“Farm-to-table has failed to transform the way most of our food is grown in this country,” he writes in his new book The Third Plate: Field Notes for the Future of Food. Local, organic meals basically resemble what Americans have been eating for generations—a large hunk of meat in the center, veggies pushed off to the side. The sourcing’s better, but the diet hasn’t really changed. [...]
I went back to visit Klaas’s farm, thinking I’d write about him for my book, which was then in its earliest stages. On that visit, I had a second culinary epiphany—one that took place not in the kitchen, but in the field. Looking out from the middle of Klaas’s farm, about 2,000 acres, I realized there wasn’t any wheat—at least, not at that time of year. I was surrounded by millet, and oats, and barley, and buckwheat, some mustard greens, some kidney beans—but no wheat. All these crops, I learned from Klaas, had very specific functions. The beans gave the soil nitrogen, and the barley was there to build soil structure, the mustard plants helped cleanse the soil of pathogens and diseases. They were planted in this carefully timed sequence throughout the year. All of this was to prepare the soil, to create the best possible conditions for that great, amazingly flavored emmer wheat. Klaas couldn’t grow his healthy, vigorous, chemical-free wheat without those rotating those other crops in, too. [...]
I began to rethink my relationship to food, understanding that each isolated ingredient in my kitchen is implicated within a complex network of relationships. If I want Klaas’s wheat, I should try to find a way to support his beans and his rye and his mustard greens, too. We talk about nose-to-tail eating of animals—to waste less, to innovate, by finding inspired culinary use for all the gamy, complex, less “choice” cuts of meat. Well, we need nose-to-tail eating of the whole farm. We’ve got to learn ways to give these “undesirable” crops some mojo through really creative cooking. [...]
I don’t think the local foods movement, as it currently stands, has the power to change our food system in this way. You cannot transform the landscape with a chef who gets excited about a tomato and then decides to support a local tomato farmer. That’s a good beginning, but it’s not enough. Because any kind of good agriculture—especially organic agriculture—does not allow you to plant a lot of the same crop without chemicals, or without sacrificing plant health.
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