I asked, in a tone that must have sounded as if I had just been told Santa Claus doesn’t exist.

“The idea for Three Sisters has been nice and distilled over time, passed down in a way that’s easy for everyone to understand. It’s fundamental, the architecture is there,” Glenn said, “but it’s so totally simplistic.”

Jack punctuated Glenn’s “so totally simplistic” with vigorous head nods. Looking at me he said, “What did you think?
That Native Americans were growing things in row crops?” He shook his head. “No way. They were growing things everywhere. Nothing was disconnected from anything else. It was all one big farm.”

In many ways the research for this book began with the opposite idea: take one great ingredient, and discover how it was grown or raised. Learn the recipe, I figured, and help make the harvests from the farmers that surround me more delicious and ecological. But the greatest lesson came with the realization that good food cannot be reduced to single ingredients. It requires a web of relationships to support it.

Aldo Leopold once wrote that the right kind of farming doesn’t discard any of nature’s component parts. “To
keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.” The right kind of cooking does the same thing: it promotes the vibrant communities, above and below ground, that make food delicious in the first place.

It’s not unlike what I hoped we, as chefs, and as eaters, could do in imagining a Third Plate. The idea is to think not only about ingredient combinations but about
how
they’re combined and how that reflects the larger picture.

Those connections begin before the plate and extend beyond it. They are more than the sum of their parts. They have the power to change culture and to shape landscapes.

Maybe what Jack said that day at the bar with Glenn is exactly the right way to think about a Third Plate for the future. Rooted in the natural world, it becomes a blueprint for
one big farm
—forever in flux, connected to a larger community, narrated by a cook through his
food.

This book began as much in the pasture fields of Blue Hill Farm as it did in the restaurant kitchens of Blue Hill. I have my grandmother, Ann Marlowe Strauss, to thank for that view, and for bringing the farm into existence for our family.

The other view of the farm was from the dinner table, and this book began there too. It’s where my aunt Tobe introduced me to French cooking—to scrambled eggs cooked over a double boiler—and where my uncle Steve, a gourmet and gourmand, shared the same fiery enthusiasm for a just picked tomato as the Hellman’s mayonnaise he paired it with. He, above all, left me with the greatest gift a chef or a writer could ever own: an insatiable curiosity.

Along the way, a great many English teachers encouraged me to follow that curiosity and write. Two in particular inspired me to read. Thank you, Andrew Glassman, for making American nature writers like Thoreau and Emerson meaningful and accessible, and thank you, Sol Gittleman, for helping me see the genius of Philip Roth. (And, what the hell? Thank
you
, Philip Roth.)

If a writer needs something to write about, a chef needs some place to cook. That is why the origins of this book can also be traced to the day my brother, David, insisted that my vague notion for a restaurant become a reality. He backed that up by becoming my business partner. Young cooks often ask for advice on starting their own restaurant. I tell them that as long as someone as brilliant as David is counting the coins, you’ll be fine. I can practically guarantee success if you add a talent like my sister-in-law, Laureen. She is the eye of—and designer for—everything Blue Hill. For added insurance, my advice is to get a lawyer as loyal as my sister, Carolyn—who, with furrowed brow, has given me counsel, insight, and comfort my whole life.

I advise luck, too. In my case, there’s been a lot of it. James Ford, sanctioned with finding a restaurant tenant for Stone Barns Center, introduced us
to David Rockefeller, Sr., and his daughter Peggy Dulany. They blessed the project and gave me a reason to research this book. In the years since, I’ve become indebted to the farmers at Stone Barns, who constantly rescue me from ignorance, and the entire staff, led by Jill Isenbarger, who motivate the Blue Hill team in more ways than I can name.

This book more or less officially began ten years ago, when Amanda Hesser suggested I write a monthly column in a magazine. To get the column approved, she asked for eight of the first twelve essays. Had her editor, the great Gerry Marzorati, not had the good judgment to reject those pieces (and the column itself), this book would not have happened.

Through all the morass of those early essays, David Black generously saw the potential for a book. D. Black is an agent, but he’s also a rabbi, huggable henchmen, cheerleader, and coach. You want him in your dugout.

Ann Godoff took a risk and signed me on to her team. Ann: 127 years later, thank you. I’m grateful for your patience and straight talk, and for your keeping your hand on the wheel whenever I tried to steer the other way. And to the rest of the Penguin team, especially Ben Platt, Tracy Locke, and Sarah Hutson—thank you.

I will never fully understand why the farmers in this book were so generous with their time and so patient in explaining why they do what they do. One way to thank them, along with the chefs, ecologists, breeders, and scientists mentioned in these pages, is to honor their work through the writing of this book. I hope I have succeeded.

Behind the scenes, a great many people educated me along the way. Among the most influential have been Fred Kirschenmann, a farmer, scholar, and good friend, and Michael Pollan, who sets the standards for journalism and generosity, as well as many others, including: Ingrid Bengis, Bob Cannard, Betty Fussell, Thomas Harttung, Sam Kass, Ridge Shinn, Gary Nabhan, Marion Nestle, Bill Niman, Fred Magdoff, Autar Mattoo, Bill McKibben, Kathleen Merrigan, John Mishanac, Frank Morton, Joel Salatin, Eric Schlosser, Rick Schnieders, Gus Schumacher, and Sean Stanton. 

If Lisa Abend didn’t exist, I would have had to invent her. Much of this book takes place on two farms in Spain. I could never have gotten my foot inside the gate without her persistence. The endless hours of translation and historical background only add to my deepest sense of gratitude.

Charlotte Douglas has worked with me since I began writing this book. Her ear is unerring, her judgment unfailing, and her skill at politely amputating whole paragraphs—and her steadfast silence as I hurled obscenities and flailed about—is a kind of art form. She’s read these pages as many times as I have. Every sentence is better because of her support and criticism.

I’m grateful to Sarah Bowlin, Mary Duenwald, Michael Gitter, Carol Hamburger, Liz Schaldenbrand, and Wendy Silbert for their critical reads along the way, and to David Shipley and Jacob Weisberg, two wise men who offered thoughtful and critical advice. Thank you.

Running a kitchen is like quarterbacking a football game, every night. No chef can survive, let alone prosper, without a phalanx of devoted cooks. They somehow push me over the goal line even when I’m more than ready to walk away. Thanks especially to chefs Adam Kaye, Trevor Kunk, Joel de la Cruz, and Michael Gallina—beside me at the stove for a combined forty-five years. Their care and attention are in everything good that I cook.

My colleagues at team Blue Hill include Franco Serafin, Philippe Gouze, Christine Langelier, Katie Bell, Michelle Biscieglia, Charles Puglia, Charlie Berg, Danielle Harrity, Peter Bradley, and John Jennings. These are, in restaurant terms, the “front of house,” and they are the most generous people—and the finest professionals—I could ever know. Irene Hamburger (still with us sixteen years after signing on to help out for “a couple of weeks”) deserves a lifetime of gratitude for her sustained support, not to mention the indefatigable attention to a thousand details. 

When I first called my father after graduating from college to inform him of my decision to cook in a restaurant kitchen, he asked why. I told him I loved food. He said, “I love books, but I don’t
read
for a living.” He did, however, live to read, and while he died before I could finish this book—but not before
encouraging my career at every turn—his passion for reading motivated me to write.

I’ve been told that my mother, who died when I was four, also loved books. I didn’t learn until recently that she had once longed to be a writer. Is this book as much for her as anyone else? The answer is not in the book. It is the book.

A chef’s life is not easy, undoubtedly most challenging for those living with the chef. Likewise, I’ve heard it’s no cakewalk for those who live with writers. For not only enduring this double whammy but for being the infallible and loving editor of all that I cook and write (including these acknowledgments, which she made me re-do), I am luckiest of all to have my wife, Aria, by my side. All that is joyful and lovely in my life is because of her, including our daughter, Edith.