The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food (21 page)

Rodrigo ignored him. “All you need to add is a little paprika and some
salt; otherwise you’re masking the flavor.” Eduardo raised his glass to the air in a silent toast of solidarity as Rodrigo pushed on. “Look, when a great leg is born, and we get to raising it, Placido’s eight-year-old niece could make a delicious ham!”

Placido smiled uncomfortably. He leaned over to me as Rodrigo continued speaking about the importance of raising pigs the right way. “Not exactly. Give her forty-five years to learn, and all the right weather conditions, and yeah, sure . . . it’s easy.”

The color of the
jamón
was very near to purple, and even more marbled than the piece Eduardo had held up at the bar in Monesterio. Miguel handed me a piece with extra fat and told me to hold it in my hand. Unlike the fat from a Berkshire pig, the kind we cure at Blue Hill at Stone Barns, it began to melt right away. “Seventy percent of that fat is unsaturated,” he said. “These pigs are like an olive tree on four legs.”

I let the fat melt on my tongue for a moment before swallowing. Its aroma was distinct, incredibly nutty and aromatic. I felt as though I was tasting the
jamón
equivalent of Bordeaux’s finest, the Lafite Rothschild of hams. And yet my surroundings spoke nothing of luxury. The tasting room was dark and musty. Cigarette smoke wafted through the air. We drank warm beer in plastic cups. The
jamón
was on simple white plates, piled on and hastily arranged. While the ham was delicious, it was also a little dry—a minor complaint, maybe, but true.

I turned around and saw the
jamón
in the tong. The man slicing was cutting near the bone, struggling to remove whole pieces intact. We were sampling the very last of the leg. It had been cut into dozens of times, probably over many weeks, if not months. Another leg rested nearby, untouched and at the ready in case anyone wanted more.

The expression on my face must have given me away. Miguel tapped me on the leg. “This is exactly the point,” he said quietly, waving his arm around the room as everyone laughed and drank beer. “The life he leads—he looks and he acts like a peasant farmer. It’s not the picture of riches, but I’m telling
you he’s very rich. And I’m also telling you that Juan Carlos himself could come to visit here, and if there was still meat on an old
jamón
, that’s what they would serve. Because
jamón
is not about luxury. It’s a poor product; it comes from poor land. I believe this is why it has survived.”

We finished the tour on the rooftop, which was where I finally got that bird’s-eye view of the
dehesa’
s pastoral scene.

Placido’s distinctively Mediterranean home rose out of the ground like the ancient oaks surrounding us, towering over the family’s property. It was such a clear day you could see for miles. Eduardo quickly walked to the corners of the roof and again cupped his hands in front of his eyes like binoculars. He was looking for geese. I was looking for pigs, but instead I saw a cluster of veal calves grazing in the field. I asked if the pigs followed the cattle on the grass.

“This is Spain,” Miguel said. “Pigs don’t follow anything. They lead.”

That was an understatement. To ensure an abundant supply of acorns for their binges, each pig requires about four acres of
dehesa
—sometimes more, sometimes less, depending on the acorns available in a particular season. During a below-average acorn year, the number of pigs allowed to fatten is restricted. It keeps the price of the best
jamón ibérico
high, but it also acts as a kind of insurance against overwhelming the balance of the
dehesa.

Without the pigs moving, Placido explained, the grasses between the trees would suffer. Pigs eat just some of the grass, a collateral feast on their way to the next targeted acorn tree. It’s the cattle—who follow just behind the pigs—that do the real grazing. After all, they’re herbivores, and they happily trail the pigs and eat what the pigs have overlooked. The same is true of the sheep. While they no longer make up the dominant industry (and are not included on Placido’s farm), sheep are still scattered around the low-lying
areas of the
dehesa
. They eat leftovers, the grasses the pigs and the cattle don’t want or can’t get to on account of the size of their mouths.

Like at Stone Barns, all that grazing actually improves the grass. Spread out, the manure from the animals fertilizes the field. The trampling of the hooves—whether it’s sheep or cattle or pigs—also helps break down materials such as fallen leaves. Returned to the ground, that organic matter helps to sustain the billions of soil organisms and conspires to make the famously delicious assortment of grasses. It’s the variety that’s key to the health of the animals, and to the larger ecosystem. All that grass diversity increases the numbers of butterflies, beetles, ants, and bumblebees, which in turn supports the animals that prey on those insects, like lizards and snakes.

The thick forest stretches I saw in the distance provide habitats for wild birds. They flourish here, too—red kites, booted eagles, and short-toed eagles all provide a built-in population control for insects and rodents. They’re also integral to seed dispersal in the
dehesa
. In their hunt for grubs and insects, they’ll peck at the manure left behind by an herbivore, spreading it across the field and helping it to fertilize more efficiently, which means healthier pastures the next time the pigs come around to graze the grass.

Herein lies an essential fact about the famous
jamón ibérico
: it’s not just about
jamón
, in the same way that
tierra
isn’t just about the thing you stand on.

“You know, it’s a funny thing,” Miguel said to me. “What you realize looking out from up here is very obvious, and it’s something most of the world has yet to realize:
jamón ibérico
is just one product of the
dehesa
.”

He named two rich sheep’s-milk cheeses from the area: the Torta del Casar, with its gamy, acidic, and somewhat smoky flavor, widely distributed throughout Spain, and La Serena, considered one of the finest sheep’s-milk cheeses in the world. Both cheeses are made from the milk of Merino sheep. (Merinos are not much of a milking breed—the yield is particularly low—but the sheep were so integral to the culture of southern Spain and the health of the
dehesa
system that when the price of wool fell, milk replaced the wool.) But, to Miguel’s point, I had never known that they were products of the
dehesa
.

Miguel pointed to the cows, a relatively unknown Morucha breed, which he said might be more flavorful than any beef in America. The Moruchas were once used as fighting bulls (Ferdinand, of the beloved children’s book, is the most famous example), and since they originated from Black Iberian cattle, they’ve evolved to forage in the
dehesa
. The cattle are constantly in motion, which, just as with the Iberian pigs, oxygenates the muscles and yields bold, flavorful meat, darker than most steaks.

At the mention of Morucha beef, Eduardo made a tight fist and brought it to his lips.
“Fantastico,”
he said, wincing at the thought that I had never tasted it.

“There’s a history of poor communication and a lack of modern commercial networks in this area of Spain in particular,” Miguel continued, explaining that these products aren’t well-known because they’ve historically been produced for personal consumption. “That’s all changing now. You need only to look at yourself as an example. Here you are discovering Eduardo’s foie gras, but Eduardo’s foie gras is a very old thing.”

I asked what else provided an economy for the
dehesa
,
and they pointed to the oak trees. “Not the acorns, but the cork. That’s really the economic engine of this whole system,” Miguel said. Stripping the bark without harming the trees is a highly skilled task, done with extraordinary precision. Peeled like bananas, the dark orange trunks are a familiar sight after harvesting. Nearly a quarter of all wine corks in the world originate in the
dehesa
.

Placido pointed to the more open areas in the distance where barley, oats, and rye were grown—for animal feed but also for the table. “I wouldn’t say this is a highly profitable undertaking. The land is suited more for grazing. But we do produce grain, and it cuts down on what we have to import for feed.”

Dissecting the open pastures were thick forest stretches, thinned appropriately for charcoal production—another “industry” I didn’t know existed here. And the most surprising feature of the landscape—the homes scattered throughout, the hanging laundry, and the sounds of children playing in the distance—seemed just as central to the scene as the cork and the pigs.

Wendell Berry once described the land as an “
immeasurable gift,” and he wasn’t just referring to food. In the rush to industrialize farming, we’ve lost the understanding, implicit since the beginning of agriculture, that food is a process, a web of relationships, not an individual ingredient or commodity. What Berry refers to as the
culture
in agriculture is as integral to the process as the soil or the sun. Here in the
dehesa
, culture and agriculture seemed not only intertwined but interchangeable.

I’m sometimes asked what is meant by
sustainable agriculture
. I’ve never arrived at an easy answer.

When I was on that panel with Wes Jackson in California several years ago (before he schooled me in the root systems of perennial and annual wheat), Wes was asked for examples of sustainable farming. He didn’t offer any.

“Small societies have pulled it off here and there, but it has been beyond the cultural stretch of most of humanity to do agriculture right century after century,” he said, his words injecting the room with an air of defeat. “Thinking of agriculture as a mistake is a good place to start.” Wes’s work to make agriculture perennial—mimicking natural ecosystems like the prairie—is intended to remove annual planting decisions, and thereby the wild card of human shortsightedness.

At dinner that evening, I told Wes about Klaas and Mary-Howell. I described their conversion to organic, the complex rotations for soil fertility, the propagation of ancient varieties of wheat—everything pointing to farming’s potential to do a lot of good. “What’s not sustainable about that kind of agriculture?” I asked him.

“Because it won’t last,” he said. “Klaas sounds great. His son might prove to be even better. But sooner or later someone is going to show up and do something stupid to degrade the land. That’s been the history of agriculture.”

An organic farmer like Klaas might be important and inspiring, and he might produce delicious food while improving the fertility of his soil. But don’t call him sustainable, said Wes. Biologically speaking, he is more like a historical blip: here today, gone tomorrow. (“What can I say?” he said. “We live in a fallen world.”)

In the last few minutes on the roof at Cárdeno, I stood near the edge and looked out at the
dehesa
. The afternoon sun remained hidden behind a thick curtain of clouds. Then, just as we were leaving, a spectacular flood of light splashed across the fields. Once again, I saw the entirety of the astonishingly diverse landscape. But what struck me wasn’t the diversity so much as the permanence of the scene. I was enjoying the same view that Placido’s grandfather enjoyed. It was, when I stopped to think about it, the same view that Placido’s grandfather’s grandfather enjoyed, which was enough to call Wes’s conviction into question. A two-thousand-year-old agricultural landscape isn’t a blip.

The
dehesa
has survived (thrived, even) despite its poverty. In fact, as Miguel argued, the
dehesa’
s survival may be
because
of its poverty.

“The land of Ibérico was a poor part of Spain until just the last few decades,” he told me. “Understanding and respecting nature was not a choice, but the rule to survive.”

Unlike American settlers, who were spoiled by our country’s natural abundance, Spaniards couldn’t simply drop their plow and move on to better land. Agribusiness never capitalized on the
dehesa’
s wealth because the land isn’t quite good enough.
*