Terroir: an audio playlist

Listening to a taste of place

This is a companion post to this week’s forthcoming Scraps essay on terroir.

I recently curated and hosted an In The Dark event at XMTR Audio Arts Festival in my home of St. Leonards-on-Sea. In The Dark is a long-running series of events originally founded by Nina Garthwaite and loosely connected to the idea of ‘cinema for the ears’. Events generally involve audio playouts or performance that lean on creative or artistic audio making rather than any visual element. It has been a big part of my inspiration and desire to produce creative audio over the past decade and it was a real honour to be asked to be asked to do it, especially as the venue was the beautiful velvet seated and curtained Electric Palace in Hastings Old Town: putting cinema in cinema for the ears. I decided that for the event I would curate pieces around the theme of terroir.

Much of my audio work over the past decade has revolved around food. It’s taken me a while to define what exactly interests me about food and cooking, because a lot of food writing – whether that’s literal writing or audio and video work – assumes that food culture is limited to two things: recipes and restaurants. But food is so much more than that: it’s ritual, it’s community, it’s labour rights, it’s domesticity, it’s gender, it’s politics, it's environmental and land work. 

Terroir is the theory that you can taste how and where food is produced. It’s a slippery idea, and one that is traditionally only seriously used in relation to wine, but is starting to expand out more into crops like coffee and hops, and also into dairy. But I wanted to examine the possibility of applying it to everything, because if terroir can affect one thing then surely it can have an impact on the taste of everything we eat, because everything is grown or made somewhere.

One of the threads that often I end up tracing through food stories is an idea that seems to be entrenched in this country in particular: to be interested in food, in its provenance, its taste and even the circumstances of its production is a kind of elitism. The liberal metropolitan elite, with their cappuccinos. My original encounters with the notion of terroir have been influenced by this, because I reject the idea that to be interested in eating and cooking is an elite one, and I resent that there's an implication that only experts can talk about terroir. Everybody eats and that’s the interesting thing about it.

As we live in a time of deep climate uncertainty and crisis, what impact does that have on the taste of what we eat? And in a time when borders are policed so violently and land is removed from people by force, what is our relationship with terroir in these places? I also wanted to examine a little the idea of the terroir of story: how the way we talk about our food and our sense of it as a culturally specific experience has the potential to influence how it tastes. And I also wanted to think about how terroir has the potential to impact us as humans. What can soil do to us, and for us?

What is soil?

The geologist Brenna Quigley, a specialist in ‘hard rocks’ talks to the host of the podcast I’ll Drink To That, Levi Dalton LISTEN

Tasting the Earth in France

Environmentalist Isabelle Legeron reflects on the importance of terroir as an idea in France. Producer: Sasha Edye-Lindner. LISTEN

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Vermont and the Taste of Place

Chef and cultural anthropologist Amy Trubek reflects on the terroir of Vermont - and of story, from the podcast Eat This. Producer and host: Jeremy Cherfas LISTEN

The Terroir of Aubergines

An interview with the British Palestinian author N.S. Nuseibeh, from the podcast Lecker. Producer and host: Lucy Dearlove LISTEN

The Acorn: An Ohlone Love Story 

An Ohlone man named Louis Trevino and his Ohlone partner, Vincent Medina, are on a journey to bring acorn bread, and the language and traditions connected to it, back to the Ohlone people. 

From Outside/In, produced by Michelle Macklem, Zoe Tennant, Vincent Medina, and Louis Trevino. Edited by Justine Paradis with support from Taylor Quimby and Sam Evans-Brown. LISTEN

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A Common Language (Good Bread #3)

Baker Kimberley Bell and artist Ruth Levene on relearning to taste wheat. From the series Good Bread, produced by Lecker and Farmerama. Producer and host: Lucy Dearlove, exec producer: Jo Barratt LISTEN

Abu Samra (Palestine Heirloom Wheat)

The founder of the Palestine Heirloom Seed Project, Vivien Sansour, reflects on her relationship with seeds, from the podcast Stories from Palestine. LISTEN

Zaid Hilal - Abu Samra (song) 

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The Art of Now: Filth

Zack Denfeld and Cat Kramer harvest air pollution in cities around the world, whipping up egg whites on street corners. They bake them into meringues and hand them out to the public who can’t help but react to eating the city’s pollutants. Produced by Sarah Bowen LISTEN

Holy Terroir: Finding Taste in an Edge Place

Savoring the complex flavor of milk from local cows who graze on trash and scraps, Lily Kelting considers what it means to taste the terroir of Pune, India, a city shaped by urbanization, pollution, and a colonial history. An audio essay from Emergence Magazine. LISTEN

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The Allotment

Alan Dein visits the allotmenteers of Hastings to find out what their land means to them. (From Lives in a Landscape, BBC Radio 4, 2012) Produced by Sarah Bowen and Neil McCarthy. LISTEN

Growing Stories for Different Climates - Theo Tomking and Julia Schauerman

This audio work is an acousmatic story, that explores the synergies between food growing, climate and diasporic connections amongst black and minority ethnic peoples in the UK and beyond. The work was the result of an artist residency funded by Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity. Acousmatic storytelling involves the setting of recorded spoken word within composed sound scenes; narrative is presented using layers of sounds. Theo and Julia conceptualised the composition as a soil survey, with each chapter digging down to explore the rich complexity of a particular theme just as scientists might observe the horizons of soil profiles in the ‘field’. MORE ABOUT THEO / MORE ABOUT JULIA

Earth Work (PREMIERE)

Artist Bill Dilworth is caretaker of The New York Earth Room, an artwork by American artist Walter De Maria in an apartment in New York City. He has watered, raked and cared for the 250 cubic yards of earth since 1989. On the eve of his retirement, Dilworth reflects on his work – and welcomes visitors inside via the intercom. Produced and recorded by Stevie Mackenzie-Smith, edited by Lucy Dearlove. MORE ABOUT STEVIE