The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food (2 page)

“Voilà!” he said, so pleased with himself he seemed to wriggle with the sheer joy of it. “They’re ready to go. Tell me when you want them.”

“Today!” I was feeding off Jack’s energy. “We’ll make polenta and then . . .” And then I realized something I hadn’t considered: the corn needed to be ground. I didn’t have a mill.

The truth is that I had never really considered the corncob behind the cornmeal. It hadn’t crossed my mind once in twenty years of preparing polenta. Polenta was polenta. Of course I knew it came from corn, just as I knew bread came from wheat. Beyond the obvious, I had never needed to know more.

A week later, just before dinner service, our new tabletop grinder arrived. The engine whirred as it pulverized the kernels into a finely milled dust. I toasted the ground maize lightly and cooked it right away in water and salt. I’d like to say I cooked the Eight Row Flint the way Native Americans cooked it, stirring a clay pot all day with a wooden spoon over an open hearth. But the pot was carbonized steel, the spoon metal, and the hearth an induction cooktop that heats by magnetic force. It didn’t matter. Before long the polenta was smooth and shiny. I continued stirring, which is when suddenly the pot began smelling like a steaming, well-buttered ear of corn. It wasn’t just the best polenta of my life. It was polenta I hadn’t imagined possible, so
corny
that breathing out after swallowing the first bite brought another rich shot of corn flavor. The taste didn’t so much disappear as slowly, begrudgingly fade. It was an awakening. But the question for me was: Why? How had I assumed all those years that polenta smelled of nothing more than dried meal? It’s really not too much to ask of polenta to actually taste like the corn. But back then, I couldn’t have imagined the possibility until it happened. Jack’s planting strategy, as artful as a sonnet, combined with the
corn’s impeccable genetics, changed how I thought about good food, and good cooking.

With remarkable, almost ironic regularity, I have found myself repeating this kind of experience. Different farm, different farmer, same narrative arc. I am reminded that truly flavorful food involves a recipe more complex than anything I can conceive in the kitchen. A bowl of polenta that warms your senses and lingers in your memory becomes as straightforward as a mound of corn and as complex as the system that makes it run. It speaks to something beyond the crop, the cook, or the farmer—to the entirety of the landscape, and how it fits together. It can best be expressed in places where good farming and delicious food are inseparable.

This book is about these stories.

If that sounds like a chronicle of a farm-to-table chef, it is—sort of.

Blue Hill has been defined by that term since Jonathan Gold, the head reviewer for
Gourmet
magazine, called us a farm-to-table restaurant just a few months after we opened Blue Hill in New York City in the spring of 2000. He visited our Greenwich Village restaurant on a night when asparagus was everywhere on the menu. It might have been because of the achingly short asparagus season, or because they were at the height of their flavor. Or because they had been grown locally and driven down to the city by Hudson Valley family farmers.

It was all of these things, but it was something much more straightforward, too. After returning from the farmers’ market that morning and unloading a mountain of asparagus packed into the trunk of a yellow cab, I discovered another mountain of them already in the walk-in refrigerator—a week’s worth, at least—and went into a rage about the disorganization in the kitchen. How could the market order have included asparagus when we were already overloaded? I had the cooks clean out the refrigerator and prep the
cases of asparagus that were piled high and getting old. And I told them that they had to be used in every dish. I must have sounded serious, because they appeared in
every
dish. Halibut with leeks and asparagus, duck with artichokes and asparagus, chicken with mushrooms and asparagus. The asparagus soup that night even had the addition of roasted asparagus floating on its surface.

Instead of writing with puzzlement at the asparagus blitzkrieg, Jonathan Gold celebrated what he misinterpreted as intent. “What does it mean to be a farm-oriented restaurant in New York City?” he wrote as the opening line for the review, describing Blue Hill as a true representation of farm-to-table cooking. Farm-to-table is now a much abused descriptor, but back then the review pithily defined who we were, before we even knew who we were.

Farm-to-table
has since gone from a fringe idea to a mainstream social movement. Its success comes with mounting evidence that our country’s indomitable and abundant food system, for so long the envy of the world, is unstable, if not broken. Eroding soils, falling water tables for irrigation, collapsing fisheries, shrinking forests, and deteriorating grasslands represent only a handful of the environmental problems wrought by our food system—problems that will continue to multiply with rising temperatures.

Our health has suffered, too. Rising rates of food-borne illnesses, malnutrition, and diet-related diseases such as obesity and diabetes are traced, at least in part, to our mass production of food. The warnings are clear: because we eat in a way that undermines health and abuses natural resources (to say nothing of the economic and social implications), the conventional food system cannot be sustained.

Fixtures of agribusiness such as five-thousand-acre grain monocultures and bloated animal feedlots are no more the future of farming than eighteenth-century factories billowing black smoke are the future of manufacturing.
Though most of the food we eat still comes from agriculture that’s mired in this mind-set—extract more, waste more—the pulse of common sense suggests this won’t last. It will, in the words of the environmental writer Aldo Leopold, “
die of its own too-much.”

Farm-to-table—whose enthusiasts are called artisanal eaters and locavores—took root as the new food movement’s answer to the conventional food system. It was also, undeniably, a reaction against a global food economy that erodes cultures and cuisines. It’s about seasonality, locality, and direct relationships with your farmer. It’s also about better-tasting food, which is why chefs have been so influential in broadening the movement. Most chefs support the farmers’ market for the same reason that most doctors are drawn to prenatal care. As someone whose job it is to address the end result, how can you not care about the beginning? A growing number of chefs have joined the ranks of activists advancing the agenda of changing our food system.

The idea of chef as activist is a relatively new one.

It was the nouvelle cuisine chefs of the 1960s who, breaking with an onerous tradition of classic French cuisine, stepped out of the confines of the kitchen and launched modern gastronomy. They created new styles of cooking based on seasonal flavors, smaller portions, and artistic plating. In doing so, they established the authority of the chef, giving him a platform of influence that has only continued to expand.

Fifty years later, chefs are known for their ability to create fashions and shape markets. What appears on a menu in a white-tablecloth restaurant one day trickles down to the bistro the next, and eventually influences everyday food culture. After Wolfgang Puck reimagined pizza in the 1980s at his fine-dining restaurant Spago, in Los Angeles—smoked salmon instead of tomatoes; crème fraîche instead of cheese—gourmet pizza spread to every corner
of America, eventually culminating in the supermarket frozen food aisle. We now have the power to quickly popularize certain products and ingredients—in some cases, as with certain fish, to the point of commercial extinction—and increasingly we do, with dizzying speed and effect. But we also possess the potential to get people to rethink their eating habits.

Which is where farm-to-table chefs have been most effective. Today the message has gone viral, highlighting the perils of our nation’s diet and exposing the connections between how we eat and our heavy environmental footprint. We raise money for school lunch programs and nutrition education and shed light on the real costs of processed and packaged food. Michael Pollan’s
The Omnivore’s Dilemma
and Wendell Berry’s
The Unsettling of America
are on our cookbook shelves, as much for reference as for inspiration. In Berry’s words, we understand that eating “is
inescapably an agricultural act, and that how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used.”

And yet, for all the movement’s successes, and the accompanying shift in popular consciousness, the gains haven’t changed, in any fundamental way, the political and economic forces shaping how most of the food in this country is grown or raised.

Nor, for that matter, have they changed the culture of American cooking. Americans have more opportunities to opt out of the conventional food chain than ever before (farmers’ markets are ubiquitous; organic food is widely available) and more information about how to do it (innumerable cooking shows and easy access to a world of online recipes), but the food culture—the
way
we eat, which is different than
what
we eat—has remained largely unaffected.

How
do
we eat? Mostly with a heavy hand. For a long time, the prototypical American meal has featured a choice cut—like a seven-ounce steak or a
boneless, skinless chicken breast or a fillet of salmon—and a small side of vegetables or grains. The architecture of this plate has shifted little throughout the years. It’s become a distinctly American expectation of what’s for dinner, seven days a week, every week of the year, protein-centric proof that our nation can produce staggering amounts of food.

And it persists even among the most forward-thinking farm-to-table advocates. That much became clear to me on a summer night just a year after we opened Blue Hill at Stone Barns. Standing in the kitchen a few minutes into the beginning of service and staring down at a collection of newly sauced entrées ready for the dining room, I experienced what I think ranks as a revelation. I started asking myself a series of questions that took a turn toward abstraction. Among them was:
Is a restaurant menu really sustainable?