The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food (16 page)

We took a sharp right onto a dirt road and drove slowly through a maze of trees until we hit an opening. The lush grass and the scattering of oak trees came into quick focus. I asked whether Eduardo raised any of the famous Iberian pigs.

“Pigs? Sure, I have some pigs,” he said with disinterest, as though shrugging off a litter of barn cats.

Suddenly Eduardo screamed—“LOOK!” He slammed on the brakes, threw his body forward, and pasted his hands on the windshield. (I thought to myself:
dinosaur?
) Eduardo could see his beloved geese in the distance, doing what I imagine he saw them do every day, which was waddle in the grass and hunt for food. We were at least eight hundred feet away, but he leapt from the car and began walking very slowly, crouching slightly and humming something I couldn’t hear. I followed close behind. Suddenly, with what I would have mistaken for theatrics if I wasn’t seeing it up close for what it was—love—he fell to the ground and began to crawl.

“
Hola, bonitas
,” he said, and Lisa translated for me as we followed him. “Lovelies,” he was saying. “Oh, my lovelies. How are you, my lovelies?”

He stopped and showed us that they were scavenging olives from a collection of trees. He was smiling in the way a father might when he sees his children sitting down together to a well-rounded meal. Eduardo acknowledged that it was an expensive lunch. He said he probably makes more money selling his olives for first-press olive oil than he does from his livers.

“In the end they eat 50 percent and I sell the other 50 percent.” It was the “take half, leave half” rule of rotating herbivores onto fresh grass, except here the geese dictated the terms. He paused in a vain attempt to calculate the math, adding simply, “They’re always quite fair.”

“If you make sure the geese are relaxed and happy, you’ll be rewarded
with the gift of fatty livers. That is God’s way of thanking us for providing so much good food for the geese,” he said, in a pronouncement that somehow sounded neither mystical nor evangelical, just likely.

Or was there false modesty at work here? I pressed Eduardo about intervening more than he let on. Didn’t he, and his father and grandfather before him, face any challenges from the environment? Eduardo shook his head. His challenge had nothing to do with the landscape, he said. It had to do with the marketplace—with the chefs, distributors, and consumers who all demand yellow foie gras.

The quality of a liver is determined by several factors. Among the most important is its color. The yellower, the better. A pale liver commands a much lower price.

Chefs learn early in their careers to be vigilant about avoiding pale livers. My education came in cooking school, when we visited Ariane Daguin at her famous specialty-foods distributing company, D’Artagnan. We learned about how all the finest foods—caviar, truffles, and of course foie gras—were imported and arranged for distribution to the best restaurants in America. Toward the end of the warehouse, we passed a small refrigerated cold room. I looked inside. Three signs, marked
A
,
B
,
and
C
,
were spaced apart and hanging along the back wall. Livers were arranged on a long table below each rating. Off in the corner, underneath a piece of notebook paper with a hastily scribbled
A
++, a small table held perhaps a dozen livers. I walked over for a closer look. They were the smoothest, brightest yellow livers I had ever seen.

I asked Ariane if these golden livers were separated as A++ because they were going to the most famous chefs. She looked at me. “
Mais non
,” she said, “these are for the chefs who know the difference.”

The problem for Eduardo is that the coveted yellow color comes from
corn. The higher the concentration of corn in the feed, the better chance you have for brighter livers. Since Eduardo only occasionally allowed for free-choice corn, his livers were naturally pale gray. For many years he embraced this idiosyncrasy in a vain attempt to celebrate his process. “I cannot tell my geese to make their livers more yellow,” he would say. It didn’t matter. People wanted yellow livers and were willing to pay more for them. Eduardo had a difficult time competing.

As luck would have it, several years ago Eduardo’s geese spent their last few weeks in an area of his farm inundated with lupin plants. Lupins are a good source of protein, popular in livestock feed. They grow wild throughout the
dehesa
, often densely concentrated in certain areas. They also happen to be bright yellow. Eduardo’s geese didn’t especially care for the plant until it matured and went to seed. Then, he said, they nearly attacked it, gorging on the seeds and devouring the entire pasture.

“They went wild!” he said, fondly remembering the sight. He forgot about how much of it they ate until after the slaughter. That’s when he discovered that the livers had turned yellow, as if his geese had consumed enormous amounts of corn. The next year, he maneuvered them into the same lupin-dense field, which again made the livers bright yellow. It’s become a routine.

Thinking of
jamón ibérico
, I asked Eduardo if he wouldn’t prefer that his geese eat a diet of the famous acorns alone. They may not provide the same bright color, but surely the flavor would be compensation enough. He shrugged his shoulders. “That’s for them to decide.”

“Acorns,” he added, suddenly impatient. “Why is
jamón ibérico
always just about the acorns? Acorns—‘the best feed in the world!’ Acorns—‘the best fat in the world!’ Did anyone ever consider that there are acorns all over the world, but no one can replicate
jamón ibérico
?” He paused to indicate that the answer was obvious. “These geese eat tons of acorns, but if they don’t move around, if they don’t eat all this grass”—here he raised his arm to outline the lush pasture—“without grass, the acorns are nothing.”

The grass, he explained, makes the acorns taste sweet, which means the
more grass his geese have access to, the more acorns they eat. Their systems are primed, in essence, because of a chemical reaction that occurs between grass and acorns. Eduardo claimed that the reaction causes an increase in weight much faster than if the geese ate acorns alone.

Just then, twenty or so pigs walked into our view. With their lumbering torsos, Iberian pigs tend to resemble beer kegs with legs. They have large ears that stick out like the bill of a baseball cap, shading their eyes from the fierce Mediterranean sun. Their snouts are unusually long, making it easier to root around for acorns.

It was the first I’d seen them up close, and it was a thrill—and not just because I was standing just a few yards from the most famous pigs in the world. I was inspired because, until that moment, Iberian pigs and their famous hams had always been synonymous with thick, undulating fat—the product of their indulgent acorn diet. They were, in my mind, the hog equivalent of couch potatoes. Up close, looking at the muscular, long-legged animals, I realized my mistake. Having spent a lot of time with happy pigs, pigs that live outdoors and eat organic grain, foraging and farrowing in a kind of porcine bliss, I shouldn’t have been so surprised. But I swear I saw something I’d never seen in a pig. I saw
proud
pigs.

Eduardo didn’t look inspired. He looked irritated. “My geese eat more acorns than those pigs,” he said, waving his hand in the direction of the famed Iberians. “And my geese are half the size!”

Just as we turned to head back for lunch, Eduardo seemed to reconsider, suggesting that we see a few more geese first. He thought we’d find a group in the general vicinity, but as we walked around, stopping at several clearings, he admitted that he really had no idea.

It was another odd moment at his farm. How could he not know the
whereabouts of his animals? If the geese were a hobby, a sideshow to the famed Iberian pigs, misremembering their location might make sense. But a foie gras company that didn’t keep track of its livers? And seemed to take pride in not knowing?

We continued searching. Eduardo’s hands were clasped behind his back as he walked. He looked, I noted, very nearly like a goose. His head rotated back and forth, and he kept his nose pointed skyward, as if following a scent. In forty minutes, we didn’t see a single goose.

Another black hawk swooped low over a hilltop. I asked Eduardo about them.

“Lots of hawks,” he said. “Lots to eat.”

“Like what?”

“Goose eggs!” he exclaimed cheerfully. “We lose more than half our eggs to hawks.”

“Half?” I repeated to Lisa. “That’s unbelievable.”

“Yes! The geese lay once a year, forty to forty-five eggs. In a good year, I’d say eighteen to twenty survive. So yes, more than half.”

Chicks die all the time—from disease, from predation, from a drenching downpour—but to be wiped out of half your stock (and 50 percent of your potential profits) before they even hatch is a staggering handicap. I looked up to see two more hawks fly off in what I understood to be the direction of Eduardo’s brooding stock.

“Would it be fair to say that the hawks are your biggest obstacle?” I asked.

“I don’t think so,” he said politely. “It’s why nature has a goose lay so many eggs. There has to be enough to pay the revolutionary tax for living outside.”

We came through the thick brush and into an open field. A finch with a bright yellow chest was in full song from the uppermost branch of a nearby oak. The sun, golden on the horizon, suffused the pasture with soft light. The oak trees cast long shadows that looked like rows of fallen soldiers.

I noticed that Eduardo was again looking up at the sky, a few hundred yards to the left. In place of the hawk, there was a small flock of wild geese, flying in our direction. As they got closer, Eduardo’s geese began honking more loudly. By the time the wild geese got to within fifty yards, you could clearly hear them honking as well. They sounded, to my untrained ear, like they were having an argument. I couldn’t tell which group was louder.

“The wild geese come to visit?” I said.

Eduardo shook his head. “Sometimes they come and they stay.”

“Stay . . . ?”

“Sometimes they never leave,” he said.

I tried to convey my disbelief, offering the analogy of a wild pig happening upon an American hog confinement farm and choosing to stay. Eduardo didn’t seem to understand the point, and not because of the translation. It was the concept of ten thousand pigs in confinement that he found hard to believe. At first he thought it wasn’t possible. Then he just seemed uninterested in learning more.

“But Eduardo,” I said, “isn’t the DNA of a goose to fly south in the winter and north in the—”

“No,” he interrupted, shaking his head. “No, the DNA of a goose is to seek conditions that are conducive to life, to happiness. When they come here, that is what they find.”

Twenty minutes later, I was sitting in the back of a restaurant in Monesterio, a quiet town just north of Seville. Monesterio is a town that, strictly speaking, lacks a town. There are a few small stores, but not much else.

The light-filled room was spare, with faux country-western furnishings and a television at the bar playing a Spanish soap opera. Amid the empty tables, Eduardo sat heavily, his hands in his pockets. He was alert, raising his chin often, with an anxious vitality that said he’d prefer to be outside in the
cold. As we waited to be served a plate of his goose liver, he smiled nervously, squinting his eyes as if enjoying a brisk wind.

The waiter passed our table several times, empty-handed, and finally shrugged a bit as if to say, “I’m not the chef.” Eduardo watched him pass with a nod of respect that, to go by the waiter’s backward glance at him, suggested this was a familiar routine.

Finally the waiter arrived with the foie gras. “Voilà!” he said, and then turned to me and slowly, in his best English, said, “Freedom foie gras.” On the white plate sat a pâté of the liver, with three sprigs of chives sticking out from its center (which Eduardo, either offended or embarrassed by the gratuitous garnish, removed with a quick sweep of his hand). Next to it the waiter placed small ramekins of sea salt and black pepper and a plate of thinly sliced baguette. He hung there expectantly, as if he were waiting for Eduardo to approve a bottle of expensive wine.