Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
For our next discussion, we're very pleased to welcome Amy Trubek to
Inkwell.

Amy Trubek is a cultural anthropologist who also trained and worked as
a professional cook. She is presently an assistant professor in the
Nutrition and Food Sciences at the University of Vermont where she
teaches classes such as From Farm to Table: The Contemporary Food
System and Food and Culture (including a cooking lab. She was
previously the Executive Director of Vermont Fresh Network and also
worked at New England Culinary Institute. She is the author of "The
Taste of Place, A Cultural Journey into Terroir" and "Haute Cuisine:
How the French Invented the Culinary Profession" (University of
Pennsylvania Press). She is presently involved in an effort to document
the taste of place in Vermont maple syrup and artisan cheese. Her
other present research interest involved an ethnographic inquiry into
contemporary domestic cooking practices in the United States. 

Leading the discussion with Amy is our own Anne Boyd:

Anne Boyd is a project manager at a landscape architecture firm in Los
Angeles, specializing in parks and public work.  Her professional
interests include the expression of narrative, history and the arts in
landscape; memorial landscapes and cemeteries; urban wildlife habitats;
and ecoregionally appropriate landscape design.  She also has a
long-standing personal interest in agricultural history and sustainable
agriculture.  She is currently part of the team developing
interpretive gardens depicting the agricultural history of Los
Angelesfor the new Los Angeles State Historic Park.


Welcome, Amy and Anne!
  

    
Hi everybody!

I want to thank Amy first of all, for joining us.  As many food
enthusiasts as we have here on the Well (I'm trying to avoid using the
word "foodie," but may not suceeed in the long term)  I expect quite a
stampede over here soon.

Compared to many of the Well's denizens, I'm not actually much of a
food expert, although I might deserve the title of "enthusiast" to some
degree.  (Especially to anyone who has seen the happy daze in which I
wander through our local Southern California farmer's markets.) My
professional interests, as evident from my bio, are in landscape
architecture and sustainable urbanism, not agriculture and the culture
of food; but of course it doesn't really make sense to speak of those
concerns as being separate. They are only separate because our culture
has managed to split apart what are really very closely linked and
allied subjects. In my profession we often speak of 'local character'
and 'cultural landscapes,' and these are common themes throughout Amy's
discussion of terroir as well.  

Amy, to start things off, I wonder if you can tell us something about
your own personal concept of 'terroir,' what you thought the word meant
when you first learned it, and what it means to you now?
  

    
(NOTE: Offsite readers with questions or comments may have them
added to the conversation by emailing <inkwell@well.com> -- please
put the author’s name in the subject line. Thank you!)
  

    
Hello Everybody: Thanks for having me participate in an Inkwell
discussion! I am completely new to the Well (and really to much of the
latest digital platforms) but so far, so good. 

When I first started thinking about terroir, I was very much
influenced by my colleague at the time at New England Culinary
Institute who taught all the classes on wine to budding cooks and
chefs. He talked a lot about terroir with his students, particularly in
explaining the Old World (or European) approach to winemaking. In the
world of wine, the strongest association with terroir is the link
between the natural environment and the final sensory properties of a
wine. Thus, we first talked a lot about slope, site, climate, and soil.


But since my academic training is in cultural anthropology, I fast
wanted to understand if terroir could be extended to other food and
drink and also to include the human involvement in making that very
link between, let's say, south facing slope and gravel with the flinty
taste of a Chablis. I remember asking Mark, "why can't there be a
terroir to potatoes?"

Now, almost 10 years after I first posed that question, I do
understand terroir more broadly. I see terroir as way of paying
attention to the complex environmental and cultural factors that shape
the sensory profile of maple syrup, or wine or cheese. By paying
attention, and saying that variability of taste rather than conformity
of taste is the final goal, terroir can help us become a food culture
with more diverse palates (and along the way perhaps support unique
small scale farmers and food artisans).

Amy
  

    
Thanks for joining us, Amy.

While I'm sold on the local food movement, I have to admit that part of me
still sees this kind of attention to food as the province of foodie snobs.
What would you say to the mythical Joe Six-Pack who might dismiss all this
"terroir" talk as just recreational gluttony of wine-sipping elites on the
coasts? Why does the taste of place matter?
  

    
I'd follow on to that question by asking about the connections between
terroir and sustainability, too.  

Although sustainability in itself is not a major theme of the book, it
seems to me there are a lot of connections between knowledge of local
conditions, fine-grained adaptation of agricultural practices to those
local conditions, and the long-term sustainability of agricultural
practices....not to mention other land use decisions.

There is a section in the book that discusses l'affaire Mondavi, in
which the American winemaker Robert Mondavi Winery tried to buy up land
to establish a vineyard in Aniane, a village in southwest France.  The
effort was ultimately scotched by local opposition, not just to
Americans barging in where they weren't wanted, but also to the
intention of developing certain lands for vineyards that were
previously considered communally held forest.  

Two things from an ecological perspective struck me about this story:
one, the mention that the _garrigues_ (shrubland areas similar to
California's chaparral, and similarly aromatic) were held to impart the
flavors of wild herbs to wine grapes grown near these wildlands; and
the local idea that wild uplands were to be preserved for communal use,
including hiking and foraging for wild foods.  

I would also tend to assume that there is some consciousness, whether
or not it is explicit, of the value of preserving hills and mountains
to protect the local watershed.  And there is also recognition in some
thinking about sustainable agriculture that 'wild' areas have a complex
relationship with cultivated areas, affecting things like biodiversity
of pollinators and species that prey on agricultural pests.

It seems to me that in this case, the local community's concept of
protecting its terroir reflected an integrated set of concerns about
land use, livability, and the interrelations between nature and culture
that we might today view through the lens of "sustainability."
  

    
Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms has written about the importance of the
apparently-unproductive forest land on his farm to its overall output.
I love the idea of including all aspects of forest use, including
recreational walking, in its valuation.
  

    
I haven't read the book yet (though I am going to because it sounds
interesting), but I always balk a little at the idea of eating only
local foods.  I like chocolate and cinnamon and lots of other things
that will never grow in North Carolina.  I'm willing to make much of my
diet local, but not all of it.  (Also, I know there are several places
in the world that are physically incapable of feeding themselves with
only locally produced food.)
  

    
Looking forward to this discussion!

I try to eat locally, but it gives me great pleasure to know that in
the not-too-distant past, the contents of my spice pantry would have
been worth a small kingdom.
  

    
Well, I'll let Amy fill in more completely, but the book is not
exactly about "eating locally."  It is more about the total environment
that goes into creating local character in food.   

Interesting to note that the ways people think about "eating locally,"
true to our pesky Puritan heritage, are at least partially focused on
what is denied in following a strict set of "rules."
  

    
RE: #4 foodie snobs,etc and the feelings of Joe  Six-Pack. Seems
obvious that the people who are profiting from the destruction of earth
and watershed by industrial agriculture are more likely to patronize
the chic purveyors of terroir, than poor old Joe who is more likely to
be living in the mess, and risking diabetes from consuming so much
industrial food.High fructose corn syrup is,of course most beneficial
to those who own or finance the industrial agriculture and
processing.Seems to me that the ability to profit from the destruction
of topsoil and economy is the mark of an elite. 
(rosmar) I haven't read the book, either, but it seems that some form
of trade will always exist, and should. As a primary food
producer(commercial fisherman) who sells a large portion of my catch
overseas I would like to see it continue. But artesanal fishermen,
commercial or subsistance, are never without a battle for survival. The
antagonist changes costumes quite often, but it's the same  old
villain: the destruction of relationships between the human people and
the land and animal and plant people made holy by time, tradition and 
practices made workable by hundreds of generations of Mistakes, the
kind which usually can be survived. One reason that Alaskan salmon
fisheries are in better shape now than 50 years ago is that the longest
reproductive cycle is 5 years, so we haven't had to wait long for
mistakes to become painfully apparent.The first act of the new state
legislature in 1959 was to outlaw fish traps,huge floating traps which
were owned by economic colonialists who were unconcerned about
sustainability. In the forest the news is not so good. The minimum for
old growth cycles may turn out to be 300 years, and what banker can
make that long a bet? We don't know how big our mistakes will turn out
to be.
Gary Snyder, Wes Jackson, Gary Holthaus (who fished and lived in  
Alaska) and Wendell Berry have written volumes about these kinds of
relationships. I have been told that some parts of Europe have had the
same amount of topsoil  for over a thousand years.I have also been told
by elders that the Tlingit people believe that spawning salmon are
their ancestors returning in order to feed them. Somehow these two
relationships don't seem to be very different. John Jeavons writes
about building the soil, so that the soil will feed you; a small part,
perhaps, of what Wendell Berry called the country of marriage. 
Economic localization is undoubtedly one of the by-products of healthy
relationships with local land and creatures, but it does not have to
mean isolationism of any kind. Living within the pattern of a place
will probably generate  appropriate amounts of exportable surplus...
  

    
Interesting to read up there about Aniane. Two of my favorite French
wines come from right around there, and one of the things I'll be doing
after my move is finished is figuring out how to get out there and
look around. I'm wondering what other terroir-oriented items may be
growing out there, and what kind of meal you could fashion which would
revolve around the local food and wine -- what the experience would be.
  

    
Wow, what a fabulous set of comments about the taste of place! I will
start with my own enlightened self interest to say, as Anne pointed
out, that my book is primarily concerned with the beliefs and practices
of various food artisans and why they believe in the link to place.
Thus, taste of place matters because for these winemakers,
cheesemakers, farmers and others who are trying to make a place for
themselves in a global market place strewn with unknown food
commodities, it informs their practices and possibly allows them to
survive. The taste of place also matters to me because the ideas relies
on food and drink as sources of sensory pleasure which we do tend to
dismiss in our more puritanical and moralistic food culture here in the
United States.

And now let me turn to the questions about Joe Six pack. I am not
interested in condemning either the taste of place or other taste
cultures. For me, we all have opportunities to engage in our landscape
for the purposes of linking taste and place, but these opportunities
will vary depending on location (urban, rural), class (working class or
wealthy) and ethnicity. So, for example, here in Vermont there is a
powerful food culture of hunting and fishing and sharing the bounty of
that harvest. My husband is a chef and many of his employees are off
this week to go to deer camp, a true persistent food tradition here.
However, this food is just for home consumption so it does not really
engage And the fact that I focused on 
  

    
Whoops, I send this off too soon. I will respond again in a little bit
but to finish, since I was focused on food artisans in The Taste of
Place I did not focus on events like deer camp, but why couldn't it be
included in a broad inclusive vision of how we do build the taste of
place here in the United States?
  

    
I also want to chime in about the importance or relevance of creating
boundaries around what we eat or where it comes from, which some people
discussed earlier. I, too, have concerns about creating a regionalized
or localized food system that is too rules based, creating boundaries
and possibly really issues of inclusion and exclusion. I prefer to,
using Randall Grahm's felicitous phrase, think about terroir
intelligence. Thus we always consider the relationship between taste,
food and place whether a producer or consumer, but this can be a vast
global network. So for example, my morning cup of coffee uses terroir
intelligence b/c I buy it from a local roaster who sources fair trade
coffee from around the world and then I put in milk from my local
dairy.
  

    
For those of us who haven't read the book yet can you possibly expand
a little bit on "terroir?" I'm not clear on the concept and Google has
not been too enlightening (probably because the references I found were
to wine, about which I understand little). How would terroir relate
to, say, Vermont cheese vs Wisconsin cheese vs industrial cheese? 
  

    
re: local food - extreme stunts like the 100 mile diet gets a lot of
press, but none of the people I know who are passionate about food are
trying to eliminate anything not grown in their region. The world's
food supply has been globalized in some ways for a very long time -
sugar, salt cod, spices, and tea come to mind immediately - and we're
going to have to wait for a lot more climate change before it's
practical to have coffee plantations in San Francisco. 

Although, depressingly, perhaps not as long as we used to think.
  

    
Well, in relation to that, I was reading recently that climate change
is already affecting the wine growers in Napa/Sonoma; since things are
getting warmer they are having to adapt and perhaps focus on different
grapes than previously specialized in.  But since I'm a wine philistine
I can't remember the exact details.
  

    
Which reminds me, though, of how horrible the wine grown in North
Carolina is.  I've heard there are exceptions, but when I went to the
wine festival last year every one I tasted was too sweet and cloying. 
So even if you can make wine locally, that doesn't mean you should.  
  

    
i found myself thinking about cortland apples. they seem to grow
in upstate new york and western mass...i have never had apples
as good. and i bet it's a mixture of the right variety in
the right climate and right soil (not being able to eat
them is one of the few things i dont like about living
in the greater bay area...)
  

    
Yep, where I live, Joe Six-pack hunts and fishes and knows more about
terroir than any of us.

How about terroir in honey and the use of it to prevent allergies?

In Santa Cruz, I even saw people talking about terroir in the context
of marijuana.
  

    
Very interesting post in "Science and the kitchen:  g cook 22 1195 
>Bac­te­ria in the mouth play a role in cre­at­ing the dis­tinc­tive
fla­vors of cer­tain foods, sci­en­tists in Switz­er­land re­port...
>“The mouth acts as a re­ac­tor, adding an­oth­er di­men­sion to odor
per­cep­tions,”
Wow. We are what we eat. What we are determines the taste of what we
eat We eat what we are, or perhaps  hunger to be. In an intact
vernacular culture, do the people, crops,  livestock and prey animals (
and therefore, obviously, cuisine) coevolve to not only conform to,
but shape the pattern of a place? 
A few months before 9/11 my wife found herself in Roquefort, after a
succession of depressing dramas: rental car breakdown, locked out of
the robot hotel, last chance to do laundry lost etc. This left her with
what she described as a suitcase full of truly  nasty  laundry, which
of course is where she secreted the chunk of prize-winning cheese. The
cheese was on the no-fly list due to the actions of Jose Bove (tore
down a McDonald's with his tractor) and the French department of
Agriculture, a true economic terrorist. As I tasted this marvelous
stuff I had  a kind of cartoon vision of the possible series of
mistakes which led up to cheese becoming the microflora's ambassador to
the human world...the sheep and the people drinking the  same water
filtered through  the same minerals present in the caves..."Madame la
fromagere, may I present M. penicillium roqueforti...his appearance
belies his civilized, cosmopolitan nature...."
  

    
Wait, your wife secretes cheese into her dirty laundry? Although
that kind of freaks me out, it probably qualifies for its own
appellation.

I spend a fair amount of time in a little village in Switzerland
that should be the poster child for terroir - they make a lot of
bergkase up there, and the whole country seems to agree that the
best cheese comes from one high valley - the Sefinental. My family
keeps their cows up there during the summer.

And yet, I hear from my friends who work with the agriculture dept.
down in Bern that the government is going to cut off the subsidies
to farmers in my village. The bureaucrats think that they can just
pay to mow the fields so it looks good for the tourists - no cows
necessary. They'll find out they're wrong, of course, but by that
time the farmers will be extinct.

Which makes me wonder - how can we keep the really old-skool farmers
and their centuries-old terroir alive as governments decide they've
become obsolete? Can it be done, or should we focus on developing
new terroir without the benefit of farming history?
  

    
Double-wrapped in plastic,actually, but good opinionated cheese seems
to have no trouble getting some vapor through...no Roquefort was
getting into the US legally,  and the strategy  served to prevent the
customs agents from giving the bag a good toss....terribly sorry my
imprecision caused a freakout.
  

    
<22>: I find it interesting that in this age of gourmet markets and
slow-food restaurants, it's simply a given a cheese that everyone in
the country knows and loves can't even hope to survive without
government subsidies.  

Mind you I'm no cheerleader for free-market capitalism, and I'd much
rather see government subsidies going towards artisanal foods rather
than high-fructose corn syrup, but if that's not happening, one would
hope that there'd be another way.  
  

    
My bad for the cheesy attempt at humor, archipelago.

Small farmers in Switzerland, at least the ones I know up high in the
mountains, are fighting a losing battle against modernization. First,
they can't compete against big agriculture's efficiency - the mountain
farming I'm familiar with is labor intensive, and much of the land is
too steep for large vehicles - mowers, hay trucks, etc. The second
problem, and perhaps the more serious one, is that young people are
understandably reluctant to choose a farming career that pretty much
guarantees low income and continuous physical labor.

The urbanization of the population in general is another factor. Although
farmers are at the core of Switzerland's national mythology, urban and
suburban voters are increasingly reluctant to subsidize small farms.

I've worked a bit with some farmers up there, and I have no idea how they
can hope to survive without subsidies. Farming at such a small scale on
really rugged terrain was probably never much more than subsistence, and
I'm always amazed at how much work it takes to produce a few 10 kilo wheels
of cheese. It may well be that this particular terroir is doomed to
extinction.