Behind both Oldways and Slow Food is a simple but profound insight. Up until about 150 years ago when the railroads—and more recently, the automobile—arrived to give great mobility to the industrialized world, most people grew up, lived, worked, and died in the same area. Over centuries and sometimes millennia, local people had learned which crops and types of livestock thrived in their climate and on their soils. Those were the crops and breeds they farmed, steadily improving their quality by selecting for factors that improved taste, nutrition, and disease resistance.
 
Cooking techniques and recipes were for centuries very region-specific, and over time cooks in those areas learned how to make the most palatable dishes from unique local products. In the northern latitudes and higher elevations of Germany, cool springs and summers were the perfect climate for cabbage crops and pig farming, and long winters meant that the cabbage and meat had to be stored for the cold months. The result? Sauerkraut, pickled red cabbage, dried ham, and smoked bacon.

The French call these site-specific flavors terroir, or soil, which is a succinct way to describe the phenomenon that each specific place on the earth will express itself in the taste of the food that grows there. Each place on the earth has a unique climate, geology, and ecology, and these factors influence what foods will grow and what they will taste like.

Wine shows these intimate variations dramatically: A Cabernet Sauvignon from Paulliac in France is very different than one from the Napa Valley in California. We taste differences in onions from Walla Walla (Washington) and Maui (Hawaii) and Vidalia (Georgia), even though they may all be the same species of sweet onion. Cheesemakers know that morning milk from a given herd of cows is different in composition and taste from evening milk from the same herd. When I was a kid, we waited with great anticipation for the corn and tomatoes grown in southern New Jersey to arrive in our stores in Pennsylvania. Jersey corn and tomatoes were justly famous, for southern New Jersey’s combination of hot, humid days and nights and loose, sandy soil creates the perfect conditions to bring out the flavor of the crops and make New Jersey “The Garden State.”

ORGANIC FARMING ENCOURAGES TERROIR

Organic food especially will show terroir (region) because organic farming is designed to strengthen the ecological aspects of the land. The soil of an organic farm is made fertile through the addition of actively decaying organic matter, which can include manure, green cover crops that are plowed under, compost, and all sorts of plant detritus that rots. Although many people think of the process of rotting as something nasty, if plants could talk, they’d give us a far different story. They’d say that when microscopic soil organisms dismantle organic matter through the processes of rot and decay, they release nutrients into the soil that feed plants exactly what they like, in the form they need, and at the rate they want. By returning plant wastes and manures from the farm to the soil, the farmer allows biological recycling to take place, and with every turn of the cycle, the soil acquires more life, becomes richer and healthier, and strengthens the plants and animals that live off it.

Differences in flavor in foods show up because of differences in cultural—or specific growing—practices. This grower may raise her Charentais melons on a bed of straw while that one may train the melon vines up a trellis and tie strips of cloth as slings to support the melons that develop high above the ground. One tomato grower may remove all the suckers—the side shoots that arise in the leaf axils of the growing plant—from his plants, while another allows them to grow.

That’s why it’s important to know who grew your food, if that’s possible. Almost every locality in the great expanse of the United States has local food resources. By sampling those resources, you soon learn who provides food to your taste—not to some taste panel or focus group at ConAgra headquarters but to your own personal taste. No matter what the tastemakers say you should eat,  wear, or watch, or listen to, or drive, you and you alone must be the arbiter of your own taste. That sounds obvious, but a lot of folks forget that. The multibillion dollar advertising business is there to convince you that they know what you want, whether you really want it or not. I believe that the business of becoming a complete human being involves first acquiring a heart, then acquiring wisdom, and along the way acquiring a firm sense of your own taste and sticking to it. The real trendsetters and tastemakers, after all, are the people who don’t care what anyone else says is good: They know what they like, and they live by it.