Terroir Terror: My Fear of Local Food
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I went to the Quick Stop the other morning to buy a dozen of Bernice’s eggs for breakfast. Brenda--who shares a last name with a local mountain road and makes the best bacon egg and cheese sandwiches (with Bernice’s eggs)--was working behind the counter. She asked how I was doing in the midst of All This and when I said I was getting a lot of writing done because I couldn’t go anywhere or do anything, she nodded and said, “There’s always an upside.”
Another upside of All This has been getting to know the local food sources around me. My parents have been sheltering from All This with me, and when we started hearing about potential food shortages, we began exploring local food. It was embarrassing to discover how many awesome farm stands there within a five mile radius of my house that I hadn’t even known about.
After a few weeks of local produce, cheese, and poultry my mom said, “I’m really enjoying this Vermont terroir.” My French not being so good, I mistranslated terroir to mean terror. Based on that translation her statement made no sense. But even after she corrected me I had to acknowledge that the idea of eating locally did create a kind of panic or dread in me.
Local food was a big part of the reason I decided to move to the Northeast Kingdom. Once I got here, however, I found that it wasn’t like eating locally back in Philly, where the chef at my favorite gastropub did all the work for me. I found myself too intimidated to walk up to people’s farms and find out what they were growing, harvesting, and slaughtering (yes, the slaughtering thing was particularly challenging even though I’m totally fine with eating meat out of styrofoam packaging). Even when I did manage to buy something from the farmer’s market, it took so much more effort to figure out what it was (kohlrabi and scapes anyone?) and how to cook it. It was “easier” to keep going to the grocery store for my prewashed plastic clamshell of baby greens trucked in from far far away.
As challenging as local food can be, apparently terroir is even more so. According to Steve Erlanger, writing about French terroir in the New York Times, “...it is a concept almost untranslatable, combining soil, weather, region and notions of authenticity, of genuineness and particularity--of roots, and home--in contrast to globalized products designed to taste the same everywhere.” He quotes a French farmer as saying, “It’s the person who gives the work and the identity to terroir. There’s an emotional identity to a particular piece of the earth.”
No wonder I mistranslated it as terror! As much as I like the idea of that kind of intimacy with my food--as evidenced by the fact that I read Frances Mallman and Thomas Keller cookbooks the way others read romance novels--actually putting it into practice is way out of my comfort zone. I like to fantasize about connecting to the earth and my neighbors and eating elaborate meals cooked on open fires while sitting on antique textiles. But reality is always such a come down. Driving by a field of cute little lambs every day until they grow up and then buying their dead carcasses for dinner is heavy. As is knowing that the farmers down the road were up all night protecting my salad greens from a killing frost that came out of nowhere. To actually see and feel the cycle of life and death inherent in every meal I eat?! Or heck, even just that awkward moment at the farmers market when you avoid eye contact with a vendor because you’re not going to buy anything from them. It’s intense.
The truth is, I’m more inclined to use food as a quick, cheap fix to numb me out and make me feel better about (or not feel at all) the things that stress me out. Like global warming and food scarcity and the hardships my neighbors (in the country or the city) endure during this pandemic and all the time.
I aspire to challenge my intimacy issues and connect more deeply to the land I live on and the people who live on it with me. I’m taking steps, like growing my own little garden--but it’s not easy. I take it so personally when my tomato plants die or I have to squish the bugs that are eating my lilies (I don’t--I let Mom do that). I’m still shy about driving up to real farms and talking to real people about what they do. Making genuine contact with place and self and others is hard. But, as Brenda pointed out the other morning, there’s always an upside. In this case, it’s the possibility of profound nourishment...and deliciousness, if Brenda’s egg and cheese sandwiches made with Bernice’s eggs, Cabot cheddar, and Barnet Mountain bacon are anything to go by.
I’ll report again on my glorious terroir (and hopefully waning terreur) as the summer and All This continues.