The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food (34 page)

B
ACK
WHEN
chefs like Alice Waters and David Bouley began naming the sources of their ingredients in the early 1990s, it was a refreshing novelty. But that kind of proclaimed sourcing has reached a fever pitch: we get menus now written in a way that all but begs for ridicule. They declare the provenance of their vegetables with holy pronouncements (“Farmer Dave’s biodynamic turnips”). Or they announce their do-good nature with a Girl Scout–like earnestness that’s hard to stomach (“We source only ingredients that are good for the planet”). Menus like these strain to be virtuous.

I got to thinking about menu descriptions because, after months of back-and-forth, Miguel and several others from Veta la Palma decided to come to New York City to introduce themselves to a few seafood distributors, with the hope of exporting their fish to the United States.

For Blue Hill New York, which still features a traditional à la carte menu, I struggled for words when it came to Miguel’s fish. Do you say “Sea bass” and leave it at that? Bass sells itself, thanks to Le Coze’s popularizing the fish at Le Bernardin many years ago. But I wanted people to know that what they were eating was not just stunningly delicious but also a hopeful sign for the future of aquaculture. “Sustainable sea bass” is what I think I settled on, because it sounded the
least
annoying, and it had nice alliteration.

But it didn’t matter, because the meetings did not go as planned. When I called Miguel after their appointment with the first purveyor, he said it had gone well (though Miguel seems constitutionally incapable of saying
something negative about anyone). After a little prodding, he told me that the samples of bass they had brought were never talked about or tasted. When I asked if headway had been made in importing the bass, he said he couldn’t be sure when it would happen, if it were to happen at all.

I had planned to meet Miguel and the others for lunch at Esca, chef David Pasternack’s seafood-centric restaurant in midtown Manhattan, but a problem at Blue Hill developed in the late morning, and I knew there was no way I’d make it out. I called Pasternack to explain who was coming in.

Before I could get very far, he interrupted me. “You’re sending me a couple of goombah fish-farming guys?” Like Ángel León, he found the mere idea offensive. Pasternack, a lifelong fisherman from the North Shore of Long Island, is almost pathologically obsessed with great seafood. He regularly fishes from Montauk to the Far Rockaways and has been known to ride the Long Island Rail Road into Manhattan with the previous day’s catch packed on ice.

He proceeded to stake out Miguel as soon as he arrived. Miguel answered questions about the farm, then handed over a sample of the bass to Pasternack, who called me from his kitchen, having just filleted it and tasted a piece. “Fucking
very
good,” he said, his voice low and controlled (likely not wanting to admit in front of his staff that he was impressed by a farm-raised fish).

Pasternack didn’t waste time. One taste of Veta la Palma’s bass and he had what he described to me as “a small epiphany” about the potential for farm-raised fish. While Miguel was still eating, he called Rod Mitchell, the owner of Browne Trading Company, in Portland, Maine, to convince him that this was a fish he should import without delay. Mitchell is among the most important seafood purveyors in the United States, and though it sounds falsely modest when he insists he’s merely “a fish picker,” it’s also true. Mitchell picks fish for the country’s best chefs, from Maine to California.

It started in 1980 when he met Jean-Louis Palladin. Through a mutual friend, Palladin discovered that Mitchell was a diver, so he went to visit the wineshop in Camden, Maine, where Mitchell was working at the time.
Palladin examined the store, but according to Mitchell he kept looking out the window.

“It was one of those foggy, rainy days in Camden,” Mitchell told me. “The first thing he says to me, pointing out to the shore, is that the area reminds him of back home. He says he bets there are some great scallops out there. I told him he was right about that.”

Palladin knew that at that time of year the scallops would be at their peak flavor. When the Atlantic waters turn cold in October and November, phytoplankton drop from the water’s surface and fall to the ocean’s floor. Scallops, like geese, gorge on the excess nutrients to fatten themselves for the winter months.

The next day, Mitchell dove for scallops in his favorite area of the bay. “Jean-Louis took one look at them and nearly cried. In that thick, deep, gravelly-voiced French accent of his, he said, ‘What else can you get me?’ That started the business.” And an industry. Just as Palladin helped establish John and Sukey Jamison for their grass-finished lamb—influencing a generation of small farmers—and just as he converted mushroom hobbyists into full-time foragers and small milk producers into cheese artisans, he transformed Mitchell from a recreational diver into one of the most important seafood distributors in the country.

“All of a sudden we got run over with demand,” Mitchell told me. “It was like Jean-Louis had a front-page ad in every chef’s morning paper. I kept hiring divers. These guys couldn’t believe it. We’d dived for scallops all our life, just for fun, and now chefs in New York and Boston wanted to pay us a lot of money to do it.”

Now on the menus of countless restaurants across the country, “day boat” or diver scallops are well-known to be the sweetest and most flavorful of their kind. They’re among the most sustainable, too. Until Mitchell began paying divers, scallops were almost always harvested by dragging nets along the floor, up to one hour at a time. The divers may yield smaller harvests, but they are more discriminating (and less destructive) in what they catch.

When the scallop season ended, Mitchell sought out other fish to sell to chefs. “I just purchased the best of everything I could find,” he said. “I had chefs, the best chefs in America, wanting to know how many scales were on the damn fillet. You couldn’t fool these guys. So we always bid first and last, always, because I couldn’t afford not to have the best stuff.”

It was the beginning, Mitchell told me, of the specialty seafood business. An outlet for fishermen developed in the same way farmers’ markets created an outlet for small farmers. Before long, Mitchell was delivering seafood to all fifty states. Even Gilbert Le Coze, who hadn’t been interested in meeting Mitchell until the early 1990s, finally invited him to Le Bernardin. (“He brings me to the kitchen, stares at me, his right eye twitching in the way he did when he was nervous. ‘If it’s not the best fish you have,’ he said, ‘if it doesn’t look like it just came out of the water, my name should not enter your mind—I do not exist.’”) The restaurant would soon become Browne Trading Company’s largest single purchaser, and remains so today.

The specialty seafood business gave a coterie of American chefs impeccable fish. It also gave small fishermen a viable business. And yet their thoughtful practices did not reflect the general ethos of the fishing industry.

With advances in technology and the scorched-earth tactics of drag-netting, seafood catches looked like those towers of shrimp at an all-you-can-eat buffet: bounteous and inexhaustible. The fishing spree of the 1980s and ’90s decimated fisheries, kicking off the kind of lavish party that never ends well. Among those who understood that this was too much of a good thing were fishermen themselves. They warned of future problems. Many clamored for regulation. (And when fishermen want more government involvement, something is terribly wrong.)

Mitchell is adamant that if Palladin and Le Coze—and all the other chefs who followed in their footsteps—hadn’t created the specialty seafood
market, the big boats would have cleaned out the seas long ago. “They still might,” Mitchell told me. “Chefs helped good fishermen distinguish themselves from the ones who weren’t. These small fishermen are not the problem. They’re part of the solution. They generally catch the fish at the right time, when they’re fat and full of flavor, not young, tasteless, and unable to reproduce. You can’t do that with large boats.”

But chefs are also to blame. Palladin and Le Coze helped create a demand—and a chain of supply—that would eventually cripple the industry. It’s not hard to see the irony. The two men who perhaps did the most to help chefs access quality seafood and introduce Americans to unknown flavors of the sea catalyzed the decline of many of the fish they promoted. (They never lived to see it. Le Coze suffered a heart attack in 1994, at the age of forty-nine, and Palladin died of lung cancer in 2002, at the age of fifty-five.)

No one could have predicted the declines—except perhaps Carl, who warned Ángel of his efforts to popularize the unpopular. But even Carl is amazed at the rapid destruction of once plentiful fish like monkfish and skate, which Le Coze single-handedly popularized twenty years ago. The chefs’ influence was profound—and it still is.

Mitchell called me recently after visiting the Portland Fish Exchange. Daily catches now average about seven thousand pounds. “When there’s a twenty-thousand-pound day, fishermen say, ‘Look, plenty of fish!’ Which is what we used to say in 1988 after a
two-hundred
-thousand-pound day.”

It’s brought chefs into a kind of meta moment: prices have risen so drastically in the face of steep declines that a new generation of chefs is struggling to include fish on its menus. They’re asking questions about a future that appears grim. Is the answer to identify and support better fisheries management? Or are we going to have to cook with less fish? Or less local fish? Or more of the less desired fish? Or more farmed fish?

Over the past twenty years, we’ve used our influence to identify and boycott particular species of fish—a thumbs-up for fish A, a thumbs-down for fish B. The “Give Swordfish a Break” campaign of the late 1990s was one
such example. It worked spectacularly well. More than seven hundred chefs around the country pledged to drop one of their best sellers from the menu. Thousands more soon followed.

Calling attention to certain well-managed fisheries (“Day Boat Chatham Cod,” “Alaskan King Salmon,” “Maine Diver Sea Scallops,” “Hook and Line Haddock,” “Sustainable Sea Bass”)—the widely imitated Bouley form of menu writing—may feel contrived, but it’s been another significant step toward raising the public’s consciousness and preserving the right kind of fisheries.

And yet the question remains whether, in advertising these delicious and sustainable alternatives, we may be unwittingly endangering them for the future.

W
HEN
Á
NGEL
described the ancient tuna-fishing ritual of the
almadraba
over lunch with Lisa and Carl, it had sounded interesting and rewarding in the way that important museum exhibits often sound interesting and rewarding—but don’t necessarily compel you to go. It didn’t help that since the lunchtime debate between Ángel and Carl, I had gotten the suspicion that Ángel, notwithstanding his good intentions, had it wrong about the
almadraba
. Without seeing it, I had sided with Carl, who has an uncomplicated view of fishing bluefin (don’t do it) and sustainability (biology trumps culture). How can you disagree with outlawing the killing of a species that’s going extinct?

But six months later, Ángel called Lisa to announce that he’d partnered with Miguel and Veta la Palma for an exciting new project. Partnered? The last I’d heard from Ángel, he hadn’t even deemed Veta la Palma worthy of a visit. I was a little jealous, then impatient to learn more. A partnership between Ángel and Miguel seemed to me inevitable, a meeting of complementary minds.

Ángel called me himself a week or so after that to say, first, that he wanted me to see his “revolutionary new project before the world learned of its existence” and, second, to inform me that the captain of one of the
almadraba
boats, an admirer of his, was willing to allow me on board during the catch.

Lisa (who would also be allowed on board) called me as soon as I hung up the phone with Ángel. “It’s incredibly rare for an outsider to get to witness the
almadraba
,” she said. “Especially a foreigner!”

I reached out to Miguel, wondering how he felt about the opportunity. There was silence on the phone, and then Miguel said, “I don’t want to impose, of course, but is there any way you think I might be able to go with you? I mean, this is my dream.”

Later that week, Ángel called one last time. “Come. Do as the Romans did,” he said. So I went.

Lisa, Miguel, and I planned to meet the evening before our
almadraba
expedition at El Campero restaurant, in the town of Barbate, in Cádiz, the southernmost province of Spain. Shoehorned between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, the area evokes a forgotten time of small towns and picturesque coastline, before high-rises and cheap tourist attractions blighted the country’s seaboard. There’s a warmth to Cádiz, too, and it’s not just from the blazing Iberian sun. The people seem friendlier, more relaxed. Maybe too relaxed: Cádiz’s staggering unemployment rate has for decades been Spain’s highest.

Barbate is the most famous of the
almadraba
towns along the coast, and El Campero, as restaurants go, is bluefin ground zero. Nose-to-tail dining is how a place like El Campero would be described in Brooklyn or Berkeley. (And that may be underplaying it; you can order tuna face, heart, ear, and semen.) But the restaurant is bright, nondescript, and totally without pretension. There is no big to-do, no fuss over a cuisine that utilizes the whole animal.

As we waited for Miguel, Lisa explained how bluefin tuna is a way of life there. “Like Eskimos and their fifty names for snow, the people of Barbate have twenty-five words to describe parts of the tuna,” she told me. “This isn’t a trend or a fad. Tuna is to the people of Barbate what
jamón ibérico
is to most Spaniards—culture by way of gastronomy, with deep ties to the region’s identity.”

While she spoke, I started to realize something that had eluded me until
this moment. Miguel and Veta la Palma (and Eduardo and the
dehesa
) had made such strong impressions on me at least in part because of Lisa herself. Her translation made my visits possible in the first place, but more than that, I was able to better understand them thanks to the framework of information—gastronomic, historical, religious, and cultural—that she provided.

Farm-to-table cooking, or any of the gastronomic variations associated with sustainability, usually involves something larger than delicious food. The relationship between a farmer and a chef, or the connection between a community and an ecology—the story behind the food—can be as important as the food itself. (
Jamón
is delicious, but
jamón
as an expression of a two-thousand-year-old landscape is something to savor.) The waiter is often that conduit. Food writers can be, too. At Stone Barns, the education center plays that role, bridging the gap between farm and restaurant. But here in Spain, it took someone like Lisa, a deeply knowledgeable interpreter of the language and culture, to illuminate the meaning of the experiences.

Miguel arrived looking exuberant. He and his wife were adopting a baby from China. He said he had been busy lately, taking a course on Chinese history. He had also spent the past year learning Mandarin, which he found tiring and difficult but worth the effort. “She will be Spanish, of course, but she will know who she is as well.”

It was a beautiful early evening, the sun’s brilliant light settling into the town. I asked the waitress if we could move to one of the outdoor tables, which were all unoccupied. She looked at me, puzzled. When we arrived at a table, it seemed as though she still couldn’t believe we actually wanted to sit outside. She spoke quickly in Spanish, then cried out, “
Levante!
” I must have seemed confused, because she looked at Lisa and Miguel with an expression that said,
Tourist?

Miguel said he’d heard warnings of the
levante
on the radio while driving to meet us. He explained that the
levante
is one of the strong winds that historically plagued the region’s fishermen. One belief has it that during the worst of the winds, dead people’s souls are being blown from their graves;
another tradition, like that of the French mistral, suggests that the winds make you a little loopy. Either way, their existence, defined by the direction of the wind, determines the fate of the fishermen’s catch, and therefore their survival.

The waitress returned with our beers, inquiring about our comfort. I didn’t even feel a breeze, or the hint that one might appear. But she was very concerned. When we assured her we were fine, she shrugged, washing her hands of responsibility.

By the second beer Miguel had relaxed in his chair and looked out over the town, the fading light painting the sides of Barbate’s ramshackle homes. I asked about Veta la Palma. I knew that changes were imminent, especially with the farm’s sea bass on the verge of being available in New York City. Miguel didn’t look very excited by the prospect.

“Any day now they tell me the papers will clear,” he said. “We’ve entered into a kind of spiral that we can’t get out of.” And then, as if catching himself, he added, “In a good way.”

He got up and excused himself for the bathroom. I asked Lisa how a spiral could be good—maybe the stress of the job was getting to him. The waitress appeared with more drinks. Lisa shrugged and whispered, “Maybe it’s the
levante.
”

When Miguel returned, I asked him if he had second thoughts about selling his fish abroad. “No, no, this is very exciting. But I worry about how much bass we will have to sell.” Since I had been under the impression that Veta la Palma could sell a lot more fish if only they had greater demand, I found the admission surprising and asked him to clarify.

“True, absolutely, we do have a lot more fish to sell, except chefs want the sea bass. Right now the farm produces twelve hundred tons of fish per year—nine hundred of this is sea bass. We don’t have trouble selling bass.”

I told him I didn’t see the problem. “I think the carrying capacity of the system is about two thousand tons,” he said. “I don’t believe we can go beyond this without compromising the quality or hurting the farm.” Two
thousand tons did not amount to a lot of fish. Should New York City chefs taste what I tasted, the farm’s supply would be exhausted in a few days. Factor in chefs from Las Vegas, San Francisco, and Los Angeles—all popular spots for Rod Mitchell’s deliveries—and it would last a few hours. Miguel nodded.

We sat in silence until Lisa asked, “Could Veta la Palma produce more if some of the other fish you raised were popular?”

“Yes,” he said, looking at her with an expression of relief and bewilderment—relief, perhaps, that such a bewilderingly obvious question hadn’t been asked before. “Yes, absolutely. The sea bass, as I have explained, is raised in a semiextensive regime. That is to say, from at least March until October, and sometimes longer, the natural productivity within the system—the phytoplankton, zooplankton, crustaceans such as shrimps, small wild fishes, et cetera—feeds the bass. For the other times, the feed is complemented with a supply of dry food, or fishmeal.”

“Isn’t this true of all your fish?” I asked him.

“Oh, no, not at all.” Miguel pushed his beer aside and sat forward in his chair. “The mullets, for example, their regime is absolutely extensive.” He paused to make sure I understood. “No feed. Nothing. It is important to remember that the bass are active predators. They are carnivorous and rank high on the ecological network—the amount of energy needed to raise them is greater than the mostly herbivorous mullet. Mullets need less energy to live and reproduce. This is the second law of thermodynamics, and it’s applicable to the laws of ecology—well, actually, it’s a
principle
of ecology, as ecology doesn’t have a lot of laws.”

Just then, a strong wind arrived so suddenly, it was as if a switch had been flipped. A brutal current of air threatened, for a moment, to levitate our table and the three of us along with it. And then, just as suddenly, it died. The calm returned, only now it felt a little eerie.

Miguel hardly noticed. “Mullets are filter-feeding fish. They are all the time removing excess nutrients—nitrogen and phosphorus, to name the two
most important. If they don’t get taken up by the mullets or the other filter feeders in the system, these nutrients become concentrated.”

“Algae blooms,” I said, wanting to show him that I followed his logic.

“Yes,” he said, sitting back a little in his chair. “They do the work for you. This is the ecological network. They are the keystone to the network. My belief is that within this network we could double the rate of mullet production, if we had a market for mullets.”

“That’s the problem,” I said. “Mullet. Tough to sell mullet.” Miguel nodded sympathetically.

“It sounds like I fell for the wrong fish,” I said.

“You fell in love with a fish that has the highest commercial value but the lowest ecological value. So, maybe,” he said. “Yes.”

We moved inside for our dinner reservation. Ángel had arranged for the mayor of Barbate to welcome us at some point during dinner. Lisa was on the phone with him when we sat.

“By now I’m sure you’ve heard,” the mayor said into the phone, without introducing himself. “The
levante
is fucking us.”

“Does this mean the
almadraba
is going to be impossible?” Lisa pressed. “Because we’ve come all the way—”

The mayor interrupted her. “Please, Miss Lisa, we’re in Barbate. Nothing is impossible,” he said. He promised to join us soon.

As we waited for menus, Lisa diagrammed the
almadraba
. She made a rough outline of southern Spain on the back of her napkin. “We’re here,” she said, marking an
X
near the southernmost tip of Spain. “Africa is right down here.” She sketched Africa. Morocco’s shores, at the northwest tip of Africa, were not far away. The Strait of Gibraltar, dividing two countries—and two continents—measures only eight miles wide, making the waterway more riverlike than the geographic distinction seems to warrant.

“The Strait of Gibraltar, of course, connects the Atlantic over here”—Lisa drew an
X
for the Atlantic, to the left of Barbate—“and the Mediterranean over here,” where she drew another
X
, across the Strait and far to the right of Barbate. “So the tuna enter from the Atlantic, looking to spawn in the Mediterranean, which is what they’re programmed to do. The labyrinth of
almadraba
nets is set up along the coast here.” She made a line that passed several towns along the coast, including Barbate.