Read The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food for Free Online

been made with cake flour. It wasn’t, Mary-Howell told me, in a voice that suggested she wasn’t surprised I had guessed wrong. Infact, the cake was made with whole wheat flour—a variety called Frederick, grown on the farm and hand-milled in her kitchen that morning. She pointed to a tiny old mill no larger than a toaster oven, next to the microwave.
    Each bite of cake brought a whiff of wheat. Just as the sweetness of the sugar and the vegetative tang of the rhubarb made the cake delicious, the wheat itself was unmistakably present, and it made a prosaic dessert richly textured and interesting.
    “We were scared,” Mary-Howell said, continuing with the story of Klaas’s numb arm. “I mean, here we were, completely on our own, just the two of us, and Klaas can’t use his right arm.”
    I asked when they stopped using chemicals. “That day,” they said.
    While interest in organic agriculture had already begun to grow by the early 1990s, organic grain farming was still essentially unknown. “We literally had no one to turn to,” Mary-Howell said. “There were tons of successful organic vegetable farmers. And there were some good organic dairies, to be sure. The organic market was booming. But grains? We didn’t know one farmer.”
    “Which is when people started planning our auction,” Klaas said. Mary-Howell laughed and accused him of exaggerating. “Oh yes, indeed,” he insisted. “There was talk at the coffee shop in Dresden. I heard that firsthand. And then there was old man Ted Spence . . .”
    “Oh, God, Teddy . . .” Mary-Howell shook her head.
    “He came over here one day, drove right up to the house,” Klaas said, pointing to just outside their front door. “He rolls down his window and yells, ‘Klaas, your dad would be disgusted with the way you’re farming.’”
    “He said that,” Mary-Howell confirmed. “He absolutely said that.”
    By luck, a few weeks later, a local farm paper carried an advertisement from a large mill that wanted to pay for certified organic bread wheat. Sitting at the kitchen table, Klaas and Mary-Howell couldn’t believe the coincidence.
    “It was like a hand from God was reaching down to us,” Klaas said. “We jumped at the chance.”
THE FERTILE DOZEN
    I first met Klaas in 2005, at a gathering hosted by Jody Scheckter, the controversial former world champion race-car driver known for his erratic driving and for what was perhaps the worst accident in Formula One history. Having turned his attention to organic farming, Jody created Laverstoke, a two-thousand-acre farm in Hampshire, England, that he determined would be the best in the world. Jody being Jody, he really meant the best. So he reached out to Eliot Coleman.
    Eliot, a widely revered organic vegetable farmer and author from Maine, is a Gandhi-like figure for the sustainable agriculture movement. He did not invent organic farming, of course, just as Gandhi did not invent the doctrine of nonviolent resistance, but countless small farmers and gardening enthusiasts have absorbed the philosophy through his teachings. I was given a copy of Eliot’s back-to-the-earth guidebook,
The New Organic Grower
, in college, and in my early twenties I took it with me when I went to California to apprentice in a bread bakery.
    Jody commissioned Eliot to identify the twelve most important farmers in the world—half from the United States, half from Europe—and bring them, at Jody’s expense, to England for a three-day discussion on how best to use his land. Eliot framed the event as a once-in-a-lifetime summit of the world’s greatest agricultural minds. He called the group “the Fertile Dozen.”
    Eliot, who by this point had become a friend (and later would be a trusted adviser during the creation of the farm at Stone Barns Center), called me a few weeks before the meeting to ask if I’d be interested in preparing the final dinner. It wasn’t so much a question as a foregone conclusion.
    I spent the day