Today, the amazing proliferation of farmer’s markets, local food networks, and artisanal products testifies to our unease with the industrial system. Food safety is a valid reason to pay more attention to the origins of our food, but it’s probably not the best reason. Rather than acting out of fear, many of us are acting out of love. Food has always helped to define our lives and anchor us to a particular time and place on this planet. To love food that is real and distinctive—that could not come from anywhere other than where it does—is to love the myriad and dazzling ways that life has adapted to the many landscapes of earth. It is to rebel against the flat meaninglessness of sprawl.
Say I’m hooked on the gingery spiciness of sourwood honey, which can be made only from a tree found in some fast-disappearing Carolina forests. That attaches me to those forests in a very tangible way, and girds my resistance to any proposal to bulldoze those forests and throw up another housing development and Wal-Mart. Places are not interchangeable. I hope the amazing fruits and fish, the cheeses and wines I profile will make that obvious. Learning about them and seeing the places they came from have given me a lot of joy, as well as a whole new way of reading the American landscape.
We crave food with stories, as evidenced by those hand-written signs explaining the pedigree of seemingly every apple, cheese, and bottle of wine in Whole Foods. This can seem a little precious to conventional food buyers. “Don’t fall for the marketing!” they protest. “Why must food have a story? It’s just food.”
But that’s just it. The fact that we can even entertain a phrase like “it’s just food” emphasizes what a strange time we live in. Because until the advent of the modern grocery, every food had a story. Anonymous food is not the norm, it’s the aberration. Whether we were buying it at market from the farmer, or growing it ourselves, or, farther back, gathering it ourselves, food came heavy with history and meaning.
When most of us were more or less responsible for getting our own food, whether farming or foraging, reading the landscape was essential to survival. Understanding how it worked, and how to work with it, was no elitist activity. At the core, our interest in terroir is an enduring desire to partner with a landscape, survive on it, and live well.
At some level, our survival still depends on somebody knowing the ways of the world, knowing how to harvest the many living things we depend on. Most of us have outsourced this knowledge to thousands of rural people we will never know, but that doesn’t mean we are any freer from the earth. It just means we can no longer make the connections. Ultimately, that’s what meaning is—seeing the connections between things.
We are some of the first people on earth not to have built-in connections to the land we inhabit, not to be able to take comfort and pleasure in the verities there. Paying attention to terroir is one of the best and most enjoyable ways to reestablish the relationship. It can teach us much about who we are, why we like what we like, and how we go about living on this earth. It can allow us to rediscover a romance that is exhilarating, fortifying, and real.
No comments yet.