Terroir: in short, “place-ness," the essential character of land and environment that is expressed in products from a particular place.
Trying to entice a food co-op’s produce buyers into stocking Rock Spring Farm’s vegetables in their store recently, I found myself struggling to explain why our carrots taste so good. We have known that they are good for a long time, but why? – that’s a different question.
“Well,” I stumble, “it starts with better genetics.” We grow high-flavored carrots bred in
“We have great bottom soil,” I try again, “a wonderful silty loam down by the creek.” It’s heavier than most vegetable soils, which tend to be sandier for better drainage, which makes it easier to do the multiple yearly plantings that vegetable production requires. “It has more clay in it, more minerals, more stuff.”
“Down in our valley,” I ramble on, noting the produce buyer’s skeptical expression, “nights are almost always a few degrees cooler than the they are on the ridge. And cool nights cause carrots – and other storage-type crops – to get sweeter. I think that might have something to do with it,” I continue. That seems to be a somewhat satisfactory answer, but not fully.
So I think carrots. Pushing a seeder for miles of row. Waiting for the seedlings to emerge. Lying down between rows of carrot fronds, I can feel the warmth of the soil on my back. I can hear the trickle of the creek. Cool air flows down from the ridges and along a side draw, and pours over me into the creek bed. The setting sun dips between the neighbor’s barn and the hillside, up the valley. The donkey brays. The carrots hear it, see it, and feel it, too.
Through fifteen years of raising vegetables all over the country, in deserts and maritimes, in floods and droughts, in heat and cold, I have learned to appreciate the differences of vegetables. Not the difference between a carrot and a parsnip, or even the difference between a Chantenay- and a Nantes-type carrot, but the difference between a carrot grown in California and one grown in the Midwest, or even between one grown in a broad, warm valley and one grown where the first frost always comes early.
The eating quality of manufactured foods results from an industrialized effort to create uniform results through processes that are essentially chemical in nature; the same could be said of the irrigated vegetable and fruit production in the western desert valleys. Eating quality in real food result from the complex interplay of genetics and environment: soil nutrients and moisture combining with heat, sunshine, and humidity to influence the genetically-controlled biochemical pathways that result in the molecular compounds and physiological structures that we associate with texture, flavor, and nutrition. In other words, in tasting the food we taste the soil, weather, genetics, and a thousand other pieces that go into any living thing.
And that’s why our carrots taste so good.
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