The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food (33 page)

I remember hearing this story many years ago at a lecture given by Sally Fallon Morell, a
longtime advocate of traditional diets, and thinking two things. The first was:
Really?
Steiner, the great philosopher king, gets three suggestions to improve humanity and he gives us one that has as much clarity as a haiku? It confirmed for me what many think of Steiner: creative, provocative, and a little loopy.

The second thought was:
Really?
If the heart doesn’t act like a pump, what does it do? At the suggestion of Fallon, I read Thomas Cowan’s
The Fourfold Path to Healing.
Cowan spent twenty years contemplating the question, and, while his analysis helped me decipher Steiner’s statement, it wasn’t until I stood at the pumping station—at what Miguel called “the beating heart of Veta la Palma”—that I began to understand its significance. Steiner wrote that science “sees
the heart as a pump that pumps blood through the body. Now there is nothing more absurd than believing this, for the heart has nothing to do with pumping the blood.”

Cowan argues that Steiner was right. For one thing, when blood enters the heart, it is traveling at the same speed as when it exits. It slows down as it heads to the smaller capillaries to transfer nutrients, then moves to the venous system, a highway of larger and larger veins that eventually lead back to the heart. As it approaches, the blood speeds up again. The heart acts more like a dam at this point, trapping the blood and holding it in its chambers until they’re filled, which is when the valves open and the blood is released, resuming the cycle.

As Steiner explained,
“The circulation of the blood is primary.
Through its rhythmic pulsations—its systole and diastole—the heart
responds
to what takes place in the circulation of the blood.
It is the blood that drives the heart and not the other way around.”
The heart doesn’t pump the blood. The blood pumps the heart.

So what does the heart do? It listens, according to Cowan, which is Steiner’s larger point. It’s the body’s primary sensory organ, and it acts like a conductor, controlling the rhythms of cellular management. A scientist might call this maintaining homeostasis. Either way, the idea is that the heart serves at the pleasure of the cells, not the other way around.

Veta la Palma’s pumping station works the same way: the pump activates what the tidal action from the Atlantic and the powerful Guadalquivir River (the largest vein entering the farm, fed by thousands of smaller, capillary-like rivers) demand. It listens as the water “pumps” itself through the system. The
pumping station is programmed to react, instead of control, the flow of water. And the distinction is not small.

The first part of the distinction is that Veta la Palma’s technological pursuits are in the service of a better-functioning natural system. As Miguel later wrote to me, “It’s about technology working, side by side, with ecology. Without this engineering project, we biologists would not be able to guarantee the viability of what we grow, nor its ‘added value’ (i.e. the birds, since in summer Veta la Palma is the only place there is water). And without our biological and ecological knowledge, the engineers would never have been able to build such a sophisticated hydraulic system.”

The second part is, to borrow a phrase from Steiner, spiritual, and that takes more time to decipher. Steiner was one of the earliest writers to question the so-called mechanistic approach to science, which viewed the workings of the environment in separate parts—machinelike more than lifelike. According to Fred Kirschenmann, a sustainable-agriculture writer, theologian, and the president of Stone Barns Center’s board, these ideas took root during the
scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, led by people like Sir Francis Bacon, who believed you could bend nature to your will, and René Descartes, who saw humans as masters and possessors of nature. That may seem simplistic now, but who can blame them when the presiding wisdom of the day was the theology of the church? These scientists were reactionaries just like Steiner, questioning accepted theological teachings with the intention of breaking things down to their simplest forms. They wanted to show how the world really worked. Rationality and physicality were at the core of their thinking.

The core of Steiner’s thinking was that biology is a lot more complicated than that. It is decidedly not linear. He didn’t see simple cause and effect applying in a natural system. Just like Miguel, Steiner valued relationships, and in that sense he was a kind of complexity theorist, seeing the workings of nature as continually in flux.

“Steiner said what the science community at the time wasn’t ready to
hear,” Fred told me once. “Nature doesn’t allow you to impose one idea, or one solution, because it inevitably changes the game.” The only way to comprehend nature was to recognize an inherent spirituality in its workings.

It was the spirituality that always rubbed me the wrong way. And yet, as I stood in the middle of Veta la Palma, with the backdrop of the enormous pumping station, Steiner’s message began to seem more right than wrong. Today the mechanistic worldview is mostly old news. We don’t, for example, hear talk anymore of the search for the one gene that will cure heart disease. Or any other disease. For much of the past half-century, the prevailing view was exactly that: one gene, one trait. Identify the gene, suppress it, and solve the problem. We now know that to be wrong. Genes don’t act independently of one another. What’s most important is the complex set of relationships that determine how they get turned on or off.

And it’s not just the medical sciences that have moved on. Businesses, government agencies, and educators have moved away from erecting silos between departments, encouraging more creativity under the logic that innovation prospers when ideas can connect and recombine. It’s all very logical, really, except that most of agriculture is still mired in seventeenth-century ideology. Diversity has been replaced by specialization; small, regional networks have given way to consolidation. Farming has been broken into component parts in pursuit of growing more food.

One hundred years ago, Steiner saw this thinking as folly. To break nature into its component parts to solve problems, as you would go about repairing an old watch, is to go about it in entirely the wrong way. That isn’t how biological systems work. It’s how computer programs work.

What’s become clearer to me, after spending time with farmers like Miguel, Klaas, and Eduardo, is that farming with nature’s frustrating complexities—even, or especially, with supposed enemies of the system—is inherent to their success. True, their systems are “artificial” (Veta la Palma’s pump-moderated estuary, Klaas’s intricate crop rotations, Eduardo’s man-made
dehesa
), but human intervention, in each case, is in service to the
ecology rather than in opposition to it. They embrace the diversity of the natural world; they work within the constraints of nature—and, in the end, benefit from them by producing food with great flavor.

I often think back to what Miguel admitted to me in the first hours of our meeting. It was so true, and so humble—and, when you think about it, so Steineresque, with its hint of spirituality. He said that most of what happens between the species at Veta la Palma he couldn’t see. “But,” he added, “I am absolutely sure they are allies of the system.”

T
HE
DAY
after Carl and I visited Veta la Palma, Lisa arranged for Ángel León to join us for lunch at Sant Pau, a seafood restaurant in Sant Pol de Mar, near Barcelona. I was thrilled to see him again, especially in the company of Carl Safina. I’d imagined Carl was likely something of a hero to Ángel. And I figured Carl would enjoy meeting a chef with a passion for the health of the oceans that matched his own. Lisa also happened to be a great admirer of Carl’s writing. It had the makings of a memorable gathering.

By the time we received menus, I was convinced I wouldn’t be able to forget it soon enough. Ángel, it turned out, had never heard of Carl. Sitting there at the table across from me, he looked distracted. He had heard of Veta la Palma—maybe once, he said—but though his restaurant is only one hour from the farm, he had never visited. I asked Lisa how this was possible. How could Spain’s apostle of the oceans not support such an enlightened fish farm, especially one that existed a few miles from his restaurant? And, more to the point, one that produced such delicious fish? She told me that Ángel was adamant in his opposition to aquaculture, which was when I heard Ángel’s Churchillian decree from across the table.

“Never, never, never,” he said, his dark eyes squinting in my direction. Lisa described Veta la Palma—the water purification, the natural feed, the birdlife—and I spoke about the flavor, but Ángel only shook his head. “I’ve spoken to fish farms,” he said. “They all talk about their uniformity. ‘I can get you a perfectly uniform fillet’—they tell me this all the time, as if that’s
something to celebrate.” Beads of sweat formed above Ángel’s upper lip. Lisa argued that Veta la Palma was the exception to the rule, explaining how, with its limited feed and cleansing waters, it could be a model for other fish farms around the world. Ángel shrugged. “There’s already plenty of fish—if we cooked with the bycatch.”

As Ángel excused himself to make a phone call, I told Carl about my meal at Ángel’s restaurant, Aponiente—about the unnamed fish and the innovative cooking methods, and about the consortium of local fishermen Ángel had cultivated to help create a market for bycatch. Carl nodded without looking up from the menu.

“The problem,” he said, suddenly peering up at me over his glasses, “is that your friend over here is going to create a whole new level of demand. It’s just a matter of time before these smaller fish become fashionable.”

Safina saw the flip side of Ángel’s logic: by bringing awareness to new species, you initiate their decline. “It’s the classic story of
fishing down the food chain,” Carl said. “We exhaust the large predators and move to the smaller fish for substitution. Of course, the technological advances of the last fifty years have meant that we’ve been moving up the chain as well, as technology and access have improved. So basically, it’s been a round-trip.”

Except that, according to Carl, we’ve got nowhere else to go. He predicts that our children will be living in a world of radically impoverished marine communities, dominated by simple forms of life, like jellyfish.

Just then the future came to us in the form of our second course: It was fideua, a traditional Spanish noodle dish, in which the chef, Carme Ruscalleda, had replaced the usual seafood with jellyfish. It was as delicious as it was imaginative, but would it be as delicious or imaginative when jellyfish was all that was left for us to catch?

Ángel returned to the table just in time to overhear Carl’s predictions of what would be left of the ocean. “This is why chefs are so important,” he interjected. “With less resources, we’re the ones who are going to have to make what’s left taste good.” He looked at me meaningfully from across the table again. Carl appeared befuddled, and perhaps annoyed.

“Unless more farms are built like Veta la Palma,” Lisa said quickly, breaking the growing tension at the table.

Ángel didn’t play along. He mentioned Kindai tuna, a method of bluefin tuna “ranching” marketed as a sustainable solution to dwindling numbers of wild tuna. “It tastes terrible,” he said. “Way too much fat. Let it sit in your hand even for a minute and you’re covered in oil. Eating it is worse. Just thinking about it is giving me a stomachache. It’s an insult to tuna,” he said, sounding so much like Eduardo that I looked at him in bafflement. “When you go against nature, you always get it wrong. I only cook with the real thing.”

Carl adjusted his glasses and looked at Ángel. “You serve bluefin?”

Ángel looked confused by the question. “Yes, yes,” he said, turning to Lisa to make sure he hadn’t misunderstood. “It’s the greatest fish in the world. Of course I put it on my menu when it’s in season. We celebrate it.”

It was an odd moment. Both Carl and Ángel turned to look at me, their expressions each saying the same thing:
Who is this guy?
It must have struck Carl as especially strange. I had described Ángel León as a visionary chef in tune with the health of the oceans and the future of sustainable seafood. And here he was declaring bluefin, the most seriously depleted of fish, the species Carl had spent his life protecting, fit for celebrating on his menu. It was as if you were arguing for the slaughter of chimpanzees with Jane Goodall. I clutched my glass of water.

No one spoke until Lisa broke the silence. “Your tuna is coming from the
almadraba
, isn’t it?” she asked, referring to an ancient system of tuna fishing practiced in Spain.

“I only cook with
almadraba
tuna. It’s the best tuna in the ocean,” Ángel said.

The
almadraba
is a web of large nets along the southern coast of Spain, around the corner from Veta la Palma and along the Strait of Gibraltar. The nets are hung every year, from May until mid-June, just as the tuna are leaving the Atlantic to spawn in the Mediterranean. On their way through the strait, some tuna lose themselves in the maze of nets and are corralled into an
area small enough for the waiting fishermen to haul them to the ocean’s surface. It’s a passive pursuit compared with the sonar-seeking trawlers that have been so destructive to bluefin populations around the world. The
almadraba
is also part of a long, deeply held Spanish tradition, a tradition that’s especially revered in Ángel’s coastal area of Cádiz.

Carl wasn’t impressed by the distinction. Though he had heard of the
almadraba
, he argued that we were at a point where the decline of bluefin was so severe that greater pressure, however passive and traditional, wasn’t possible to support. Ángel leaned forward in his chair. His darting eyes made him seem both wary and mischievous.

“I have something I want to show you,” he said to Carl, reaching into his pocket and removing a coin. “Do you know what this is? This is an original Phoenician coin. Look here,” he said, leaning over. “Phoenician,” he repeated, pointing to the coin’s faded depiction of tuna enmeshed in the netting of the
almadraba.
“It’s very emotional. I carry it with me everywhere I go. The
almadraba
is 2 percent of the tuna taken in the world. I want to be an apostle about protecting this 2 percent. The
almadraba
is not the problem. The sonar-seeking trawlers are the problem,” he added, in a tone that suggested anyone who thought otherwise might also be a problem.

When Lisa finished translating, she nodded and added, “There’s something inherently unfair about telling
almadraberos
that they have to stop doing what they and their ancestors going back millennia have done because other tuna fishers have overexploited and endangered the stock. Ángel is right; the
almadraberos
are not the problem. It’s like banning sex because some men can’t be trusted not to rape.”

Carl said the debate was moot: the world was running out of tuna. “You can keep saying, ‘We didn’t create this problem.’ I’ve heard the Japanese say that, too. This is the tragedy of the commons—everyone is responsible for tuna, which means no one is responsible. The idea that we can continue to take what is going extinct, whatever the reason, is crazy,” he said.

There are moments in Carl’s presence when you wonder if he’s agitated
about an issue or just agitated because he’s talking to you instead of doing something more productive. I got the feeling that both were true at this moment. As Lisa translated Carl’s response, Ángel sat so far forward in his chair that I thought he might fall off. Both men looked pissed.

“I want to tell you something,” Ángel said forcefully. “I want to tell you about the
almadraba
fishermen. I know of many, the older ones especially, who can rub the skin of a tuna”—Ángel rubbed the tablecloth with the tips of his fingers—“and when they smell it they smell the fat,” he went on, his fingers at his nose, his breath drawn in dramatically. “They can tell you just from that how old it is, and how it will grade out at market.” He lowered his hand from his nose. “Can you imagine how many years of culture that takes to understand?” Ángel didn’t wait for a response. He excused himself to smoke a cigarette outside.

Carl calmly finished eating while Lisa leaned back in her chair and shook her head, looking at me. “To tell the people of Cádiz that they have to stop eating tuna means they have to stop being themselves,” she said. “The
almadraba
is more than an annual ritual. It has influenced class structure, leisure activities, religious beliefs, cooking techniques, and probably even mating rituals as well, if you looked into it. It’s so fundamental to the mores and traditions of this area that it isn’t just a part of the culture, it
is
the culture.” Lisa turned to speak to the waiter.

Carl leaned over to me. “Sure,” he said, “but without biology there is no culture.”