The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food (11 page)

The 16.9 mokums lasted only a few services, but the small harvest left a big impression. Which is why, the following week, early on a frigid January morning, I stood with Jack in front of a row of future 16.9’s incubating in the rich soil of the greenhouse. He had offered to explain to me in detail how the carrots had come to be so delicious.

The 23,000-square-foot greenhouse was calm and quiet, save for the soft hum of the overhead fans. Jack wore a look of pride as he surveyed the rich black soil that spanned the building. The soil came from the excavation of the Stone Barns parking lot, which partly explains Jack’s fondness. After the construction crews unearthed the virgin soil, Jack rescued it from the dumpster. Then he created a recipe for the highest-quality compost, mixing it in to build up the soil’s organic matter. He applies a wheelbarrow of his compost to every new row of vegetables.

I was familiar with the power of compost (what I understood of it) and impressed by the quality of Jack’s personal blend. So I had a sense of how, after several years of building fertility, the soil could now nurture a carrot with a Brix of 16.9. But how exactly?

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.”

To call this war may be a little extreme. When I ran Jack’s analogy by soil scientist Fred Magdoff, he likened the process to a system of checks and balances. “To me there is real beauty in how it works,” he said. “When there is sufficient and varied food for the organisms, they do what comes naturally, ‘making a living’ by feeding on the food sources that evolution provided. Sure organisms eat one another, but is that war? We eat carrots, but are we declaring war on carrots? What you have is a thriving, complex community of organisms.”

Which is precisely what we want for better-tasting food. The result of all this activity—combat or cooperation, you choose—is that insoluble
molecules are broken down and rearranged into forms accessible to plants. It’s a process analogous to coffee making. Imagine, a farmer once told me, the difference in taste between a cup of coffee dripped through whole beans and one dripped through beans that have been broken apart into micro-granules.

Some of these microscopic nutrients combine to form phytonutrients, chemical compounds that are the building blocks of taste. “Like let’s say calcium,” Jack said. “Taste doesn’t come just from calcium—not directly, at least. It comes from a more complex molecule that gets eaten, taken apart, and put back together in a different way. The plant takes this, and all the other molecules, and catalyzes them into phytonutrients. Taste doesn’t come from the elemental compounds. It comes from the synthesis.”

Phytonutrients—like amino acids, esters, and flavonoids—are key to the flavor of the mokum carrot, or whatever vegetable, grain, or fruit you’re growing, Jack said. He crouched low to the ground to smooth out an uneven patch of soil. “And, not unimportantly—actually,
most
importantly,” he continued, “phytonutrients are vital to building the immune systems of plants. They are part of the building blocks for vigor.”

When insecticides and fungicides are used, they usurp the plant’s natural defenses, which means the plant produces fewer phytonutrients. Studies show that organic fruits and vegetables typically contain between 10 and 50 percent
more antioxidants and other defense-related compounds than are found in conventional produce.

Some scientists suggest it’s one of the reasons organic food tastes better than conventional food. As soil biologist Elaine Ingham explained to me, “Phytonutrients are the building blocks for all of the flavor compounds. A lot of those flavor compounds are quite complex, and it takes quite a bit of energy and requires quite a diversity of building blocks in order to make them. So you have to have a plant with really good nutrition for those flavors to be expressed. It’s not all that simple to have something that tastes really good. It’s a lot easier to get something that has sweetness to it, but those really subtle complex flavors? You really have to have a healthy plant to have that.”

I thought of Klaas and the velvetleaf—his soybean crop’s resistance was not only a sign of healthy soil but a promise of great flavor as well.

“That’s just it,” Jack said when I mentioned Klaas’s work. “The development of flavor, and the health of the plant, are the same freakin’ thing. You don’t get one without the other. If I treat the soil’s microorganisms right, if they have everything they need to prosper, they’ll do the work for me. At that point you just need to put it on the plate, basically.”

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 Laverstoke 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. (No wonder Klaas advocates for rotations of spelt; its large, deeply penetrating root systems create space for the community to thrive.)

Pointing again with the stick, Jack circled the narrow areas around the
roots, the rhizosphere. It’s the soil’s most competitive environment, where organisms thrive in densities up to one hundred times greater than in other parts of the soil. The roots, sensing nutrients in the area, drill into the soil to take advantage of the rich possibilities for nutrition. In healthy conditions, the mycorrhizal fungi and the root tissue literally bind together, forming an unbeatable partnership that allows the root to reach even deeper into the earth, extracting what the soil has to offer.

“You can look at plants that produce mycorrhizal fungi like you look at oil companies,” Jack said. “These companies invest the heavy costs of searching for oil if they believe it’s a region rich with resources. The roots work like that. It’s an incentive economy.” He said plants will spend as much as 30 percent of their energy to build these fungal root extensions in order to tap into the tiniest spaces in the soil and get the nutrients there.

It turns out that the mechanism is a prerequisite for great wine. I learned this from Randall Grahm, the iconoclastic winemaker of Bonny Doon Vineyard, in Santa Cruz, California. “Mycorrhizae are microbial demiurges—they bring minerals into the plants,” he told me. “What does that taste like? Persistence. The best wines are powerfully persistent. You breathe out your nose and you taste the wine over again, or you leave the bottle open for a week and the wine still tastes alive. Persistence doesn’t fade, and it doesn’t oxidize. That’s from the minerals.”

Jack got his finger into a nook of soil to show where the minerals are retrieved. “Here’s where they suck out the phosphorus, or the copper or zinc, and all that comes up into the root with some stored water from the soil.” He shook his head. “Brilliant, right? But you see what I’m saying? It’s not just chemistry or biology down here. It all works if the physical structure is welcoming to the organisms and the fungi. At the end of the day, the plant’s just looking for a good dinner, but he’s got to be able to get to the table.”