Best Food Writing 2014 (31 page)

Jack pointed to the soil. “There's a war going on in there!”

“War” seemed a funny way to put it. The process had always struck me as extremely cooperative: Leaves and needles and grasses eventually die, forming a brown carpet of carbon on top of the soil. Herbivores (such as cows) and birds (chickens) periodically disturb the surface, allowing soil organisms (worms) to reach up and pull this organic material deeper into the dirt, where it—along with other material such as dead roots—is broken into nutrients available to the plants.

Jack went on to explain this war, which is when my understanding of the soil organisms' shared objective—the notion that everyone works together for the betterment of the soil community—became more complicated. There is a whole class system. First-level consumers (microbes), the most abundant and minuscule members of the community, break down large fragments of organic material into smaller residues; secondary consumers (protozoa, for example) feed on the primary consumers or their waste; and then third-level consumers (like centipedes, ants, and beetles) eat the secondaries. The more Jack explained it, the more it started to sound like a fraught, complex community. Organisms within each level may attack a fellow comrade (say, a fungi feeding on a nematode—or vice versa), or any of the tiny eaters can, and often do, turn on their own kind.

All of this subterranean life, Jack explained, is forced to interact—“cooperatively, yes, but also violently and relentlessly to maintain the living system.”

As we left the greenhouse, Jack acknowledged that the precise mechanics of flavor creation are still mysterious. He realized this many years ago, after experimenting with brining olives. At first he chose
distilled vinegar, which, when used as a brine, produced a predictable olive—delicious, but uniform in flavor. “Then I used a live vinegar,” he said, “and after six months to a year, with all the fungi and bacteria in there, some olives would turn out sweet like fruit, some smoky, some had a roasted flavor almost. It was wild! The same thing is true for soil. You have different things going on, catalyzing new flavors, reaching the full potential and expression of the plant. It's the action that's important. But who really knows what the hell is going on in there?”

The admission took me by surprise, if only because Jack always seemed to know exactly what was going on in there. But eventually I realized he had it just right. I thought of Sir Albert Howard, who, writing in 1940, could not have named the full roster of microorganisms. Nor would he have known a phytonutrient if he saw one. Nor could he have described the chemistry behind well-composted soils—even though he was a chemist, and the father of compost. He didn't need to. I suppose that, like Jack, Howard was fine with not knowing. Where there is a bit of mystery, respect—even awe—fills the void.

A little ignorance keeps us from wrongly thinking it's possible to manipulate the conditions for every harvest. It's humbling to not know the how, and in the end it's probably a lot healthier. In the words of ecologist Frank Egler, “Nature is not more complex than we think, but more complex than we can think.”

If a great-tasting carrot is tied to the abundance of soil organisms, a bad-tasting carrot comes from the absence of soil life. Which is the big distinction between organic and chemical agriculture. The nutrients in compost are part of a system of living things. They are constantly absorbed and rereleased as one organism feeds on another, so they're continuously available as plants need them. The supply to the plant comes in smaller quantities than it does with fertilizer, but it comes in a steady stream. It's slow release, versus one heavy shot of chemicals. The disparity is enormous.

To administer the heavy shot, soil is bypassed. Synthetic fertilizer, in soluble form, is fed directly to the plant's root. “It's a fast system,” Jack said. “Whoosh! Water and nutrients are just flushing through. You can get your crops to bulk up and grow very quickly.”

This is one of the reasons conventional salad lettuce—iceberg lettuce from the Salinas Valley of California, for example—often tastes of virtually nothing. It's almost all water, and the nitrates saturate the water, leaving no room for the uptake of minerals.

Thomas Harttung, another of the Fertile Dozen farmers at Laver-stoke and founder of the largest organic farming group in Europe, has compared it to cooking: “Imagine a wonderfully balanced Italian main course full of herbs and other fresh ingredients. You then drop the salt bowl into it—rendering it totally inedible. The other taste notes ‘die.'” Industrially produced grains, vegetables, and fruits taste of almost nothing because the nitrates have crowded out the minerals.

To bypass the network of living things is to deprive the plant's roots of the full periodic table of the elements the soil provides. But it also deprives the soil organisms of their food source. When Klaas said the number of organisms in his fistful of dirt was greater than the population of Penn Yan, he added, “That's a lot of community life to feed.” He meant it as an obligation. “What kind of soil life are we going to promote in our fields, and what kind of flavor are we going to get in our mouths, if we feed soil life garbage?”

Why limit the hand that feeds you? As Eliot Coleman once said, “The idea that we could ever substitute a few soluble elements for a whole living system is like thinking an intravenous needle could administer a delicious meal.”

Late one afternoon the following November, Jack finished his carrot tutorial by excavating a three-foot ditch in the vegetable field next to the fall crop of mokums. We climbed into the trench to examine a cross-sectioned wall of black dirt. It reminded me of the glass-enclosed ant farms I studied in seventh-grade biology. But in the dim light, this soil looked both exposed and secretive. Jack, my subterranean escort, pointed with a small stick to the exposed earth, hoping to illustrate once more how flavor starts in the soil.

“You should see this, because everyone talks about the chemistry of soil, or the biology,” Jack said, running his hand along the wall, “but without the right physical structure, say goodbye to chemistry and biology. Nothing works.”

The root systems created what appeared to be small highways
and back roads, allowing organisms the freedom to move around. It brought to mind the interior of a well-made loaf of bread—moist, textured, and filled with irregular bubbles. The miles of white, wispy root hairs clenching the dirt in Jack's trench looked like the strands of gluten in bread that allow it to expand in the oven. Unhealthy soil, by comparison, resembles cake mix—dry and packed down, with no spaces for air to circulate or organisms to maneuver. . . .

Back in the kitchen, Jack brought out his refractometer to test another batch of mokums. They scored well again, with Brix readings between 12 and 14. Someone pulled a case of stock carrots from the refrigerator. Grown in Mexico, these workaday carrots are large, uniform, and fast-growing, which makes them cheap fodder for vegetable and meat stocks.

I asked Jack if adding soluble nitrogen to his mokum carrots would make them grow faster. “No way. You'd just end up burning the shit out of everything,” he said. “Adding Synthetic N is like adding a bomb—I mean, bombs are N, the same ingredient, so think what happens if you were to drop a bomb in the middle of a community of soil organisms.”

“So let's say I'm a mycorrhizal fungus . . . ”

“Kiss your ass goodbye,” Jack said, chopping the air. “Gone, goodbye. N is ammonia, as in ammonia. It's burning, like the stuff you wash your floors with, only it's double, triple that in strength. If you're fungi, you're hightailing it out of there.”

The Mexican carrots were from a large organic farm, an example of what Michael Pollan calls “industrial organic” and Eliot Coleman once described as “shallow organic.” Such farms eschew chemical fertilizers and pesticides and technically abide by organic regulations, but they use every opportunity to operate in the breach. They grow in monocultures, they look to treat symptoms instead of causes, and, to cut to the real offense, they don't feed the soil.

“Carrots like these are all grown in sandy soils,” Jack told me. “It's sand, water, and fertilizers.” Organic fertilizers are the tools of the shallow organic farmer's trade. Like chemical fertilizers, they are applied in a soluble form, feeding the plant but not the soil.

Jack squeezed the juice and read the refractometer. “Whoa,” he said.

“What did you get?” His expression had me imagining the Mexican carrot registering 20.9.

He shook the refractometer, squeezed more juice, and stared at the monitor. “Holy cow . . . zero.”

“Zero?”

“Zero point zero,” he said, flashing me the screen. “There's no detectable sugar.”

“I didn't know a zero-sugar carrot was possible,” I said.

Jack was silent a moment, holding the carrot up to the light as if it were a lab experiment. “Neither did I.”

He said the Brix discrepancy could be attributed to several factors. Mokums were bred for outstanding flavor, for one thing, giving them a hereditary leg up on the Mexican organic variety, which was likely conceived for high yields or better shelf life. So comparing the mokum with the Mexican vegetable wasn't actually comparing carrots with carrots. And then there's the mokum's stress response, in this case to the cold snap we were experiencing. Freezing temperatures kick-start a carrot into converting starches to sugars. This neat physiological trick raises the internal temperature and prevents ice crystallization, helping the carrot survive another day. The Mexican carrots, in contrast, hadn't lived a day under a balmy sixty degrees.

But none of these excuses could disguise the essential difference between the two carrots. Jack's carrots were satiated with nutrients; the others were starved. By afternoon's end on this chilly fall day with Jack, I'd come to another paradigm-shifting realization about soil. Until then, I had held on to a remarkably simple misconception about conventional agriculture: that chemical farming kills soil by poisoning it (which it can) and that ingesting chemicals is unappetizing and harmful (which it probably is). But both miss the larger point if you're after a 16.9 carrot. Chemical farming—and bad organic farming—actually kills soil by starving its complex and riotous community of anything good to eat.

I
n a windowless basement room decorated with photographs of farmers clutching freshly harvested vegetables, three polo-shirt-and-slacks-clad Monsanto executives, all men, wait for a special lunch. A server arrives and sets in front of each a caprese-like salad—tomatoes, mozzarella, basil, lettuce—and one of the execs, David Stark, rolls his desk chair forward, raises a fork dramatically, and skewers a leaf. He takes a big, showy bite. The other two men, Robb Fraley and Kenny Avery, also tuck in. The room fills with loud, intent, wet chewing sounds.

Eventually, Stark looks up. “Nice crisp texture, which people like, and a pretty good taste,” he says.

“It's probably better than what I get out of Schnucks,” Fraley responds. He's talking about a grocery chain local to St. Louis, where Monsanto is headquartered. Avery seems happy; he just keeps eating.

The men poke, prod, and chew the next course with even more vigor: salmon with a relish of red, yellow, and orange bell pepper and a side of broccoli. “The lettuce is my favorite,” Stark says afterward.
Fraley concludes that the pepper “changes the game if you think about fresh produce.”

Changing the agricultural game is what Monsanto does. The company whose name is synonymous with Big Ag has revolutionized the way we grow food—for better or worse. Activists revile it for such mustache-twirling practices as suing farmers who regrow licensed seeds or filling the world with Roundup-resistant superweeds. Then there's Monsanto's reputation—scorned by some, celebrated by others—as the foremost purveyor of genetically modified commodity crops like corn and soybeans with DNA edited in from elsewhere, designed to have qualities nature didn't quite think of.