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    The Taste of Place: A Cultural Journey into Terroir
    The Taste of Place: A Cultural Journey into Terroir
    The Taste of Place: A Cultural Journey into Terroir
    Ebook399 pages5 hours

    The Taste of Place: A Cultural Journey into Terroir

    By Amy B. Trubek

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    How and why do we think about food, taste it, and cook it? While much has been written about the concept of terroir as it relates to wine, in this vibrant, personal book, Amy Trubek, a pioneering voice in the new culinary revolution, expands the concept of terroir beyond wine and into cuisine and culture more broadly. Bringing together lively stories of people farming, cooking, and eating, she focuses on a series of examples ranging from shagbark hickory nuts in Wisconsin and maple syrup in Vermont to wines from northern California. She explains how the complex concepts of terroir and goût de terroir are instrumental to France's food and wine culture and then explores the multifaceted connections between taste and place in both cuisine and agriculture in the United States. How can we reclaim the taste of place, and what can it mean for us in a country where, on average, any food has traveled at least fifteen hundred miles from farm to table? Written for anyone interested in food, this book shows how the taste of place matters now, and how it can mediate between our local desires and our global reality to define and challenge American food practices.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of California Press
    Release dateMay 5, 2008
    ISBN9780520934139
    The Taste of Place: A Cultural Journey into Terroir
    Author

    Amy B. Trubek

    Amy B. Trubek is Assistant Professor in the Department of Nutrition and Food Sciences at the University of Vermont and previously taught at New England Culinary Institute. She is the author of Haute Cuisine: How the French Invented the Culinary Profession and of numerous articles that have appeared in The Boston Globe, Gastronomica, and other publications.

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      Book preview

      The Taste of Place - Amy B. Trubek

      INTRODUCTION

      WHEN I WAS IN MY EARLY THIRTIES, JUST FINISHING MY DOCTORAL DISSERTAtion in cultural anthropology, I moved to Vermont to teach at a culinary school, the New England Culinary Institute. I had worked as a cook for many years, and my dissertation looked at the history of the culinary profession. Working at a culinary school, then, was really a form of fieldwork, allowing me to be a participant-observer in the making of contemporary American food culture, especially the subculture of people earning their living making, selling, and serving food in restaurants. Soon after I arrived at the school I met Mark W. Davis, a trained sommelier who taught all of the wine courses. The students revered Mark for his depth of knowledge and his sophisticated palate (not to mention his fashion sense). Eventually Mark and I ended up sharing an office, and our close collegiality continued for many years. When writing classic ethnographies, anthropologists like Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Clifford Geertz relied on native informants, cultural insiders that provided the naïve anthropologist with an entry into their complex world, a web of cultural meaning, symbols, values, and practices. Mark was my native informant, if you will.

      From my own experience and research I knew a lot about the culture and history of professional chefs. However, I knew little about evaluating wine, or analytically pursuing the sense of taste more generally, and I was extremely curious. With Mark as my guide I was able to use our shared experience as a way to recognize a certain worldview not solely related to wine, but to the very way people taste wine and food, and how they evaluate those tastes. He first introduced me to terroir and goût du terroir, glossed in English as the taste of place, the central focus of this book.¹

      So sharing an office with Mark started my informal, and then ultimately my formal, education in the appreciation and discernment of wine and food. Simply by overhearing Mark's conversations with students, and then through our own conversations and shared meals, and ultimately by taking some of his courses, I learned about viticulture and viniculture, about the aroma wheel and tasters and super-tasters, about distinguishing between New World and Old World styles of winemaking, and, most importantly, about terroir, the notion that the natural environment can shape the taste of wine. This last idea really took root in my thinking, as it encapsulated so much of what I was learning in my everyday work life. Was terroir a word familiar to me before I spent my days at a desk three feet away from a sommelier? Probably, since I had traveled often to France, including on recent research trips to explore the country's food culture. But sitting in our office was where I realized that terroir was not simply a word but a category for knowing and discerning wine.

      Over time, as my participant observations of the culinary school became subtler, my understanding of terroir shifted from an incidental result of sharing an office with Mark to the focus of my own scholarly inquiry. As an insider with the classic outsiders' stance, always trying to understand how the various individual actions and underlying assumptions fit together, I began to recognize themes, such as certain standards about what constitutes a good worker, or what is needed for a dish or a glass of wine to taste good, or what it meant to be a technically proficient chef or sommelier.

      In the course of a workday I taught culinary students, talked to farmers, and attended faculty meetings at which at least ten working chefs were frequently in attendance. I also often talked to Mark about our teaching strategies as we shared stories about our students. At this school, most of the courses were taught in a professional setting. Students learned to bake, for example, by arriving at the school's bakery at 5 AM, ready to mix doughs and shape breads. Chef-instructors ran restaurant kitchens, building the menus and executing the dishes with students, who rotated through various kitchens as part of their education. In this environment people discussed taste and the taste of things every day: the blackberry notes in the merlot, the crispness and purity of a freshly picked organic carrot, the best ways to pair wine with a sole dish served with lemon and ginger. I became fascinated by these conversations for what they revealed about what mattered in this community, but also for how they informed everyday choices.

      Above all, I was intrigued by the thread that stitched together all these conversations: the connection between the taste of the wine and food and their origins. By origins I mean what happened before the food and beverages came to the loading dock of the school's central purchasing facility: the region where the wine was made, the method used for pressing the olive oil, the style of the cheese maker. Besides their shared explanations of why food and wine have certain tastes, clear differences existed among the people having such conversations: the wine sommelier lean and elegant in his Hugo Boss suit swirling and sniffing; the local organic farmer fit and tan in a scuffed Carhartt jacket and work boots discussing compost and Roundup pesticide; the compact and intense chef from France passionately discussing the pitfalls of too much garlic in a sauce. But for all of them, the taste—the sensation when the wine and carrot and sauce were brought into the mouth, when the products of the earth were incorporated into the human body—is what mattered most. And for everyone, any attempt to explain the experience in the mouth and articulate a sense of discernment (the mellowness of the wine, the sweetness of the carrot) led back out of the mouth into the surroundings and settings. The place where the wine and carrot came from and the methods used in their creation, according to the sommelier, the farmer, and the chef, created distinctive tastes.

      When Mark taught his students about terroir, he emphasized the Old World or European origins of the association between taste and place. Students learned about methods of using labels of origin to differentiate wines in much of Europe, especially France's Appellation d'Origine Contrôlée system, Italy's similar Denominazione di Origine Controllata system, and, more recently, the European Union's protected denomination of origin. Most Old World wines, he explained, are made to best express the unique aspects of the grape's environment (geology, climate, farming methods), but the labeling system helps people appraise a wine's final quality as well. Understanding such internal referencing between the taste of a wine and how and when it was made was instrumental to the students' appreciation of European wines.

      From my first engagement with terroir, the result of my own conversations with Mark and overhearing his discussions with students, I was struck with how this idea seemed at once particular (students learned about a French concept and a European set of practices) and universal (shared by the sommelier, the chef, and the farmer, as well as by the French and Italians). This dynamic between the universal and the particular was fantastic food for thought for me, someone with an anthropological imagination and a trained cook's palate, and so it became my central research subject. Initially, I spent much time just trying to clearly define terroir and the frequently used phrase goût du terroir, and the role of both in the French system of labels of origin.

      Anthropologist Pradeep Jeganathan describes his own research in Sri Lanka as travers[ing] the basic problem of anthropology, which is to make the particular available through the categories of the universal.² I came to realize that our many specific conversations about the taste of food and wine and their origins could be heard around the globe as well.

      The complexities (and contradictions) of the particular and universal qualities of terroir and goût du terroir became very apparent early on in my research, when I still worked at the culinary school. I was asked to speak to a group of professionals who run the food service at an Ivy League university. I discussed the importance of thinking about food from a cultural and historical perspective. As an introduction to the next event, a port tasting led by the maître d'hôtel (the manager of the front of the house) of the school, I spoke briefly about my early research considering terroir, focusing on the French AOC labels of origin. The director of the university food service, savvy to the importance of marketing in America to create market niches for certain products, looked at me skeptically and said, They are just trying to sell the sizzle and not the steak. I stayed for the tasting and sat next to the director. The sommelier led us through a tasting of four different ports. (Though produced in Portugal, ports are subject to a control system similar to that of the French Appellation d'Origine Contrôlée. In fact, some consider the system used for port to be the historical precursor of that in France.) He began with two fairly inexpensive blended ports produced in large quantities. He explained that the third port was a vintage port, which means it was created from an unusually good harvest. Every year could be labeled vintage; however, a year is not declared a vintage year unless conditions are considered favorable for producing high-quality wines. All the grapes came from a single vineyard (most ports are made from grapes picked in a number of vineyards), and only a very small quantity, 39,000 bottles, was produced. After tasting two blended nonvintage ports, we could truly discern a difference when we tasted the third port. There was greater clarity and depth to the flavor. The director looked at me, laughed, and said, Okay, it's not just the sizzle. This port simply tastes better. His comment haunted me as I continued my research.

      The director's initial skepticism but ultimate acceptance of the taste parameters I outlined reflected my central concern: How could I figure out both the sizzle and the steak? Ultimately I moved beyond the assumption that the taste of place is a preoccupation of professional foodies and began to think about taste more broadly, realizing I was looking at tastes whose origins were ultimately about both culture and nature. The universal elements of the taste of place came to inform my consideration of all the complex particulars I examined through archival research, interviews, and participant observation. From that time on I wondered how could it be that thousands of miles away from where the port was made, two people in another culture tasted how place intersects with unique flavors?

      THE CULTURE OF TASTE

      In the act of tasting, when a bite of food or a sip of wine moves through the mouth and into the body, culture and nature become one. Universally, eating and drinking are processes of bringing the natural world into the human domain. Thus, these everyday events are by no means culturally neglected; eating and drinking are powerful and meaningful throughout the world in ways that extend far beyond pure sustenance. Incorporating the natural world into the physical body can signify so much. Consider the globally varied list of taboo foods: grasshoppers, for example, are considered unacceptable as food in the United States, but they are enjoyed in Mexico. And this cultural attention encompasses what, where, when, how, why, and with whom you eat or drink.

      Taste is the difference between food as a mere form of sustenance and food as part of life's rich pageant, a part of sociality, spirituality, aesthetics, and more. Taste unifies the myriad means humans have devised to make food so much more than what makes us able to move, to survive as a species. Human eating habits are paradoxical. On one hand, unlike almost every other animal species, we are omnivores: we eat animals, vegetables, grasses, grains, and fruits. But we don't really eat everything; in fact, we eat very little of what is available to us. Some of us eat ants; some turn in disgust. Some eat sea urchins and octopus and squid, while others embrace squid in the form of fried calamari at T.G.I. Friday's but reject it everywhere else. Ideas about what tastes good or is even appropriate as food vary immensely among nations, cultures, religions, and peoples. And the reasons we refuse to eat certain foods are not arbitrary, but mediated by cultural beliefs and practices.³ In Oaxaca, a taco filled with fried chapulines, or tiny grasshoppers, tastes wonderful and also helps define the taste of Oaxacan cuisine. In south India, fresh coconut and red chili, used in any number of dishes, is a deeply loved taste combination, and for many Keralites living abroad, it tastes like home. For an observant Jew or Muslim, the consumption of pork is an affront to God, although the consumption of beef or lamb is not. For many Americans, the smell of powdered cheese combined with a Styrofoam-like crunch harkens back to the most wonderful days of childhood, while the smell of liver can bring back the worst dinner table memories. Our cultural tastes frame our physiological taste experiences.

      Judging the sensory quality of any food or drink is complex. All human beings do share certain physiological aspects of taste, thanks to the taste buds located on everyone's tongue. These hundreds of small papillae that dot the tongue's surface enable us to distinguish between salty, sweet, bitter, and sour, and even the most recently identified taste, umami. The taste buds at the front of the tongue are considered most sensitive to sweetness, the ones at the edges to saltiness, and those toward the back to bitterness. Smell is as important as the taste buds in the ability to taste, since flavors and aromas are perceived by the human brain with the olfactory bulb. However, taste remains profoundly subjective because the taste experience can never be physiologically shared. Instead, taste evaluations must occur through language, through a shared dialogue with others. The complexity of discerning taste, therefore, lies in how that dialogue develops, and what factors shape both the conversation and the final sensory evaluation.

      My participant observations at the culinary school led me to realize that the origins of food and beverage determine prevailing notions of taste. Taste—this unbelievably vital, complex, amorphous, physiological, cultural, undoubtedly elusive, and probably evasive notion—kept being located, both in geographical terms (in the gravel, schist, or clay; on the hillsides, in the valleys, or by the river) and by name (Joey's strawberries, Bill's lamb, Laini's cheese, Helen's wine). As soon as I first heard of this locational philosophy of taste, my curiosity was piqued. I borrowed this notion from the world of wine aficionados and began to look at taste as if it were produced by a locality rather than by a technique or in a certain social setting. Once I changed my worldview with regard to taste, numerous questions arose: If taste is produced by place, how does it work? Can the earth, air, sun, and water really make such a powerful imprint on my mouth? Is the link between taste and place particular to certain cultures or a universal human phenomenon? Why is this coupling so potent right now?

      Although the social structure understood by sociologists such as Pierre Bourdieu to be determined by social and economic class may influence what we believe is in good taste, other involved processes shape what we think tastes good. Working at a culinary school I witnessed every day a dynamic tension between a set of structural constraints and individual and professional aesthetic and creative ideals when it came to the taste of food and drink. Students learned how to cook while making food for the locals and tourists that came to the restaurants run by the school. The restaurant menu had to reflect the expectations of consumers: yes to hamburgers and French fries, but no to fermented yak butter and calves' brains. At the same time, chefs wanted to demonstrate their mastery of culinary techniques and sensory evaluations and students aspired to such mastery. As a result, each menu item became an opportunity to transcend the often static assumptions about what the customer expected with surprising ingredients or unusual presentations. Every day the interplay between social expectations about what would sell and the desire to express aesthetic values and skills was worked out. Making sense of such an interplay requires an analysis of growing, cooking, and eating food and drink based on practice. Exploring how the physiology of taste is elaborated by those who grow, make, and eat food every day allows a more nuanced analysis of the culture of food, and also the larger cultural assumptions we enact every day.⁴

      FRENCH TASTE

      As someone who takes a decidedly historical approach when attempting to answer broad questions, I first wanted to understand the origins of this idea—the taste of place—which means I had to consider France, for that is where the idea originated. It is difficult to translate terroir from the French in a way that encapsulates all its meanings; in fact, some say terroir can never really be translated from the French at all. When it is attempted, the word is translated alternately as soil, locality, or part of the country.⁵ Among the reasons the term is so difficult to translate is that the word's meaning is embedded in French culture. It is part of people's everyday assumptions about food; it is as fundamental as our assumption that the first meal of the day should include coffee and orange juice but not miso soup. The French are unusual in the attention they place on the role of the natural world in the taste of food and drink. When the French take a bite of cheese or a sip of wine, they taste the earth: rock, grass, hillside, valley, plateau. They ingest nature, and this taste signifies pleasure, a desirable good. Gustatory pleasure and the evocative possibilities of taste are intertwined in the French fidelity to the taste of place.

      By now this French orientation has moved far beyond France, and it has become a method for people like Mark to explore and explain taste experiences. According to Mark, if I want to understand the unique terroir found at Mas de Daumas Gassac in the Languedoc (one of Mark's favorite vineyards), I need to be where the grapes are grown and the wine is made. I need to go to France. I first tasted the robust red wine from this vineyard in a comparative wine tasting Mark hosted for a group of students interested in French wines. As Mark expounded on the vineyard's unique terroir and the other students and I tasted the wine in a small, dark classroom, I had another epiphany about the existence of the taste of place, and its importance to the French.

      So, to truly understand what my colleagues were discussing so passionately, and to be able to tell the story of the importance of the natural world to our ideas about taste, I went to France. I found terroir in many places and guises, although capturing it was often as difficult as describing taste experiences. The first section of this book details the important events, people, and institutions that have been instrumental in developing terroir as a powerful category for tasting food and wine. I also explore why terroir has been such an important cultural category for the French, tracing it back to the celebration of the peasant and agrarian life so central to French identity.

      People are a large part of the story of terroir and goût du terroir, even if rock, soil, slope, and sun may seem to be the central characters. Many French people are dedicated to championing the connection between taste and place: the dynamic dialogue that happens when we evaluate what we eat and drink has long been shaped by tastemakers and taste producers. The term connoisseurship is often used to describe discriminating tastes when it comes to wine, cheese, chocolate, and other foods; the dictionary definition of a connoisseur is someone with a thorough knowledge and critical judgment of a subject, especially one of the fine arts; an expert in any matter of taste (e.g., wines, foods).⁶ Although during my research I often engaged with people who could be understood to be connoisseurs, in the end connoisseurship doesn't cover all of the meanings and activities involved in understanding terroir and the goût du terroir. Other interpretations more convincingly capture the taste of place. To better capture the entire universe of possibilities when considering the taste of place, I use the word discernment instead.

      Michel de Certeau and Luce Giard argue for a close analysis of food and drink embracing contingency, context, and aspiration and not simply assuming our choices are shaped by a static social structure. Such an approach requires a consideration of a constellation of features ultimately shaping taste experiences, for the food that is reserved, authorized, and preferred is the place of a silent piling up of an entire stratification of orders and counterorders that stem at the same time from an ethnohistory, a biology, a climatology, and a regional economy, from a cultural invention and a personal experience.⁷ A study of the quotidian activities of how people grow, cook, and savor needs to incorporate de Certeau and Giard's ideas of "the truant freedom of practices" involved in making and tasting food and drink, and then, in turn, what such daily activities bring to the making of culture.⁸

      Inherently a comparative project, this book explores how, why, where, and when terroir arrived on the shores of North America. The historical particulars of the production of locality, using anthropologist Arjun Appadurai's felicitous phrase, as well as the tremendous cultural commitment to the notion, are certainly unique to the borders of France. But when it comes to the idea that quality of flavor is linked to certain origins, ultimately found in locally based farming and cooking practices that pay attention to natural conditions, I wonder if the French have captured and bottled, so to speak, a powerful sensual dimension of taste. Such a cultural vision of the taste of place is increasingly becoming part of contemporary notions of discernment for food and drink around the globe. This is happening now; the connection is being made every day, in ways both big and small.

      My investigations became much deeper and broader than I ever imagined they would in those early days of wine and food talk and tastings at the New England Culinary Institute. Above all, achieving a nuanced picture of how the taste of place works and what it ultimately accomplishes took me into unfamiliar territory. Much of this book navigates the many different possible paths leading to and from the taste of place, for above all I know now that to tell the story of terroir requires more than a simple narrative of cause and effect. The concept can never be captured in a linear fashion: first comes rock, then soil, then plants, then sun, and so on. As I was completing this book, I met the French food scientist Yolande Noël, who in her employment by the French Institute for Agronomic Research has thought long and hard about how to define terroir, and how to capture its essence in order to help farmers and winemakers use it in practice. In one wide-ranging discussion about the taste of place, I asked, How do you envision it? She replied, The best way to think about terroir is as a double helix; all the strands work up and around each other. Each aspect is necessary for the final result. What a perfect analogy: it is an evocative image that also refers to a modern scientific discovery, a key to unlocking many secrets of who we are and how we live. The spiraling, interdependent, and universal double helix truly evokes terroir.

      DISCERNING TASTE

      Taste of place ultimately transcends France: terroir and goût du terroir have become transnational categories for discerning taste. This book investigates why the taste of place has become part of a global dialogue about taste. Placing or localizing food and drink is our bulwark against the incredible (and increasingly menacing) unknowns of our interdependent global food system. Locating food makes it ours, and it can also train us to appreciate it in new ways. This sensibility is beginning to inform people everywhere: we are increasingly a global community of concerned consumers and producers. By comparing France and the United States, I can look at all the different ways food is being localized, for reasons of economics, politics, and aesthetics.

      These two nations are under similar pressures related to the supply of food. They are both subject to a shrinking agricultural sector, greater globalization of markets, and increased consolidation of distribution systems and retail food sectors. Especially over the past century, farming has shifted away from being a localized activity that spurs economic and culinary activity in home communities toward becoming a sector of a larger industrialized portfolio based on distant trade. But what does this shift mean? How should it be understood? How broad and how deep are these changes? And, finally, how are people responding to such changes in their everyday lives? Analyses of the economics of globalization tend to rely on metaphors of forward movement—a juggernaut, a fast-moving train—and these images reinforce an underlying assumption of inevitability, to like it or lump it. However, not every place on the globe has responded in the same manner to an increasingly globalized economic system. A poll published in The Economist in 2006 asked people from a number of nations to agree or disagree with the following statement: The free-enterprise system and free-market economy is the best system on which to base the future of the world. Seventy-three percent of the people polled in the United States agreed, but in France the number was significantly lower, with only 40 percent in agreement.⁹

      At the same time, tastes are always changing, and the way these changes occur can ultimately reveal much about the larger structures that do shape our daily lives. A fine wine and an organic carrot may appear to represent very different creations in the taste hierarchy. It may be hard to imagine that a discussion of the finer points of the wines grown by Château Mouton-Rothschild could be related to a discussion about the variations in flavor between Nantes and Chantenay carrots grown on Joey's farm. One seems so fancy, the other so, well, plebeian. But why is that so? Perhaps this assumption has more to do with how we think than with what we taste. Our contemporary thinking about the physiology of taste is increasingly mediated by modern capitalism, an economic system that values food like it values any other commodity, thus putting tremendous pressure on any other cultural sensibilities and distinctions. Food and beverages continue to straddle the gap between a good and a commodity, between known and unknown objects, even though consumption of commodities—including food and drink, the only ingestible commodities—now functions as the primary marker of social status.

      Many in France perceive globalization as a threat, but in the United States we apparently do not share their fears. The persistence of the French agrarian tradition means that France as a nation and a culture has responded to globalization quite differently than the United States has. Even though there are fewer and fewer French peasants, the idea of the peasant looms large in the cultural imagination. Certain decisions that are considered common sense in France are thought elitist or strange in the United States. The French habit of shopping for food daily, for example, is quite foreign to Americans, who tend to shop only weekly. Similarly, the Americans' more nonchalant attitude toward the agrarian world and landscape is difficult for the French to understand.

      In America as a whole, we have embraced a fully industrialized and globalized food system as well as a more open acceptance of economic globalization and free markets more generally, and this level of acceptance certainly influences our everyday diet. However, acknowledging the globalization of food and drink, and accepting that this phenomenon may influence the culture

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