Have you heard of the word, “terroir?” It’s French. Terroir is why champagne can only come from the Champagne region of France. It’s why you can’t call your crappy, molded chicken milk, “Roquefort.”
Terroir is the sum of the environmental conditions in a place. It’s the soil composition, the acidity of rain, the angle of the sun, the height of the hills, local farming techniques and surrounding plant species and all the minute variables that even local farmers might not know. The terroir of the Champagne region can’t be reproduced anywhere else on earth. You want to make champagne? Move to Champagne. But if you’re satisfied making some shitty sparkling wine then you can stay in Fife or wherever you live. Expand!
When you eat a meal you eat a place.1 Not only are you physically becoming part of the food and its soil, but you’re spiritually saturating your body with the terroir.2
This will blow your mind. Have you ever heard of camas or salal? Well, let me tell you about them, friend. Camas is a plant with an edible root that seems to be somewhere between an onion and a potato. (It has a bad-ass brother named, death camas, which isn’t nearly as fun to eat.) And salal is a low shrub that you’ve definitely seen around the NW if you’ve spent any time here. It lives under tall trees, near water and it makes little black-purple berries. You’ve definitely seen it.
Both these plants are native to the Pacific Northwest. Along with salmon they were the staple foods of the Northwest native peoples.
I have lived here my whole life. I wouldn’t say I know everything about Western Washington botany, but I pay as much attention as anyone else. Until a few months ago, I had never even heard of the two plants that were the pillars of people’s diets, right here, for the last 10,000 years. And it’s not like I’m six years old; I’m thirty! Over thirty!
So, what does this have to do with anything? I’m not really sure myself, I’m a little drunk.
I guess what I’m getting at is that Presence/Attention/Awareness is about more than just focusing on the moment, it’s also about engaging with this place where we are.3 Because we eat many times a day, we have many opportunities to engage with the terroir, to be sensually present in this physical Place and let the rain become our blood. We should eat food with which we share terroir, with which we have a common rhythm.
Salal and camas evolved here, so where are they in our diets? Maybe they taste bad, I don’t know, I’ll tell you this summer, but maybe they were pushed off our plates by cheap food from other places. If we are where we eat, then most of us are geographic Frankensteins.
Where it rains so much that there’s rain in my dreams and my knees can feel it and it narrates Sunday mornings, do I eat the onion that drank the rain that wet my hair weeks before?4
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1 “Terroir” technically refers only to food and drink (and the official distinction doesn’t even require that the food be organic), but I like to think of it as applying to other things as well – clothing and building materials immediately come to mind.
Art made with local materials is, I think, something different. Of course food and clothes and structures can be created with inspiration to become more than just necessities of survival – they can become expressions of place through person – but the timing of the creative process may or may not coincide with the need for food or shelter, and those two things are going to be taken care of regardless.
2 Not to mention the spirit with which the farmer grows, treats and harvests the food.
3 Travel is, essentially, the experience of and engagement with Place. Which is why these food posts have a place on a travel blog.
4 This is what I thought about when praying before each meal in France, how our bodies mix with the earth and why I can taste Marguerite’s biceps in her wine.
