The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food (5 page)

No one spoke directly about how their work translated into crops with more flavor, because it was simply understood. I got hungry just sitting there.

And then Klaas Martens rose to tell his story. Standing six foot three, with his John Deere baseball cap askew and his overalls hiked alarmingly high, he looked more Gomer Pyle than agricultural statesman. I decided to get back to the kitchen, but as I turned to leave, Klaas offered the group a simple question: “When do you start raising a child?” Just like that. It was an oddball opening to a talk about his life’s work, but Klaas’s humble, practical tone drew everyone’s attention. I stayed for the answer.

Klaas said he’d come to the question through his interest in the Mennonite community, a group he had known over the years and greatly respected. He explained that Mennonites forbid the use of rubber tires on their farm tractors. The Fertile Dozen shook their heads in near unison. Klaas smiled, acknowledging the severity of the decree—steel-tired tractors inch along, slow as oxen.

He said one day he got up the nerve to ask a Mennonite bishop why
rubber tires were forbidden. The bishop answered Klaas’s question with a question: “When do you start raising a child?” According to the bishop, Klaas told us, child rearing begins not at birth, or even conception, but one hundred years before a child is born, “because that’s when you start building the environment they’re going to live in.”

Mennonites, he went on, believe that if you look at the history of tractors with rubber tires, you see failure within a generation. Rubber tires enable easy movement, and easy movement means that, inevitably, the farm will grow, which means more profit. More profit, in turn, leads to the acquisition of even more land, which usually means less crop diversity, more large machinery, and so on. Pretty soon the farmer becomes less intimate with his farm. It’s that lack of intimacy that leads to ignorance, and eventually to loss.

Around the table, heads nodded in silent recognition: Klaas had just described the problem with American agriculture.

I
F
FEELING
humbled in the face of nature is what you’re after, skip the Grand Canyon and stand in a large field of wheat. Or stand in any grain field next to dozens of other, contiguous grain fields. The wide, ripe expanse doesn’t just surround you, it envelops you. It makes you feel small. I once heard the environmental lawyer and activist Robert Kennedy Jr. speak of an epiphany he had. God talks to human beings through many vectors, he said, but nowhere with such clarity, texture, grace, and joy as through a growing field of wheat.

A few years after meeting Klaas at Laverstoke, I stood in the middle of one of his wheat fields in Penn Yan, New York, and saw what Kennedy meant. I had never been to Penn Yan—didn’t even know it existed until I met Klaas—and though it’s only forty-five minutes from downtown Ithaca and the hubbub of Cornell University, it feels more like central Kansas than upstate New York.

The scene reminded me of a painting I once saw in grade school. A crew of seamen, sailing at a time when conventional wisdom had it that the world was flat, quaked with fear and knelt in prayer as their ship slowly approached the edge of the horizon. Their expressions of despair would be appropriate if you found yourself about to fall off the face of the earth, but I had trouble sympathizing. To my adolescent mind, the men looked a little silly, their fear exaggerated.

And yet from the vantage of that wheat field, I thought maybe those men
had been on to something. The idea that the world is
not
flat seemed, at that moment, sort of radical. I raked my gaze back and forth, enormity and abundance in every direction. The rain had just cleared, and the air was still thick with odor and color. To the east, beyond Klaas’s fields, I could see his neighbor’s fields—a figure of a man on a tractor was no larger than a grasshopper—and, beyond this, his neighbor’s neighbor’s fields, until eventually the grass just dropped off into a kind of oblivion.

Klaas leaned over, broke off a stalk of emmer wheat, and brought it to his mouth for a taste. He chewed thoughtfully, separating the wheat kernel from its chaff and rolling it around in his mouth. Klaas’s features sometimes seem to have outgrown his frame. His hands flap around like empty ski gloves when he speaks, and his shoulders are so wide you’re tempted to inspect the back of his jacket to make sure he didn’t leave the coat hanger in. He embodies a particular brand of solidness—the German immigrant farmer who plowed our country’s midsection with nothing more than grit and determination. And yet Klaas is an irrepressibly cheerful man, generous and humble.

I asked Klaas why he found it important to grow wheat. He paused to examine another stalk. “The nice thing about wheat is how it’s tied to Western civilization, to the cradle of civilization. The history of wheat is the history of a sociable crop.”

He was right. For centuries, wheat was a community builder, a grain whose benefits were reaped only through cooperation and effective social organization—farmers grew it, millers ground it, and bakers turned it into sustenance and pleasure. In his book
Seeds, Sex & Civilization,
Peter Thompson says all three of the world’s great grains—wheat, corn, and rice—provided the foundations for civilization. But, he wrote, “
whereas the foundations provided by maize and rice were sufficient to build walls,” wheat’s inherently communal qualities “provided the keystones of arches to support the edifices of urban civilizations.”

The story of wheat is the story of who we are.

Klaas broke off a kernel and held it in his big hand. “This is probably what someone was threshing when Ruth showed up,” he said, adding that emmer was one of the first domesticated crops. He shook his head. “It humbles me just holding it.”

God may or may not communicate through wheat, but for sure
we
communicate by carpeting so much of our landscape with grain. The middle of the wheat field in Penn Yan was insignificant—a mere nursery compared with the Corn Belt of the Midwest, or the plowed-up prairie of the Plains. Today more than 80 percent of American farmland is in grain production—corn, wheat, and rice, mostly. Wheat—which, worldwide, covers more acreage than any other crop—is planted on fifty-six million acres in the United States. Vegetables and fruits, by comparison—what most everyone, including chefs, fixate on—occupy just 8 percent of our farmland.

Why haven’t we talked more about wheat? While we’ve been obsessed with record corn harvests—as impressive and record-breaking as they are—wheat still blankets much of our country’s midsection. It also constitutes a large percentage of our diet—more than 130 pounds per person, every year. That’s more than beef, lamb, veal, and pork put together. It’s more than poultry and fish, too. If you don’t count corn sweeteners,
we eat more wheat than every other cereal combined.

But rarely do we consider how it’s grown. If we want to improve the condition of our food system and create a food tradition that thoughtfully ties together the disparate parts, focusing only on fruits and vegetables is like planning a new house but designing only the doors and windows. It misses the big picture.

Klaas acknowledged the disconnect. “I see people go to all the trouble to visit the farmers’ market and really take the time to pick out the best peach, or stand in line for a grass-fed steak that’s treated the way a cow ought to be treated,” he said. “And then on their way home they buy packaged bread in the store.” He removed his cap and ran his hand over a mop of matted-down hair. “That’s bread made with wheat that’s adulterated and dead, even more
than the fruits and vegetables they successfully avoided purchasing a half hour before. And I mean dead, like a rotten tomato, which you would never eat.”

He turned to me. “So how is this possible? How do we get to the point that we willingly, even happily, eat the equivalent of a rotten tomato?” He paused, looking out at his fields as a gentle breeze made the wheat sway in unison. “It happens,” he said, “because we’ve lost the taste of grain.”

My office sits in the corner of the kitchen at Blue Hill at Stone Barns. The drafting chair at my desk faces out so I can observe the cooks, catch mistakes, and sometimes even head off small disasters.

One night, not long after my fateful conversation with Klaas, I was sitting at my desk and watching the kitchen wind down for the end of service. It’s a scene I’ve witnessed a thousand times before, the cooks slowing to the rhythm of the late orders. But for some reason, on that night I noticed something I hadn’t been conscious of before. Wheat was everywhere.

In one corner, a waiter cleaned the bread station for the evening, saving the unused loaves for the pigs’ dinner. Over by the stove, Duncan the fish cook sprinkled the last order of trout with flour before roasting it. Across from him, the meat cook wrapped a loin of pork with an herb dough. An intern organized trays of fresh ravioli and thick-cut spaghetti. And there was Alex, the pastry chef, serving his white-chocolate-and-cardamom cake with dried fruit strudel. Trays of after-dinner cookies and small pastries flew past on the way to the dining room.

Suddenly Jake, the pastry sous chef, came into view hauling a fifty-pound bag of all-purpose flour, which he heaved into the flour bin just outside my office. It was his second fill of the day. A white flurry hovered in the air, as in a just-shaken snow globe. As it drifted toward the window of my office and fell away, I was reminded of standing with Klaas and watching his fields
stretch to the end of the horizon. Back then I’d been struck by how much the story of agriculture is really about grain. The kitchen scene that night had me realizing that the story of our menu is really about grain, too, particularly wheat.

When Klaas complained of his neighbors’ visiting the farmers’ market for fruits and vegetables, only to then carelessly purchase bread at a supermarket, he might as well have been complaining about me. As the owner of a farm-to-table restaurant—actually a restaurant
in the middle
of a farm—I’ve gone on and on (and on and on) about local fruits and vegetables with no more apologies for repetition than a peanut vendor in a ballpark. Like most chefs, I can name the heirloom variety of this or that tomato, or the breed of cattle with the most flavorful grass-fed steaks. We root around obsessively for all these things because they taste better, and because we know the people, and the practices, that produced them. The soft, white dust dumped into the container bin twice a day was the most generic thing in our kitchen, but I knew more about the construction of our stove than how the flour had been farmed.

I wanted to learn the taste of wheat (or relearn it), and to do that, I needed to learn its history. What could account for its odd duality—the all-purpose little grain that is everywhere on my menu but about which I knew close to nothing?

I
N
THE
MYTH
OF
P
YGMALION
,
a sculptor falls in love with his female statue and helps bring her to life. The story of wheat is the anti-Pygmalion: in our ten-thousand-year effort to sculpt a more perfect grain, we’ve succeeded mostly in making it more dead.

Can something be
more
dead? Technically, no. And yet as I began to dig into the story of wheat in the United States, I learned that it suffered exactly that: several stages of degradation and death. Who’s responsible for killing wheat? It’s no mystery—what makes the story of American wheat so interesting, and so tragic, is just how obvious it all was. Culinary historian Karen Hess once called it “
the conjugation of seemingly unrelated events.” Everyone and no one killed wheat. It was the perfect murder.

It began innocently enough. Domesticated wheat wasn’t even here when Columbus arrived, as opposed to corn, which flourished.
The Spanish were the first to bring wheat to the New World, and other European immigrants did the same when they settled the colonies. It failed miserably at first, but with great effort on the part of the early settlers, it eventually took hold. Long before wheat became synonymous with the Midwest, the East Coast was America’s breadbasket. Gristmills dotted the countryside—
one for every seven hundred Americans in 1840. Once ground, flour had a shelf life of only about one week, and if you wanted a loaf of bread, you baked your own. That meant bringing your wheat to the mill or milling it yourself.

With the help of farmers, wheat adapted itself to specific regions. But it
thrived especially in the milder climate of the mid-Atlantic—Pennsylvania, Maryland, and New York. As of 1845, wheat was
grown in every county in New York, including four acres in Manhattan. Wheat had distinctive characteristics, flavors, and baking qualities, not just from state to state (
Massachusetts “Red Lammas” versus Maine “Banner wheat”) but from farm to farm, and from year to year. Diversity flourished. Farmers tasted the raw kernels in the field to assess their protein content and when it was time for harvest. Women adjusted recipes according to the condition of the flour. These were good times for wheat. After all, what more could a grass seed want than to find itself thriving in a new world?

The opening of the Erie Canal, in 1825, completed the link between the Eastern Seaboard and the Midwest, establishing new trade routes and creating a milling hub around Rochester, New York—soon to be known as the Flour City. Railroads soon followed, which coincided nicely with our nation’s longing for cheaper and less crowded farmland. And wheat went along for the ride. This was nothing sinister, just inevitable. But something significant happened here that served as a harbinger of times ahead: for the first time in America, wheat started to be grown far away from where it was consumed.

The roller mill appeared in the late 1800s, just in time to expand the divide between the wheat field and the table. It was a technological breakthrough that revolutionized the wheat industry just as the cotton gin had done for the cotton industry a century earlier. Until its widespread use, people used stone mills. Stone mills, like the one we use at Blue Hill, work like molars, crushing the kernels between two large stones. They are effective, but slow and tedious, and they do little to separate the kernel into its component parts, a key development in the drive to industrialize flour.

A few years ago, Klaas’s wife, Mary-Howell, showed me a picture of a wheat kernel in cross section. It looked like an ultrasound image of a six- or seven-week-old human gestational sac, which isn’t a bad comparison; a wheat kernel is a seed, after all. The grain’s embryo, or “germ,” is surrounded by the starchy endosperm—the stuff of refined white flour—which stores food
for the germ. Surrounding the endosperm is the seed coat, or bran, which protects the germ until moisture and heat levels indicate it’s time to germinate. (Later that same day, I returned to the field with Klaas and saw, in a bizarre neonatal vision, the wheat as a phalanx of plant stalks holding their embryos up high in the air, as if they were torches.)

Whereas stone mills had crushed the tiny germ, releasing oils that would turn the flour rancid within days, roller mills separated the germ and bran from the endosperm. This new ability to isolate the endosperm allowed for the production of shelf-stable white flour, able to be stored and transported long distances. Overnight, flour became a commodity.

It’s hard to fathom that merely removing a temperamental little germ could revolutionize a staple grain. But that’s just what happened. The settling of the Great Plains and the advent of roller-mill technology meant that white flour was suddenly cheaper and more readily available. Small wheat farms, including those in the former grain belt of New York, couldn’t compete. Farmers chewing kernels in the field and gristmills dotting the landscape became the stuff of folklore. The homogenization of the U.S. wheat industry had begun.

The whiter flour became, the greater the demand. To be fair, that’s been the history of wheat for thousands of years. But for all its efficiency, steel couldn’t match the old-school grindstone in two key respects. In fully removing the germ—that vital, living element of wheat—and the bran, the roller mill not only killed wheat but also sacrificed nearly all of its nutrition. While the bran and the germ represent less than 20 percent of a wheat kernel’s total weight, together they comprise 80 percent of its fiber and other nutrients. And studies show that the
nutritional benefits of whole grains can be gained only when all the edible parts of the grain—bran, germ, and endosperm—are consumed together. But that’s exactly what was lost in the new milling process.

There was another cost as well, just as devastating. Stone-milled flour retained a golden hue from the crushed germ’s oil and was fragrant with bits
of nutty bran. The roller mills might have finally achieved a truly white flour, but the dead, chalky powder no longer tasted of wheat—or really of anything at all. We didn’t just kill wheat. We killed the flavor.

Our nation’s prairie became collateral damage along the way.

What did I know of the prairie before I developed an interest in wheat? Nothing, really. I doubt that I would have been able to locate it on a map. I definitely didn’t know that at one point, not that long ago, our country was more than 40 percent open prairie, a lush expanse of grassland that extended from Missouri to Montana and straight down to Texas. And even if I had known these things, I couldn’t have said why it mattered to a chef.

Then I met Wes Jackson. Wes is the folksy and eloquent cofounder of the Land Institute, in Salina, Kansas, where he leads research into how to breed grain crops—wheat in particular—so that they can be planted once and harvested year after year. Domesticated wheat—the wheat we eat—is an annual crop, which means that every year new seed is sown.

If it were to instead become perennial, like wheat grows in the wild—if it could be “
native to its place,” as Wes likes to say—agriculture’s worst offenses, like plowing and the need for chemical fertilizers, could be avoided.

In 2009, Wes and I attended a food conference in California as part of a panel about the future of food. When asked by the moderator to describe his work, Wes simply said, “I’m solving the ten-thousand-year-old problem of agriculture.” To his mind, agriculture’s problem is not mega-farms or feedlots or chemical fertilizers. The problem is agriculture itself.

On the walk back to the hotel that evening, I asked him about the possibility of his perennial wheat appearing anytime soon, a question I later learned annoys Wes, because he hears it so often. But he only cranked up his slow prairie drawl and said, not immodestly, “If you’re working on a problem
you can solve in your own lifetime, you’re not thinking big enough.” He said he wanted to show me what he meant.

I followed him to his room, where he handed me a cardboard shipping tube. “You are the first to see this,” he said. I must have had a look of
Why me?
because he added, “We shipped them here the day they arrived. I knew I wouldn’t sleep tonight if I didn’t have a nice, long look-see.” I started uncorking the tube. He stopped me. “Go ahead and roll it out, but do it in the hallway. It won’t fit in the room.”

I unfurled the photographic banner onto the hallway carpet. It was twenty-two feet long and reached down the corridor, past the doorways of two other rooms. Wes bent down and evened out the crinkles. On the left was a life-size profile of perennial prairie wheat, showing the plant both above and below the soil. Aboveground, the stalks, leaves, and seed head took up less than half the photograph. Belowground, the wheat’s root system was at least eight feet long—a Rapunzel-like tangle of thick fibers anchored deep in the soil.

I stepped back. The roots merged into what looked like the trunk of a sequoia tree, only growing down instead of up. “That’s nature investing—digging into the soil, seeking nutrients and moisture,” Wes said as I studied what once had been the underbelly of the prairie.

To the right of this, a photo showed another patch of wheat, above and below ground. But this was modern wheat, the kind that’s planted each year and, as Wes reminded me, “occupies sixty million acres of real estate in this country alone.” Aboveground, the wheat was a much shorter copy of its
perennial cousin. But belowground, the roots were wispy, thin hairs, barely an arm’s length in depth. Compared with the perennial, they looked laughably anemic, needle threads next to those dreadlocks. Such are the roots that blanket the prairie and fill those bags of white flour dumped into the bin in front of my office. I was looking at the roots of my cuisine.

“Those wimpy little things,” Wes said, smiling. “There’s your problem right there.”

Until the 1800s, almost everyone who visited the Great Plains thought the problem was the prairie itself. The massive land area was called the
Great American Desert, which, from the perspective of people accustomed to things like trees, is a forgivable first impression. But also a mistaken one.

In fact, there was plenty of aboveground diversity in the prairie. Add to the grasses the surrounding two hundred or so broadleaf flowering plants, the forbs, shrubs, and sedges, and what you had was a kaleidoscope of natural variety—a richly purposeful system in which grass and plant depended on one another to thrive.

And yet, the true wealth of any prairie exists in the soil, where the majority of the biomass resides (unlike, say, a rainforest ecology, where the richness, or biomass, is mostly above the surface). Wes likes to remind his audiences that the soil’s richness results from a lucky geological break. A few million years ago, glaciers formed in the continent’s far north. Frozen rivers
stripped northern Canada to hard rock and dumped ancient dirt on top of the already rich soil of this country’s midsection. As fierce prairie winds distributed the dirt, it was the grasses that clung to it, holding it long enough to consolidate the mass into soil. The rich root systems absorbed nutrients from the soil and knit the soil together.

For the prairie, this was the greatest insurance policy against erosion and extreme weather fluctuations. The weather in the Plains was—and still is—unpredictable, fierce, and destructive—desertification on the one hand, flash floods on the other. The root systems’ ability to store energy and nutrients ensured that the prairie grass could always grow back quickly. And the grass, in turn, kept the rich soil in place as millions of bison fertilized it over thousands of years, depositing more nutrients into the soil’s natural fertility bank.

We’ve been drawing from the account ever since the first settlers tried to dig in with their plows, an effort that, from above (or, more to the point, from below), must have appeared comical. The root systems were so dense, the plows snapped and clogged. Looking at the entangled roots of just one small patch of perennial wheat made it easy to see why. One square yard of prairie turf can contain twenty-five miles of these massively thick roots; the coal-black topsoil can run to a depth of a dozen feet. (Wes reminded me, with glee, that the average topsoil on the East Coast is closer to six inches.)