The taste of the mushroom was a map. Biting into it, I was tracing the soil it had grown in, navigating the weather conditions that brought about its fruiting, human work that picked it from a hillside, and centuries of Tuscan culinary tradition that led to its simple preparation on the plate before me. I was at a loss for words at how such a simple dish could convey so much character. With every mouthful, I knew I was consuming something I could never replicate.
Several months ago, I gave a talk for the Culinary Medicine elective about artificial flavor. It was titled “Processed Food and the Flavor Mirage,” and the central thesis was that the harm of artificial flavor lies not necessarily in any chemical toxicity, but rather in the potential it holds for decoupling flavor from nutrition. In essence, the fear is that people learn to associate the flavor of, say, blue raspberry with the nutrient load of purified vitamin C that has been added to Kool-Aid, thus never developing the intuition to crave broccoli, oranges, or peppers as sources of the nutrient. I argued that if the hypothesis of nutritional wisdom is to be believed—that our bodies use taste as a proxy for the nutritional content of foods we eat—then artificial flavor creates statistical noise which misleads our homeostatic cravings. This, in my opinion, is part of how our food system is outpacing our evolution for the worse.
How then, can we protect ourselves? I think my mushroom may hold a clue.
What I tasted in the freshly picked porcini mushroom on my recent trip to Italy was place. But to say that my experience was just of tasting would not be the whole truth. Where taste fails to holistically capture this essence, flavor comes closer. Flavor consists of taste, along with sight, aroma, texture, temperature, and, importantly, a human element. Memories, cultural associations, and social context all play crucial roles in how we perceive a dish. This is why Anton Ego, the harshest critic of the Ratatouille universe, surrendered at the first bite of a simple peasant dish, and why food tastes better when you’re surrounded by people you love. It’s why even processed foods, the pinnacles of identical interchangeability, can “hit different” based on circumstance. Ultimately, flavor is a dynamic interplay between person and food, not a static end product that is the same for everyone.
Still, however, even flavor doesn’t fully capture what I experienced. The sauteed mushroom I ate was just that: a large mushroom cap, lightly fried in olive oil, and salted. Nothing is stopping me from repeating this preparation at home, even with fresh porcinis and my family members dining with me, but I know the experience I recreate will never be the same. There was something intangible in what I felt; flavor was the immediate experience, but I also felt connected to my meal, as though to a story. This sensation, I believe, was terroir.
Terroir is a nebulous term. At its most basic, it is the combination of growing conditions—soil, sunlight, water—that give foods of a specific region their distinctive character (“champagne from the Champagne region of France”). I see this definition as missing the bigger picture. Theoretically, a machine could analyze every molecule of a food item to determine the precise way that environment, growing methods, and surrounding plants and animals produced the n=1 item before you. However, this still wouldn’t capture all that is felt in the experience of eating it. The brownies gifted to you by your new neighbor or loaf of bread baked by your best friend are made not just of ingredients, but of meaning. In much the same way, the soup your mother always made for you when you were sick simply cannot exist outside of that context. Terroir is about more than physical matter; it is about the layers of memory and connection that infuse food to make it irreplaceable. It is quintessentially human.
Far from Merriam-Webster, I have found insight about terroir from a definition I saw by Ryan Foxley in a small farming journal. In focusing on what terroir is not, I believe he better captures the vastness of what it actually includes. He writes: “Terroir is not to be found in the products of industry. Industry, by default, suppresses, masks, and eliminates any trace of terroir that may have once existed in any of its products. Terroir is not homogenized, pasteurized, pressurized, sanitized, denatured, reconstituted, fumigated, waxed, or otherwise adulterated.” What Foxley hints at here is that industry has turned food into a commodity—a product stripped of unique qualities in order to facilitate exchange on financial markets. Commodities are social constructs, collectively agreed-upon fictions that declare different goods as equivalent in value despite the nuances of how they were produced. While such reductionism may work for petroleum or steel, it crumbles when applied to food.
As much as grocery stores want us to believe that “garlic” or “kale” are real food categories, they are not. There is no such thing as generic “garlic”: there is German Porcelain Garlic, Northern White Garlic, Chesnok Red Garlic, Musik Garlic, and more, but no such thing as “garlic.” Many of these varieties actually rotate through our “garlic” bins, but how often does someone notice that this month their garlic has purple streaks and easy peeling skin, while last month it was pure white and with bigger cloves? If all these beautiful differences are ignored to offer consumers a homogeneous commodity, we grow irreconcilably distant from our food; we quite literally strip it of its name. Until we see through the monolithic concepts of food we have become conditioned to expect, we cannot voice the richness we’ve been missing. Only after learning to identify foods for what they actually are can we see through industry’s artifice and vote with our dollars for products that fulfill us. In this regard, I think the language of terroir should act as our lighthouse in the dark.
Defining terroir is an enigma. The core is material, but its nuances are intersubjective. It is precisely this adaptability, though, that I believe makes the term resilient for our constantly evolving, ever more cunning food landscape. My best attempt at operationalizing the concept is as such: terroir is the one-of-a-kind product of real people, not faceless corporations, that reflects with honesty what it is and where it came from. Real terroir matters for the same reason art matters: it carries wisdom and truths that neither words nor science can communicate. It is the primordial source of nutritional wisdom. It primes our capacity to come together.
The world we live in often makes it feel like terroir can only be found in a limited set of boutique circumstances: farmer’s markets, Michelin restaurants, the Italian countryside. In reality though, it is far closer. Yes, terroir is found in craft products made by artisans and imported cans with D.O.P. designations, but it is also found at home. To me, terroir is my grandma’s cottage cheese pancakes fried in far more oil than I care to admit, and mulled wine made over a campfire with my friends. It’s the ground cherries that grow like weeds in the pavement cracks of my hometown backyard. It’s even the sugar-laden cookies I prepared on a hot plate with my freshman dorm floormates; no thanks to the ingredients we made them from, but thanks to the non-fungibility of the moment they existed in. Terroir is food with a story.
So if nutritionally-dubious desserts can have terroir, then how can terroir be a litmus test for what we should be eating? I would argue that the cookies made with my roommates are nutritionally distinct from the cookies one eats alone. Based solely on a single social variable, I believe the “healthiness” of a food item can be altered. Healthy eating is not just about nutrient composition—after all, the base of the Mediterranean diet food pyramid is not food but community. Our nation faces an epidemic of loneliness, and rather than seeing it as distinct from our numerous metabolic health crises, let’s consider the intersection. What if, as our surgeon general advises, social disconnection is one of the most pressing public health threats in America, and what if our broken food system is afflicted by the same crisis? Dare I say it, might a homemade buttery grilled cheese eaten with your partner actually be better for you than a whole-grain turkey wrap swallowed in three bites on the way to a meeting?
Terroir is what I advocate for not because it is always “healthy,” but because it is always honest. In our current food environment, you may think you’re eating something nourishing, but often it’s a carefully designed illusion, like caffeinated sugar-water branded as health-promoting or identical gummy candies masquerading as though made of different fruit. Fancy certifications don’t protect us here (far too many workarounds and perverse incentives), nor do FDA-controlled nutrition labels (which make it seem like three square inches can capture the entirety of a food’s nutritive potential). Our bodies have corrective mechanisms that seek nutrient diversity and social behaviors, but industry has figured out how to exploit them.
Industrial players have weaponized the flavor road signs that tell us a food’s contents and inserted themselves as middlemen of the social connection that food brings about. Flavorings trick us into thinking that we’re getting nutritional diversity when what we eat is corn or soy, and preparations by fictional personalities like Betty Crocker supplant traditional recipes passed down for generations. Perhaps most insidiously, industry tries to emulate terroir. They steal the scents of grandma’s kitchen for microwaveable apple pies and encourage us to “Share a Coke with Dad.” Terroir’s connection to people and place is real, and reinforces situations we should crave to seek in the future. Industry, by definition, cannot have terroir. When it attempts to imitate it, the connections they engineer twist our innate prosocial cravings toward profit-generating junk foods that we pay for with our health. Much like how industrialized social connection will never meet our needs for belonging—when was the last time you ever heard someone be satisfied from social media?—so too industrialized food will never truly sustain us.
In my own life, I pursue terroir by striving to incorporate myself in as much as possible of what I make. I ferment yogurt, and in so doing direct the entire evolutionary history of a little colony of microbes via my forgetfulness, choice of milk, and kitchen temperature. I garden, and in the process get to harvest herbs and vegetables grown in a combination of environmental conditions and care routines that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world. I’ve even started milling my own flour, which has perhaps had the most eye-opening effect on me, showing me an entire world of flavors, scents, and textures that exists outside the homogenous white powders sold in grocery stores. My advice is thus to make meals “your way,” even if the product is not something others would call balanced. Incorporate the taste of your hands into your cooking, a sentiment beautifully captured by the Korean concept of son-mat. Learn where food comes from, what’s in season, and don’t be afraid to ask sellers for specifics about their products (usually they’re more than happy to share!). Do things the long way, even if the results don’t taste different, because the stories you create will nourish you in ways beyond the tangible. Most importantly, share. Leave tupperwares everywhere you go, enter debts of camaraderie, and invite others to partake in both your culinary defeats and victories. Initiate a paradigmatic shift in why we eat food.
So here is my call to action: broaden your reasoning for why you eat. Much as the biopsychosocial model of medicine has shifted our perspective of medicine away from the purely physical, so too should humanism color the way we approach nutrition. Humans are social apes, and a hunger for connection is as innate a drive as our thirst for water. Thus, eat not just to refuel, but to reconnect. Reconnect with land, centuries of culinary culture, and the human quest for belonging. Incorporate yourself unapologetically into what you make, because your originality is the strongest possible defense against the neon bite of artificial flavor. With every swallow, let the story of your meal nourish you as much as the food itself. And when every signal around you tries to scramble your gut intuition, just remember: seek terroir.
