The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food (30 page)

The ocean’s edge is “
the primeval meeting place of the elements of earth and water, a place of compromise and conflict and eternal change.” Those are the words of Rachel Carson, an English major turned marine zoologist and the author of
Silent Spring
. While Carson is widely credited with winning the ban on DDT and helping ignite the environmental movement in this country, she is less well-known for what occupied most of her life: the oceans. Before publishing
Silent Spring
, Carson wrote three books on the subject, all
best sellers, including
The Edge of the Sea
, in which she takes readers to the shoreline and just beyond.

Carson owned a home on the coast of Maine, which served as both an observatory for her fieldwork and a place to write. In her introduction to
The Edge of the Sea
, oceanographer Sue Hubbell explains that for many years Carson worked on a field guide of what could be found along the coast. Except it didn’t get very far. Carson struggled. She complained of writer’s block in letters to her editor. Realizing she was
writing “the wrong kind of book”—that readers needed to feel an emotional connection if they were going to be compelled to protect something—she abandoned the field guide project and decided instead to focus on the interractions between the organisms.

“She soon realized,” Hubbell writes, “that it was more interesting to write about the relationships.”

Veta la Palma is a unique lesson in these relationships. Several miles inland, the argument between sea and shore is already under way. Exploding with life, it’s the edge effect in action. Miguel’s job is to create conditions that find advantage in this dynamic ecosystem.

We stopped to walk along a canal and take a closer look at one of the ponds. Miguel navigated the marshland with Crocodile Dundee–like ease, wading through the thick vegetation as if taking a stroll on a neighbor’s lawn. In between pointing to rare birds and aquatic plants, he explained how Veta la Palma’s natural biomass—the greenery I was slogging through and all the greenery I couldn’t see in the water—determined the health of the aquaculture system. Which in turn determined the number and the quality of the fish they raised. If the production were too high, the density of the natural feed would plummet.

“Natural feed?” I asked. “Like what?”

“Well, like the phytoplankton.”

“But bass don’t eat phytoplankton, do they?” I asked.

“No, but they’re eating the shrimp. And the shrimp eat the plankton.” We crouched beside a pond filled with young shrimp. He wanted me to taste them. They were so tiny—each one no larger than a grain of rice—that I popped several in my mouth to get a sense of their taste. They turned out to be rich and sweet, with that same fullness of flavor I’d found in my bass the night before.

I made sure Miguel could hear my hum of appreciation. “They’re incredible, Miguel, really. But what are
you
feeding the bass? Fishmeal?”

“Dan,” he said patiently, “we don’t feed them, not at this time of year, at least. The natural productivity of the farm is so high during most of the year, we’re not feeding the bass.” He paused. “In August and September, it is very dry, and the productivity is low, so yes, of course, we feed a supplement that is available to them—it’s a self-feeder, really. They come to eat as much as they want, but they have to work to get it.

“It’s a coevolution between nature and the farm’s productive capacity,” he continued. “We’re in this thing together. The response of nature has been much stronger than we thought. We’re good partners.”

He stopped at the edge of one of the canals and, looking at Lisa—who somehow seemed to understand the farm intuitively, almost as if she had designed it herself—drew an
X
in the dirt with a stick. “We are here,” he declared. He outlined a rough approximation of Spain, which in his artistic representation resembled a human heart. Tracing the Guadalquivir River like a major artery, he started at the southeast of the country and wound his way to the southwestern corner, where we were.

“The Guadalquivir River is our lifeline; it runs through us, and then it gets flushed out here,” he said, pointing to a patch of dirt and marking it with an
A
for the Atlantic. “The ocean water flows into the system here.” He dragged his stick from the Atlantic to his original
X
, the spot where we were standing. “And the pumping station, located here”—Miguel
X
’d another spot close by—“this redistributes the water throughout our farm.”

Because the water in the farm comes both from the ocean, flushed in at high tide and pumped through the system, and from the Guadalquivir River, the resulting estuary is made up of brackish water—a mix of salt and freshwater. It’s teeming with microalgae and those tiny, translucent shrimp, which provide food for the fish they raise. And the species they raise are native to the estuary: twelve hundred tons of grey mullet, shrimp, eel, sole, sea bream, and that bass I had fallen for at the restaurant. Miguel told me that more than half of their production was sea bass.

The enormous scale of the property means there’s no overcrowding of fish. They suffer none of the problems—injury, disease, parasites—usually associated with farming (Veta la Palma loses 1 percent of its fish to disease; the industry average is more than 10 percent), and the ingenious web of canals provides a filtration system against pollution.

In a vain attempt to impress Miguel, and in the hope of getting what I really wanted—an answer to why the bass had been so spectacular—I casually asked how long it took for the bass to reach market weight. Miguel pointed to a group of men dragging a small net through one of the ponds. As they lifted it out of the water, I saw three large, muscular bass caught up in the netting, flapping powerfully in a vain attempt to escape. I was amazed at the size of the bass and, forgetting my thought, remarked at how beautiful they looked.

“Thirty months,” Miguel muttered, seemingly to no one in particular.

“Thirty months!” I said. “It takes two and a half years to raise . . . a bass?”

“Yes, that’s the average, which is more than twice the aquaculture average.” I asked how the company could make money.

“So far there’s profit, enough to keep us working at an optimum, not a maximum.” He paused in deference to the ritual taking place in front of us. One of the men, emerging from the pond with the netted fish, dunked the bass headfirst into a plastic bucket of ice mixed with seawater. The bass flapped wildly, thrashing in the cold water, but quickly calmed and in just a few seconds seemed to fall asleep.

“This we’ve found to be the most humane slaughter,” Miguel said. “They lose consciousness without a struggle. We’ve found a large correlation between this kind of slaughter and the best-tasting fish.” Lisa smiled, probably remembering Eduardo and his method for gently gassing his geese.

“In the end I’m very lucky,” Miguel said, dialing back to his point about the company’s executives. “They know that you can’t, and they don’t want to, surpass nature’s capabilities. So we keep production low, and we don’t surpass the limits of the natural ecosystem.”

“But Miguel,” I said, looking around at the endless miles of canals, “This isn’t really
natural.”
It might have been my abrupt chef-speak kicking in, but I sounded more cynical than I felt.

“It’s a healthy artificial system. Yes, artificial. But what’s natural anymore?”

Back in the van, still marveling at the vastness of the farm surrounding us, I commented again on the beauty of the landscape. Miguel nodded.

Miguel has that California habit of speaking slowly, letting his words hang in the air. You feel his intensity, but it’s beneath the surface, coiled and ready for action. Several moments passed, and I thought that was that. Then he said, “Some days, driving around the property like we are right now, I’ll look out the window and I swear I see a zebra, or an elephant, and I have to shake my head to stop my dreaming. It’s really powerful. What’s the saying? ‘If you drink once from the African soil you will do it again and again’?” He told me he’d studied in Tanzania for many years.

I asked what kind of aquaculture there was to study in Tanzania. “No, not fish. I studied the grouping patterns of giraffes in the Mikumi National Park.”

“Giraffes?”

He nodded. “The giraffe is not a very well-known animal, from a scientific point of view, and yet it is one of the most beautiful and most handsome animals. I fell for them. And over my long observation, I studied how members of the herd hardly interacted. How could this be? Giraffes live in herds, move in herds, feed and sleep in herds, but they don’t really mix with each other, they don’t socialize much. So the question is, why? Is it a defensive behavior? Or a relic behavior, still maintained because it’s not expensive, energywise?”

He stopped speaking, and for a few moments all I heard was the kicking of gravel underneath the van as we sped alongside yet another canal. He appeared to be daydreaming. “How did you become such a fish expert?” I asked.

“Fish?” Miguel looked at me in the rearview mirror, genuinely perplexed. “When I came here, I didn’t know anything about fish. I was hired because I’m an expert in relationships.”

As impressed as I was with Miguel’s philosophy, I couldn’t help asking the pragmatic question: how did this kind of place decide it was doing well? I thought of Eduardo, and how he believed the size of the livers determined the extent of nature’s gift.

“Miguel,” I asked, “for a place that is so natural, how do you measure success?”

Miguel nodded as if expecting the question, and in a perfectly (almost unbelievably) orchestrated act of good timing, he pulled alongside a shallow levee. Thousands of pink flamingos stretched before us, a pink carpet as far as I could see.

“That’s success,” he said. “Look at their bellies.” He pointed. “They’re feasting.”

I was totally confused. “Feasting? Aren’t they feasting . . . on your fish?”

“Yesss!” he said, as proud as I’d heard him all day. Lisa and I laughed, but he ignored us, looking out at the flamingos. “There are thirty thousand flamingos. Overall, we lose 20 percent of the fish eggs and the baby fish to the birds here.”

“But, Miguel, isn’t a thriving bird population the last thing you want on a fish farm?”

He shook his head slowly, with the same calm acceptance Eduardo had shown in the face of losing half of his goose eggs to hawks. “We’re farming extensively, not intensively,” he said. “This is the ecological network. The flamingos eat the shrimp, the shrimp eat the phytoplankton. So the pinker the bellies, the better the system.” The quality of the relationships matters more than the quantity of the catch.

Those flamingos are only a small representation of the thriving birdlife. There are now around half a million birds at Veta la Palma—more than 250 species, compared with fewer than 50 in 1982, when the canals were flushing out water and creating grassland for the Argentinean beef cattle. Miguel even created Lucio del Bocón, a 740-acre lagoon set aside as a bird refuge—no fishing allowed. It has become the
most important private estate for aquatic birds in all of Europe.

Technically I was correct: thirty thousand hungry flamingos—one of the largest populations of greater flamingos in the world—are the last thing you want on a fish farm. But Veta la Palma isn’t just a fish farm. Miguel meant “extensive” in the broadest sense of the word. I came to understand it in two ways.

The first is practical. The fish’s excrement produces nitrogen. The phytoplankton and zooplankton and the micro-invertebrates feed off this nitrogen, and in turn become food for the fish and for filter-feeding birds like flamingos. Because the system is so healthy, there’s more than enough feed for fish and birds. In fact, without the birds, problems would inevitably arise. Much in the way that the Mississippi drains excess nitrogen from corn production into the Gulf (causing irreparable damage in algae-blooming dead
zones), the mighty Guadalquivir River carries nitrogen runoff from the heart of Spain into the Atlantic, passing Veta la Palma on the way. Filter-feeding birds scoop up the excess nutrients, balancing the system and keeping it pure.