This book review was published in the San Francisco Chronicle on Jan. 25th.
Lentil Underground author Liz Carlisle
A series of books over the past decade has extolled the environmental benefits of sustainable agriculture and how delicious it can taste. Michael Pollan's groundbreaking “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” popularized grass-fed beef and eggs from pastured chickens. Dan Barber’s “The Third Plate” celebrates free-range foie gras and heirloom wheat. But no writer has devoted a whole book to the lowly lentil. Until now.
In “Lentil Underground,” Liz Carlisle (a Pollan protégé and fellow at UC Berkeley’s Center for Diversified Farming Systems) elevates the oft-ignored legume to heroic game-changer. In the late 1980s, a scrappy group of four Montana farmers discover that “this Robin Hood of the dryland prairie” robs fertility from aboveground, sharing it freely in the soil. Lentils are what agroecologist Miguel Altieri call a “green manure” — they fix nitrogen in the soil, obviating the need for chemical fertilizers. The farmers, already disenchanted with the fossil-fuel-based grain monoculture of the Great Plains — which not only depletes the soil of nitrogen but also offers razor-slim profit margins — form a company called Timeless Seeds.
Today, it’s not unusual to find farmers who spurn herbicides and chemical fertilizers and employ a diverse rotation of crops. But back in 1987, when David Oien and three others launched Timeless, wheat was king in Montana. “Amber waves of grain were like a religion in this part of the west,” Carlisle writes. “Any other plant life was labeled a weed and taken as a sign of some deep character flaw.” Puzzled by their unkempt fields of black medic (another potent nitrogen-fixer that some might call a weed), wheat farmers ridiculed their lentil-growing neighbors, calling them “a bunch of damn weed farmers!”
Carlisle embeds herself with these pioneering organic growers — sometimes even waking up for breakfast at their farms — and chronicles their setbacks and successes. It’s a typical story of being ahead of the curve. In the late ’80s, Oien and his fellow lentil farmers struggled to make a profit. But by the mid-’90s, lentils — especially the French green lentils and Black Belugas that Timeless grows — were increasingly in demand at natural food stores and high-end restaurants. Timeless got lucrative contracts with Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods, both of which amped up production and profits, and chefs at high-end restaurants promised to put Black Belugas on every plate.
Along the way, Carlisle introduces us to memorable characters who subvert the stereotype of the laconic, corn-fed middle American farmer. Oien, a long-haired idealist who studied religion in college, signs official documents with a peace sign. Casey Bailey, 32, practices yoga, sings arias as he runs a tractor, and is “the sole Timeless farmer who had been to both a major Occupy protest and countercultural mecca Esalen.” Then there are Tuna McAlpine, a pro-gun libertarian who becomes an outspoken advocate for organic farming, and Doug Crabtree and Anna Jones-Crabtree a veteran organic inspector and a sustainable operations director for a federal agency, respectively. (They farm on the weekends.)
Carlisle is a clear and vivid writer. The founders of Timeless Seeds are “audacity rich, but capital poor.” She describes one lentil farmer’s “bearish” arms as “more like verbs than nouns.” And her pithy explanations of nitrogen-fixing plants, no-till agriculture, and why industrial agriculture is ruinous for both farmers and the environment are good primers for anyone just starting to learn about sustainable agriculture. However, sometimes her chronological history of the lentil underground feels rote. And more than once she takes readers into the weeds (pun intended), with lengthy backgrounds on two Montana nonprofits.
But overall, hers is an important contribution to the sustainable agricultural genre. Carlisle unearths some unusual agroecological practices that should gain a foothold in mainstream farming, such as “undersowing” — the idea of planting a “green manure” crop (such as medic) and a grain crop simultaneously, so as to boost fertility and increase yield of the primary cash crop without waiting a full year in between. She also tells the fascinating lineage of the black Indianhead lentil, which almost sank into obscurity until an heirloom bean buyer named Lola rechristened it Black Beluga because of their “inky resemblance to high-end caviar.”
Most importantly, Carlisle offers a vision of an alternative future. At a time when fertilizer run-off from industrial farms and feedlots alike is creating “dead zones” bigger than the state of Connecticut, and herbicide-resistant superweeds are proliferating at an alarming rate, America needs a resilient farming system like the one created by Montana’s lentil underground.
Will lentils change the world? They aren’t magic beans, Carlisle cautions. But they’re lower on the food chain — not to mention more affordable — than grass-fed beef or free-range foie gras. When I finished “Lentil Underground,” the first thing I did was go onto Timeless Seed’s website to locate a store near my home in Portland where I can buy their Black Belugas. I’m already planning my first meal: coconut-oil simmered kale with red peppers, Black Belugas and roasted squash.