The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food (15 page)

“
The challenge of cooking in America,” Palladin once said, “is to discover the newest and best products from the different states—baby eels and lamprey from Maine, fresh snails from Oregon, blowfish from the Carolinas and California oysters—and then to learn how to integrate them into your cuisine.”

But Palladin did more than simply integrate regional specialties into his cuisine; he created markets for them, too. Thomas Keller, the renowned American chef who as a young line cook made several pilgrimages to the Watergate, has said that Palladin was doing a kind of farm-to-table cooking before there was a name for it, and that his style—highly technical, cutting-edge, and artful—influenced the industry.

“When you get the professional side involved,” Keller explained, “
it trickles down to everybody.” Increasingly chefs in America saw an opportunity to focus their cuisine on cultivating relationships with farmers to supply their menu. Before Palladin, Keller said, “chefs weren’t developing relationships with farmers, gardeners, and fishermen.”

Joan Nathan, a cookbook author and former
Washington Post
writer, told
me that Palladin’s greatest gift was never squandering the chance to connect with a new farmer. “When he heard about a farmer growing something new or something great—it didn’t matter what it was, a great ham, fresh zucchini blossoms—he’d hop on his motorcycle and think nothing of driving a few hundred miles to find it. By dinner service, it was on the menu.” And when he couldn’t find an ingredient, he persuaded other farmers to grow it.

Palladin can’t take credit for persuading John and Sukey Jamison to raise grass-fed lamb, but he does deserve acknowledgement for discovering them. Long before farmers like Craig and Padraic got in the game, John and Sukey were perfecting the art of intensive grazing on their Pennsylvania farm. They quickly learned to celebrate the “inconsistency” of their product.

“Oh, yeah, you can taste the difference,” John once told me of his lambs. “By age, by diet. You’ll get stronger-flavored lamb in May and June, based on the young wild garlic and onions, and then a leaner taste in late summer from the wildflowers. In fall you start to see the cold-season grasses, giving you the most mature and delicious fat of the year.”

When I first met John, I asked him how he and his wife got started. “We were a couple of hippies who didn’t want Woodstock to end,” he said. It was in the aftermath of the 1970s oil crisis. Prices of gasoline had quadrupled in just a few months, and the combination of falling supplies and international unrest caused grain prices to double or triple.

Along came the development of portable electric fencing that could be set up and moved by one person (a product of New Zealand, where grass-fed livestock was the only game going). “That was really the beginning of the
intensive
part of rotation grazing,” John told me, differentiating the practice from free ranging, where the animals pasture in enormous fields and are rarely moved. Portable fencing gave small farmers the chance to
mimic what bison herds had been doing on a continental scale for thousands of years.

The Jamisons set up a successful grass operation on two hundred acres in western Pennsylvania, but their philosophy never went mainstream. The oil crisis ended. The era of cheap fuel and grain returned, and so too did status
quo methods of confined animal farming. We’ve been making our ruminants stupid ever since.

For many years, it was difficult for the Jamisons to compete with the grain-fed operations—and lamb in this country was already a tough sell—but in 1987 their luck changed. That’s when Jean-Louis Palladin called to ask them to deliver a few lambs for a congressional dinner at the Watergate Hotel.

“We entered the kitchen carrying the lambs on our backs,” John told me. “Palladin introduced himself—he was wearing Jordache jeans and high-top sneakers.” The chef placed the lambs on a table in the corner. John could see his arms waving wildly as a swarm of white coats surrounded him. At last Palladin called John over while examining the organs. He guessed the age of the lambs based on the layer of fat surrounding the kidneys. (He was off by three days.) Then he ran his hand along the carcass and poked his nose deep into its cavity. “Even with that enormous mane of wild hair, and thick, oversized glasses, he stuck his entire head into the carcass, breathing in, as if he was about to taste a vintage Bordeaux,” John said.

From that day on, Palladin began ordering the Jamisons’ lamb for his restaurant, naming it on the menu, and soon John and Sukey were receiving orders from chefs around the country. Farmers began asking to visit, to learn how to incorporate the Jamisons’ methods on their own farms.

“It’s a funny thing,” John said to me recently. “Here we were adhering to our ideals from the ’60s—living simply, improving the land, making the world a better place—and trying to farm in the great French peasant tradition. Along comes a chef, feeding some of the wealthiest and most influential Americans, who helps make what we do suddenly famous in America.”

Jean-Louis Palladin’s contributions to gastronomy were enormous and well documented. But one of his most lasting and least heralded legacies might be helping to ensure the success of the Jamisons, who have gone on to inspire a small network of livestock farmers to wean their animals off grain. (
Small
is the operative word; true grass-fed lamb—which means the animal
doesn’t get a lick of grain—accounts for less than 2 percent of all lamb raised in this country.)

John credits Palladin with helping create a consciousness for a generation of chefs. “That first delivery day, Sukey and I stood there with Palladin in front of the lambs after the cooks went back to work. His eyes had welled with tears.” Tearing off a piece of butcher paper, the chef quickly drew an outline of France, dividing the country into a kind of regional taste map, describing the different flavors of the lamb based on the grasses they foraged. It was the first time John met a chef who understood how feeding grain flattens flavor. Palladin celebrated the inconsistency.

“He got really animated again, pointing to the areas with the best grasses and wild herbs that produce the very best lambs in France. He studied the map, trying to situate what he had just tasted. These place-based flavors had been etched into his memory, and now he reveled in the thrill of adding new ones.”

Palladin didn’t buy in to the grain-fattening mania of animal farming, not because it was inhumane or because it was destructive to the environment, but because it never produced anything really good to eat.

A few months after my walk with Padraic and the sheep, I stood in the kitchen watching a cook devein an especially large foie gras liver. Suddenly I was thrown right back into the early July morning watching the Stone Barns lambs forage for grass. That pastoral scene—lambs hunting for their breakfast, the farmer masterfully orchestrating the right kind of meal at the perfect moment—was the antithesis to the fattened liver, which now reminded me more of that one-inch fat cap on a Colorado lamb rack.

Of course, the two aren’t entirely analogous—geese and ducks are omnivores, for one thing, which means they’re better able to digest grain than ruminants—and I wasn’t about to haul my beloved foie gras off to the
dumpster. But standing there in a moment of quiet contemplation, I wondered about the difference. How could I talk a free-choice game (as I did about all the animals we served at Blue Hill) and at the same time, on the same menu, support a system of not just corn feeding, but forced corn feeding? And a lot of it.

Luckily for me, it wasn’t long after that moment that my friend Lisa Abend, a
Time
magazine journalist stationed in Spain, called to ask if I’d ever heard of a man named Eduardo Sousa. I looked to the right, and there on my corkboard was the
Newsweek
clipping my brother had handed me. Lisa had been assigned to write about Eduardo, to evaluate with a chef whether his natural foie gras was for real, and if it was any good.

Palladin, the greatest champion of foie gras this country has ever known, might have simply hung up the phone at the preposterous (and, for a native of Gascony, offensive) idea. Or, when Lisa asked if he was interested in seeing his farm and tasting the livers, he might, as I did, have simply said, “I’ll come.”

W
E
ARRIVED
at Eduardo’s farm late in the morning, after an overnight flight from New York. Lisa picked me up at the Madrid airport, and we drove southwest toward Badajoz, traversing Extremadura, an arid region that looked the way I imagined El Paso might look if El Paso had a winter.

Extremadura has two provinces—Badajoz to the south and Cáceres to the north—both sparsely populated. Lisa, a former European history professor, explained that when the Christians were reconquering their land from the Muslims in the Middle Ages, they referred to this area as the Extrema Dorii, Latin for “far side of the Duero River.” It’s a literal translation; Lisa said it was used in the same way Americans called everything outside the thirteen colonies “the West.”

Less likely, though it would be technically accurate, Extremadura could also have referred to the “extra-hard” environment: hot, bitterly dry summers, cold winters, and high plains intersected by steep mountain ranges. Despite its difficult terrain, and undoubtedly because of it, the region was home to the original conquistadores, the famous soldier-adventurers who set off for the Americas. As I imagined the rugged television cowboys of my youth, Lisa’s comparison didn’t seem too far off.

The scene outside my window was every bit a portrait of the Spanish wild west: vast expanses of open land were intercut with towns that revealed their Moorish influence—homes with plastered white walls and thick archways. Much of the land we drove through was barren, but by the time we pulled
past Fuente de Cantos and began nearing Eduardo’s land, in Pallares, it had changed dramatically. Suddenly we seemed to be in the African savanna, but with greener pastures and healthier tree cover.

An unmarked dirt road led up to Eduardo’s farm, or we guessed it did. No one was around. A furious barking dog tied to the side of a shed greeted us. The place looked deserted. We found Eduardo lying on his back in a small, open field, his cell phone raised above his head. Two dozen or so geese circled him in a raucous chorus of quacking and feather shaking.

“
Bonita!
” I heard him say as we approached a bright orange fence. “
Hola, bonita!
” Thinking he was on speakerphone, we slowed down, only to realize he was snapping pictures of his geese. A black eagle flew threateningly low. Eduardo didn’t seem to notice.

“
Hola
—Eduardo?” Lisa said. Eduardo snapped more pictures. By now I was close enough to see that he was laughing.

“Eduardo?” she said, much more loudly. The geese shrieked and ran for the other side of the fence line, and Eduardo stood up quickly, his carefree air marred briefly by concern. After whispering something in the direction of the geese, he beamed even more brightly, then turned to acknowledge us with a gentle wave. Eduardo is large but not fat, with small eyes, puffy cheeks, and very thick black hair. His rounded belly, green sweater-vest, and brown loafers called to mind a building superintendent.

Lisa introduced us. “
Vale
,” she said. “Dan
es
chef
de
Nueva York.” Eduardo raised an eyebrow in my direction.

“It’s an honor to meet you, sir,” I said, awkwardly formal. In the instant of that raised eyebrow, I was overcome with a feeling that our trip was doomed. Foie gras without gavage? Who was I kidding? More to the point, who was
Eduardo
kidding? You didn’t need to be Columbo to question this guy’s story. He looked nothing like a farmer, and this didn’t look anything like a farm. There were no tractors, no barns, and no silos. There was only a smiling, slightly chubby man in a green sweater-vest and a phone filled with morning portraits of his geese.

A long moment of silence followed. I fought the urge to speak bluntly.
Chefs suffer from this often. It’s a regrettable but identifying trait acquired from years of working in a restaurant kitchen. The dialogue is curt. It skewers subtlety to get to the point. The point is
to get to the point
before the hot food turns cold. It’s a survival tactic. And it works. But out of the kitchen, it is often difficult to regulate.

“How often are you moving the geese to new grass?” I asked abruptly. Lisa, startled, repeated the question in Spanish, drawing it out for the sake of politeness.

Eduardo shook his head. “I listen to the geese,” he said. “I give them what they want.” We began walking the perimeter of the fence.

“And what are you feeding them?” I asked.

“Feed? No, we don’t feed,” he said.

“He doesn’t feed his geese?” I asked, looking at Lisa. Having traveled halfway around the world to learn about what was considered an impossibility—foie gras without force-feeding—I wasn’t prepared for a farm that . . . didn’t feed at all?

Eduardo smiled and held out his hands, palms down, moving them up and down briefly as if to say,
Slow down, the understanding takes time.
“The geese eat what they want. They feed off the land,” he said. “Very simple.”

We continued walking around the fence. The geese followed, slowly at first, their movements nearly imperceptible, but within a few minutes they were in a neat phalanx, marching across the paddock until they arrived, a few feet from where we stood, quacking and ruffling their feathers in delight.

Eduardo pointed at the power source for the orange fence, a solar box that converted the sun’s energy into electricity. “The geese avoid getting too close to the fence. It feels foreign to them, I think. And anyway, it doesn’t much matter, because only the outside of the fence is electrified.”

“Only the outside?”

“The outside is electrified and not inside of the fence—there’s no current running through the inside.”

I looked at Lisa and laughed. “A fence for the animals that’s not electrified. Does he mean they’re free to leave?”

“Free!” Eduardo said, his arms flapping wildly to show me just how free.

His job, he explained, was to give the geese what they wanted, and if he succeeded, they wouldn’t leave. Part of what they wanted, apparently, was to not
feel
fenced in, because if they felt fenced in they would feel manipulated. “They eat less when they feel manipulated,” he said.

“But they’re still fenced in, even if it’s not electrified,” I noted, a little too pointedly. Lisa struggled to find the right wording, to avoid offending Eduardo, but he anticipated the question and cut her off.

The fence, he said, is used only when the geese are too young to protect themselves from predators. And even then, “The geese don’t feel fenced in. They feel protected.” To be fenced in, in fact, didn’t exist on Eduardo’s farm. Until now, I hadn’t thought of a fence as much more than an instrument of enclosure and control. But for Eduardo it is a means of protection—a physical one and a psychological one, too. In feeling unmanipulated, the geese felt free, and a goose that felt free was, according Eduardo, a hungrier goose.

My mind went to Padraic and the lambs at Stone Barns. Is it possible that the animals were so delicious not just because they grazed on grass at the perfect moment, but because they felt free to do so? Perhaps the secret to natural foie gras was similar to that for superior lamb. Allow the goose to feel free, give it the opportunity to eat what it wants to eat, and nature will take care of the rest.

Eduardo insisted we drive to another area of the farm. The fencing system was important, he told us, but the freedom to roam and forage was essential to the success of the foie gras. He wanted us to see the adult geese at work.

He drove us along a back road, so slowly that I wondered if he had a flat tire. The effect, if not the intent, of this meandering was a shared appreciation for our surroundings. Winding through these open fields, intercut with enormous oak trees, it struck me for the first time (I didn’t admit to Lisa or Eduardo that I hadn’t bothered to consult a map of Spain before coming on
the trip) that we were driving through the famed Spanish
dehesa
. I had seen pictures and heard about the history of this land, but for most chefs (and Spaniards, too), coming to the
dehesa
is a pilgrimage to a sacred place, the source of the renowned
jamón ibérico.

Food writers tell us that chefs are obsessed with superior ingredients, especially ingredients that make their cooking sing—Périgord truffles, artisanal olive oils from Italy, sea salts from Brittany—and it’s true. Like anyone devoted to their craft, we are drawn to ingredients that help us elevate a dish. Which is another way of saying we’re drawn to anything that makes our food taste better. But there are a select few products that inspire complete subservience—which arrive at and depart our kitchens unchanged and without garnish. These foods fall into the category not of ingredients on a chef’s palette but of fully formed works of art. A perfectly ripe cheese, for instance, or a just-picked heirloom tomato, still warm from the sun. Or
jamón ibérico.
Even the most talented chefs (perhaps
especially
the most talented chefs) agree that they’re better left alone.

But unlike the perfectly ripe cheese or the heirloom tomato—which can be produced with exceptional results most anywhere—no one has been able to replicate the taste of
jamón ibérico.
It is unquestionably the finest ham in the world. With a taste that is both rich and dry, as nutty as Spanish almonds or aged sherry—it’s almost indescribably mouth-filling and deeply satisfying.

I first saw
jamón ibérico
a few years after leaving Los Angeles, while working as a line cook in Paris for the great French chef Michel Rostang. Chef Rostang was famous for his modern interpretation of classic French food, but in the industry he was also known for his massive eruptions during a stressful dinner service—outbursts that would often bring young line cooks to tears. I witnessed one such explosion that I still think about, nearly twenty years later. Guillaume, a lovable but absent-minded vegetable cook, had used the wrong potatoes for a fricassee, something he apparently had done many times before, and Chef Rostang, on seeing the potato dish leave
the kitchen this one night, nearly split in two with anger. He screamed Guillaume’s name, then hurled a barrage of curses and insults at Guillaume’s attitude, his intelligence, his appearance—in a way that was so personal and so intense, I was sure Rostang’s heart would just give up from the thunderous beats required to pump the rage through his body. (In fact, he had already suffered two heart attacks, both in the middle of dinner service.)

It went on so long that it stopped conversations in the dining room, which is when the maître d’hôtel, Bruno, appeared in the kitchen carrying a leg of
jamón ibérico
in a tong, the traditional metal clamp that holds the ham for proper slicing. Up to that moment, I had only seen pictures of
jamón ibérico
, and I never imagined that my first sighting would be in a famous Parisian restaurant. Nor did I ever imagine that the
jamón
would act as a pacifier. Bruno placed the ham (purposefully, I was told later) next to the unhinged chef, who stared down at it and immediately, almost reflexively rested his right hand on the front of the leg. He stopped yelling and looked down at the ham as though he were looking down at the crib of his sleeping newborn. It was as if Chef Rostang, suddenly in the presence of something so perfect, felt embarrassed by his behavior.

As we drove, I admired the oak trees outside my window—the source of the pigs’ famous acorn diet. The oaks were green and gray, gnarled through the trunk. They looked ancient but powerful, as though they’d risen up from the thick grassland through sheer force of will.

I mentioned how thrilled I was to finally see the
dehesa
for myself. “It’s more beautiful than the pictures,” I said. “Amazing.”

“And this is the ugliest time of year!” Eduardo said, his right index finger pointing straight up in exclamation. “You have to come back when it’s green, and the light is fading. Right now, well, I’m sorry for the way it looks.”

Lisa explained that locals, in their attachment to the
dehesa
,
always
bemoan your not seeing the landscape at its peak. “I’ve been coming to the
dehesa
for a long time, and I swear I get the same reaction whenever I marvel at the beauty. It’s like you’re visiting someone’s home for the first time who’s apologizing for the condition it’s in.”