You also can’t help but admire the Yupik Eskimo who have worked with these fish for thousands of years. It was they who learned the life cycles of the salmon, as well as the necessary preservation techniques, in order to survive in a precarious subarctic environment. The story of the greatness of Yukon salmon is inseparable from the story of the Yupik, and that’s the dynamic you’ll find again and again. Ultimately, it’s about the human response to the deals that nature has offered. It’s about the soul of the vigneron and the cheesemaker and the fisherman.
Nature offers different deals in different places. The patterns of wind, wave, light, and life that define a region come through in the plants and animals that grow there. If you want to understand the world—if you find joy in its diversity—then those patterns are worth paying attention to. Another example: In New England, a tree developed a system for dealing with long, cold winters by using changes in barometric pressure to pump clean, sweet sap up to its crown in the earliest spring, getting a head start on the season, and early humans discovered that they could boil away the water in the sap to make a syrup. In the central Mexican highlands, a tree took advantage of the endless growing season, fertile volcanic soil, and abundant rains to produce the richest, most valuable (in terms of calories—nature’s currency) fruit in history. New England never could have produced an avocado tree, and Michoacán never would have been right for the sugar maple, no matter how ingenious the farmers and plant breeders. The two foods are natural outgrowths of their environments, and tell us something fundamental about life in those regions—which, in turn, tells us something fundamental about life, period.
The Reign of Terroir
The term terroir has been used by different people in very different ways, and there is still a lot of confusion about what it includes. For example, locavores tend to get enthusiastic about terroir as a means for promoting local foods, but regionalism, tradition, and terroir are not the same thing. Manhattan clam chowder, Montreal bagels, and Seattle coffee are not examples of terroir. Cajun gumbo is, as it’s a dish that evolved to celebrate the best of what the land had to offer (crayfish, sassafras leaves, and so on). And, though tradition is often a good indicator of terroir, especially in Europe, where they have had centuries to work out which agricultural products do best in a given place, terroir need not be traditional.
In America…perhaps because we have less history, because we are immigrants and our connections to the land aren’t so rooted in family ancestry, we are less interested in what the land has been or meant and are more excited about what it can do. If our terroir is immature, it’s also youthful, with all the energy and exuberance that brings. If you want to tour the museum of old terroir masterpieces, go to France and Italy. If you want to visit the galleries where new artists are trying new things, look around America.
Indeed, something extraordinary and unprecedented is happening. You see it in more and more food markets, farmer’s markets, and restaurants: A spontaneous upwelling of passion for beautiful foods and the way they are made. Most observers thought the artisan food movement would come and go, that people would tire of the expense and inconvenience and return to the supermarket. They didn’t understand that the trend was answering a deep, pent-up desire. “Everywhere here it’s flipping back,” says Mateo Kehler, a visionary cheesemaker. “You go to central Illinois, corn desert, and there are all kinds of little organic farms popping up. The locavore movement is incredible. Six years ago we had a really hard time selling cheese in Vermont. People had to read about it in the New York Times first. It’s changed radically and quickly. It’s pretty exciting.” Though this passion feels new, the break, like so many other contemporary trends in American society, can be traced to the seismic shifts of the 1960s.
The phrase gout de terroir, or “taste of the earth,” first showed up in the 1600s, when it was meant more or less literally. Modern-day terroirists are often surprised to learn that for most of its history, gout de terroir was considered a defect. As late as 1964, Frank Schoonmaker’s Encyclopedia of Wine described it as “a characteristic, unmistakable, almost indescribable, earthy flavor, somewhat unpleasant, common, persistent…. Superior wines rarely if ever have much of this, which if once recognized, will not easily be forgotten.”
The early sixties, of course, were the tail end of a long period when “earthy” was not a plus. Technological progress in the twentieth century had, for the first time, made it possible for many people to leave the farm, and leave they did. Aspiring to an urban life of more refined tastes—the kind that previously had been available only to the upper class—the western middle class sought to distance itself from its rough and rustic past, embracing refined white bread, uncalloused hands, transparent accents. Unsurprisingly, they valued wine that, like themselves, seemed to have risen above its earthy roots.[3] For its part, the upper class was no more enamored of earthy wine than it was of an earthy middle class. No wonder gout de terroir had negative connotations. It was like saying, “You can take the wine out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the wine.”
My, how things have changed. In the United States, characteristically, the reaffirmation of the countryside came from a rebellion against government, first in the back-to-the-land movement of the forties and fifties, and then in its love child, the sixties. From naked hippies on Tennessee communes to virtually naked vegetables being served at San Francisco’s Chez Panisse, a new veneration of the land and the simple life arose. Earthy was in.
Yet in a way it didn’t take. Sure, we reminisced about our Bohemian youth and went to Chez Panisse for a special treat, but meanwhile our diet and lifestyle were getting farther and farther from any connection to place. We lived in cookie-cutter suburbs and ate at Chi Chi’s. Even if we were part of the minority that still cooked regularly, we used supermarket ingredients that, in the process of being moved around the world, had had their identity whitewashed as completely as any participant in the witness protection program.
And it wasn’t terribly satisfying. I believe that our recent interest in the terroir of wine—and, by extension, of local food—is simply one manifestation of a much more fundamental desire. Maybe you have to be disconnected from the earth for a generation or two to truly appreciate the profundity of being connected to it.
Or maybe you just have to be burned enough times by the current system. As Mateo Kehler puts it, “The whole industrial food system is failing. It’s hugely successful on one level, and on another you’ve got salmonella-tainted tomatoes and E. coli spinach.” When a single E. coli–laden hamburger bought at Sam’s Club, as documented by the New York Times, contains fresh fatty edges from Omaha, lean trimmings from old cows in Texas, frozen trimmings from cattle in Uruguay, and heated, centrifuged, and ammonia-treated carcass remnants from South Dakota, maybe it’s time to start paying attention. Maybe it’s only natural to feel that a single food should come from a single place and taste like it.
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