by Adam Gopnik
On a hot, white-and-gold French summer afternoon, Alain Passard is standing in his kitchen garden on the grounds of the Château du Gros Chesnay, in Fillé-sur-Sarthe, about two hundred kilometers southwest of Paris, near the racing town of Le Mans. A few years ago, Passard, the owner and chef of the restaurant L’Arpège, on the Rue de Varenne, in Paris, which since 1996 has had three stars in the Michelin Red Guide, bought the château in order to create a potager, an organic vegetable garden. He bought it through a uniquely French practice, in which a younger person buys the property of an older one while the old person is still alive. This gives the older person a cash infusion, and the new buyer gets at least a little use of the property while he or she waits to get it all. The practice can create a situation as intensely delicate as a Roman imperial adoption, since the buyer becomes nearly a son or daughter of the house as he begins to occupy it, or bits of it, while, by ancient French cynical conviction, the sudden onset of money combined with the power of spite extends the life of the older person out to the demoralizing edge of immortality.
Passard, fortunately, had bought the place from Mme Baccarach, an impeccable French grande dame whose family has owned the château for centuries but who, as it happens, lived for thirty years in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, and with whom he has a perfect long-term relationship: she loves to mind the house while he is content to work the grounds. While Madame prepares a table in the dining room, he begins the tour of the potager, with one of his gardeners, Mohamadou, a severe Frenchman of African origin.
“It is an organic garden but not merely an organic garden,” Mohamadou says. “It’s a vegetable garden controlled by the beasts. Do you know a garden only by its sights and smells? No. You know it, too, by its sounds. Listen!” The New Yorkers visiting cock their heads in the gasping heat and hear the sounds of birds flying to nests specially provided for them in the orchard; the distant croaking of frogs in the pond that Passard has had dug in order to have natural predators for crop-eating insects; and, off in the further distance, a lovely, slightly ominous buzz of bees. The garden has a set of wood-frame hives; the bees make honey for the restaurant. “Those are the sounds of a true garden,” Mohamadou says. “We’re bringing the birds back, and vipers to eat the mice, and frogs to eat the bugs…. It’s a balance.”
Alain Passard is a man in love with vegetables. For most of his career, though an infinitely inventive cook, he was famous for his roasts: particularly roasts of veal and lamb, cooked for six or seven hours sur la plaque, on the stove. Then, in 2000, he startled his diners, and his staff, by announcing that he would no longer cook red meat in his restaurant, and that he might phase out animal protein entirely. Today, though he will still throw a few moules or langoustines into his dishes, and there is usually fowl available for the incorrigible, the menu he prefers is made entirely of vegetables.
His garden in Sarthe is a showpiece of “permaculture,” a system of intensive small-plot rotation that is intended to preserve the energies and resources of the soil. All the planting, for instance, is prepared traditionally, by horse-drawn plow, in order to prevent the soil from being torn up too deeply, as happens with tractors.
Mohamadou looks at Passard. “I saw you on television, chef,” he says. “I approved of what you said about the single gesture.” On a television program the night before, exploring the new, rococo cooking of the Spanish chefs, Passard had said that a single gesture on a plate was the right direction for the future of cooking, that one properly sliced tomato was a higher accomplishment than a tomato confit, that to get the single gesture right was harder than to make a set of gestures on the plate.
“I believe it,” Passard says. “I believe it utterly. One sincere action from the garden is worth six skilled actions in the kitchen. When I’m in my kitchen, I shut my eyes and think that I’m here.” He points all around. “And, by seeing myself here, I see what I want to do with the gardens.” Passard is a handsome man, light on his feet, younger-looking than his fifty-odd years, with a French schoolboy’s face: hair en brosse, expression intensely earnest and open. “The other day I made a plate of tomatoes—just these tomatoes, sliced the right thickness, salted, and with a dab of balsamic. It was perfect.” The gardener nods seriously. “Of course, one gesture on the plate demands a thousand acts here in the garden,” he says, and Passard nods in response.
Passard offers a comprehensive embrace, taking in the garden and the frogs and the birds and the budding vegetables. “I chose this place for many reasons,” he says as he walks through vine-covered trellises. Off in the distance, golden cattle low. “It was important to be here in the Sarthe, in part because the soil is promising, neither too sickly rich nor too poor, and in part because it gave us excellent access to the TGV”—the high-speed train. “That means we can pick vegetables at seven in the morning and have them in the kitchen to start making lunch at ten-thirty, and on the diner’s plate at noon.” He shakes a finger beside his nose, impressed by the efficiency of his own system. “They don’t have to be refrigerated for their journey and they lose nothing, or nearly nothing. This fall, we’re going to start selling what we don’t use for the restaurant at a little counter at the Grande Epicerie at the Bon Marché, so that people who can’t eat at the restaurant can still have an experience of true garden vegetables.”
Passard continues his tour. “It’s an experimental garden, too. We’re trying to revive some of the great heirloom varieties of tomatoes and potatoes. We’re trying to see what might happen. The beet, for instance, has never been completely appreciated.” He leans down and gently brushes the dirt from a fat, dark beet. “We’re raising larger, richer beets, and they have a potential that is vast! Enormous!” The new beets have inspired Passard to make an imposing plat in his kitchen: the beet is cooked in a crust of gros sel, as duck and lamb have been for centuries, and then the crust is broken with a flourish and the beet is delicately sliced and served, with a light jus, as the main course.
For lunch, in the château, Passard prepares a few single-gesture plates from the garden outside: tomatoes, potatoes, and a fine Comté cheese and a bit of country bread from his city restaurant, with a red wine from the Gascogne country, on a table that Madame has set beautifully with old china and etched glass and white linen.
“It was many things,” he explains earnestly to Madame B. and his visitors, talking of his conversion experience, five years earlier. “There was the fear of B.S.E. [mad-cow disease]. And for years I had been seeing new dimensions in vegetables when I cooked: green beans with peaches and almonds. Seeing them, but not seeing them all. But, especially, it was because I no longer wanted to be in a daily relationship with the corpse of an animal. I had a moment when I took a roast out into the dining room, and the reality struck me that every day I was struggling to have a creative relationship with a corpse, a dead animal! And I could feel inside me the weight and the sadness of the cuisine animale. And since then—gone! All the terrible nervousness and bad temper that are so much part of the burden of being a chef: that was gone with the old cooking. I entered into a new relation to my art, but also to my life. Everyone in the kitchen commented on it. And the lightness of what I was doing began to enter my body and my entire existence, and it entered into the existence of the kitchen. Digestively, yes, of course, but also spiritually, a new lightness of step and spirit that entered my life. It was like a light that I saw, and a door that I walked through. One day, I found myself regarding a carrot in a different light, and I saw the cuisine végétale ahead of me through an open door.”
“Of course, we have always had many beautiful vegetables here in France, as they do in America,” Madame B. says, in the classic style in which mannerly French people search for polite consensus while still speaking the truth. “But in America vegetables were always horribly overcooked. There would be this, and then that, with special utensils to fish them out.”
“There have been great vegetable dishes in France,” Passard says. “But no great vegetable chefs.�
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“Very true!” Madame says. “Not before you, monsieur.”
Alain and Fergus represent the two extreme poles of the great meat-eating debate that divides our day: at one end, no meat at all, no daily relation with a dead carcass; on the other end, the whole of the whole beast the whole of the time. Taste, we’ve said, is an argument compressed to an instruction—so what exactly must the no-meat-evers be arguing?
The most impassioned and eloquent, if at times chaotic—the better to press home the urgency—anticarnivore polemic is Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals. Foer is not afraid to use big words when talking about dead birds. We are, he says, “making war” on seafood. The intensity of the language may make us doubt as much as assent. After all, we wonder, have cats really declared war on mice? Have foxes made war on chickens? Predation is surely different in kind from persecution. This doesn’t justify its cruelties, but it does point toward its complexities. Nature, we may think, isn’t “cruel,” since cruelty depends on understanding. But then, nature certainly isn’t kind. Foer’s arguments ultimately depend on the likeness of animal feeling to human feeling, and how great we think that likeness really is. “KFC is arguably the company that has increased the sum of suffering in the world more than any other in history,” he writes. The complaint is easily made that this kind of thinking projects human feelings onto animals, while ignoring the actual sufferings of humans. The suffering of shrimp is a metaphysical question; that of the Sudanese is not.
What are the best arguments to be made for not eating dead animals? The arguments seem to come in three tiers. The first argument is that killing animals for food causes pain, and that we have no right to inflict pain on another living creature just because it can’t speak out or fight back. We shouldn’t cause pain to weak or mentally slow members of our own species, and to cause pain to nonhuman creatures because they cannot speak or even reason is no better. Yet this argument leaves us with at least the exit of painless slaughter: if we kill kindly, and somehow without warning or notice, so that the animal knows no panic or fear, then can we kill to eat?
This in turn leads to a second, fiercer argument: that the act of animal slaughter is essentially cruel: no living thing wants anything but life, on pretty much any terms it can get it, and to execute inarticulate and helpless animals for our pleasure because they can’t speak, organize, or struggle is finally as cruel as executing babies would be because they can’t speak or struggle. That we enjoy eating them is neither here nor there; we might enjoy eating babies or chimps if we tried them, too. The attempt to justify murder by insisting that the soon-to-be-dead don’t know that they will die, or that they do die without pain, is no better, the argument goes, and finally no different in moral kind, than the attempts by the SS to anesthetize or justify their own atrocities by insisting that they were being kind to the Jews by telling them that they were going to the showers: such kindness exists only in the minds of the killer. (I’m not proposing, or endorsing, this analogy, only saying that it is one, very often prompting the use of the term “animal Auschwitz” to refer to particular farms or, indeed, the whole meat industry. Google it!)
The third argument is that we shouldn’t eat dead animals even if they are painlessly slaughtered and go to their death without fear because raising animals for food on big industrial farms is itself cruel and, by its nature, resistant to change. This argument is more utilitarian than moral. The meat industry, with its vast inefficiencies, its reliance on antibiotics and other drugs, and its hideous distortion of sustainable agricultural practices, is inherently destructive, wasteful, and polluting. Even if animal killing could be justified on moral grounds, meat-eating can’t be: it is a luxury that no one who cares about the future of the planet can indulge. Even eating locally raised, grass-fed, “sustainable” animal meat makes at best a marginal difference. To this argument add another, still utilitarian but more selfish, that meat-eating is violently unhealthy for humans in its current everyday form, involving a kind of self-injection with all the dreck we feed to animals. It would be better to eat grass-fed beef, but we would still be eating more fat and protein than nature ever meant us to.
The arguments from suffering seem serious; those from inefficiency and disease much less so, since these are all things that could be remedied, and, if they were, would leave you with the same sad pig. Foer, to his credit, embraces and investigates humane farming methods with considerable respect; he rejects them, though, as an excuse for meat-eating, and finds that his revulsion is not ended by the kinder practice of a Niman Ranch—to him, eating meat is always degrading to people and inherently cruel to animals. He makes a distinction, crucial to his view, between those who care about “animal welfare” and those who care about “animal rights.” The animal-welfare movement—insisting on more space in chicken batteries, more room for animals to roam, more humane slaughtering—is merely alleviative. It eases pain without ending killing. Animal rights are more substantial than that: if we accept that animal rights exist, then we can’t morally “make war” on tuna or conduct a “daily massacre” of cows, any more than we would make a genocidal war on or conduct a daily massacre of people. That we treated them “humanely” before the killing started wouldn’t alter the crime. Murder is murder.
And the arguments for eating meat? Perhaps typically, the arguments for doing something that we already all (or nearly all) do, which ought to be weighty and well made, given that they govern our behavior, barely exist. We don’t make arguments for things we do anyway; we only make arguments to stop ourselves from doing them. Proslavery arguments appeared in the American South not in advance of but only in reaction to abolitionism. Women’s inferiority was so self-evident even to our great-great-grandfathers (if not their wives) that they had only a handful of old saws and religious injunctions to point to to justify it; it took John Stuart Mill and Helen Taylor to end it with a fiendishly well-formed case. We don’t need an argument to eat cheeseburgers until we stop eating them.
The taste for meat-eating being so intuitive, or seeming so, we make a new argument for it just by doing it again. And so the new anger at animal-eating has been countered by a new gusto in meat-choosing, evidenced in the work of Anthony Bourdain and Mario Batali and Henderson, which has produced a practice of aggressively celebrating strange or special meats—face bacon and braised spleen, cuts of Spanish black-footed pigs and French blue-footed chickens—in order, in effect, both to defend the carnivore and insist that he is more than just a dumb consumer of those dead carcasses, that there is honor among butchers, too. There are mere meat-eaters, and savvy carnivores, and canny ones compliment their meat by eating it properly. (Remember when Hemingway used to write that way about hunting and fishing? The animal liked to be killed by someone as impressive as Hemingway was.)
Yet we can find, or make, several good, articulate arguments for meat-eating. Animals raised for slaughter are an intrinsic part of the cycle of all traditional agriculture—for feed, manure, to trim the grass. It isn’t realistic to think of sustainable agriculture without the interaction of animal and vegetable, and to keep the animals only as mowing machines without using them as protein is wasteful and unreal. An ideal sustainable cycle in farming, though very different from the one we see in practice now, would still be ineluctably carnivorous.
Second, animals raised to be slaughtered are in a real sense meant to be eaten: we can demand kindness and consideration for goats, sheep, and calves, but they exist at all only for the table, and to stop eating them is not to give them or their descendants a better life; it is to give them no hope of life at all. The analogy with slaves dies right there (the argument goes): the emancipated slave goes on to make his own life, however hard; the emancipated animal, with a few feral exceptions, is in every sense a dead end. There would be very few pigs at all if we did not eat pork chops.
Third, eating animals is, however hedged the concept may be, and however many qualifications we wreathe around its middle, natural to humans, as
it is indeed natural in the rest of creation. Big fish eat little fish; lions eat gazelles; humans eat pigs. I have written such harsh things in this book about the appeal to nature that to insert it here even as a plausible hypothesis seems rank hypocrisy in search of a hamburger. Yet arguments from nature that say we ought to do something—eat one way rather than another—are different from those that warn how hard it is to stop ourselves from doing something that our bodies are designed to do. We can eat the way we choose—but we can’t choose not to eat. We can’t not have sex—at least not as a society—nor not shit. Is meat-eating perhaps one of those necessities, sad or sublime, take your pick, in which it is frivolous to insist on abolition when the best that can be hoped for is improvement?
Yes, of course, “Nature” does many cruel things that we no longer do. But there is a difference between improving on nature by eliminating its cruelties, and defying nature by ignoring its needs. Evangelical vegetarianism, on this view, is closer to the Shaker prohibition on sex than it is to the abolitionist war on slavery: it does not ask us to be better than we have been. It asks us to be other than we are. That our grandparents ate steaks is not in itself, perhaps, an argument for our eating cheeseburgers—our grandparents also took, or were, slaves. But that all human beings in all contexts since even before there were human beings have eaten some kind of meat in some kind of circumstance provides, if not grounds to foreclose the debate, at least some kind of sanction from the sweep of time. (There are, after all, very good arguments against having sex, too, and lots of people who don’t. We still regard the attempt to make that practice universal not just as likely to fail but as completely unrealistic. That there are now no Shakers left to shake is itself an argument against Shakerism.)
