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I’ve loved the concept of terrior since first hearing it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terroir https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terroir Seems to not only ex

• hammock 3y ago
  The concept of terroir needs to be introduced to the produce aisle of the grocery store. Easy shortcut to explaining why our fruits and veggies have no taste or nutrition anymore. We destroyed any natural terroir through tilling, fertilizer and pest control
  • mtillman 3y ago
    This is part of it. The other part is that we demand produce year round which means transportation and long term storage. This is why tomatoes all taste meh now. As to nutrition, I’d recommend switching to frozen as it looses less value in transportation.
    • dkasper 3y ago
      Funny as people use to always feel frozen was not as “healthy” as fresh
  • dagw 3y ago
    As long as we insist on being able to buy cheap fruits and veggies year round with no regards to what is or isn't in season, we have no one but ourselves to blame.
    • robg 3y ago
      Organic seems to sell well, but often just as tasteless. I bet the market would recognize something like a terroir label which designate the value of taste. The price of apples for instance seems to reflect this already, the pricier ones do taste better. The taste of apples also seems pretty resilient to long cold storage.
      • nerdponx 3y ago
        The downside of organic is that it might be even more energy- and resource-intensive than the alternative, and generally has no guarantee of being more nutritious or tasting better. I remember reading years ago that organic peanuts at industrial scale can basically only be grown in arid regions, because the only effective alternative to fungicide is dry weather. That means organic peanuts are actually really bad for the environment, and due to the way water is priced in the US, the price on the shelf does not reflect its true cost. Likewise for organic blueberries and cherries shipped up from Peru and Chile in January. It's hard to comprehend how wastefully luxurious that would have seemed at a not-too-distant time in history. And odds are high that those berries are bred for bruise and rot resistance, rather than nutrient content and flavor.
  • tsukikage 3y ago
    I mean, we're not optimising for taste or nutrition. We're barely even optimising for cost these days. We're optimising for length of time the produce looks good on a supermarket shelf after travelling halfway around the world in a container ship. All other concerns get thrown under the bus. The really insidious aspect of this, though, is that this isn't the result of some deliberate plot; supermarkets sell what people will most buy. If enough people switch to buying tasty nutritious misshapen local in-season produce instead of the tasteless bland cheap good-looking year-round stuff, we'll see more of that. Time and time again, though, we all vote with our wallets for beautiful insipid gratification, and so that is what we get.
  • WorldMaker 3y ago
    Also, refrigeration and trucking across long distances. Even some of the heaviest industrial fruit/veggies might still have some semblance of terroir if eaten local to the industrial farm. Most modern grocery stores have bought into the idea of presenting the illusion of a "year-round bounty" in their produce departments and prioritize long distance shipped reliable year-round produce over local and seasonal options (leaving those to things like farmers markets and CSAs).
  • tlb 3y ago
    So, suppose you walk into your local grocer and today the carrots are from East Dursley. Last week they were from North Grimsby. How does that affect your buying decision? There are at least 1000s of distinct terroirs that any given crop might grow in. It's far beyond most people's cognitive ability to know any significant fraction of them. Maybe you could devise a sharding scheme, where each grocery store got carrots from 10-20 different fields in different growing belts for year-round availability. With a limited set, consumer might learn their favorites.
  • 0xbadcafebee 3y ago
    That's not what led to lack of taste and nutrition. It was consumer preference combined with food supply chain logistics. People wanted redder apples, and stores wanted apples that stored well, shipped well, and were cheap. So they grew, shipped and sold Red Delicious. It's not tasteless because of farming, it's just a shitty apple. The marketplace gave the consumer (and seller) what they asked for. Other produce does now has less nutrition (due to the farming methods you mention), and they could improve the produce if that was their goal. But it's not, because people aren't demanding improved produce. They demand "Organic", because they fear unorganic, because they fear it's going to make them sick. They don't fear a lack of nutrition (or taste), so they aren't concerned with it, so they don't demand more nutritious or delicious food, so it isn't made that way. Americans have been programmed since the 1950s to prefer convenience, salt, sugar, and fat, over quality. Go to France, see how they eat, what produce they have. It's not because their farms are different. Their consumers just want good quality, local, seasonal food. So they get it.
  • AdamN 3y ago
    I had 'swamp carrots' for lack of a better word a few months ago at an amazing restaurant in Berlin. Fundamentally different than a regular carrot - super smooth but crisp flesh, almost creamy.
  • mancerayder 3y ago
    A Waitrose supermarket in the UK I used to go to had a dozen varieties of apples, and also tomatoes, also noting their varietal and origin country. It was a real pleasure discovering different flavor profiles and developing favorites. Putting aside that American supermarket tomatoes are fatally flawed (they are full of flavorless water and have a mealy texture), it's amazing to me how behind even expensive grocery stores are. Don't even get me started on the cider... Here's another tangent. Americans have less conceptual agreement with terroir, which is why beer and even wine now have strange names and labels. I'm being flippant but: "Total Death Winery" with a skull and crossbones logo, or 'Whisper' and other random names like this instead of a town and last name or producer. And it's funny that French and Spanish wine labels (and I'm sure others) selling to the American market started to pull the same label marketing technique. Make it artistic, ironic/funny and memorable. I'm old school so I don't appreciate it. But there's definitely a cultural difference. Perhaps because the US does not have a long history. In contrast, apples and wine have been a French speciality for literally thousands of years.
    • hollerith 3y ago
      I think you have to buy organic produce in the US to match the quality of the non-organic produce in Europe. Whole Foods is the largest retailer of organic produce in the US.
• williamdclt 3y ago
  tbh the english wikipedia article seems to lend "terroir" a meaning that it doesn't have in french: it's not really used to "describe the environmental factors that affect a crop's phenotype". It refers to a region and the practices/traditions of the people living there, particularly for agricultural products. It doesn't have much deeper meaning than "traditional production of Devon" (or whatever other place): it _implies_ that the environment is important but it's not really what it _means_.
• photochemsyn 3y ago
  Stumbled across this coffee terroir blog, even discusses some strains referenced in the paper (Timor). https://coffee-consulate.com/en/Coffee-Knowledge/ https://coffee-consulate.com/en/Coffee-Knowledge/
• bsdz 3y ago
  Sounds like "terrain" or one of the lesser used definitions of the word "territory". I think "terra" means land in Latin.
• dfxm12 3y ago
  differences in outcomes by zip codes, for instance. I feel it is important to point out that when talking about people, this less because of the physical properties of the land (proximity to superfund sites not withstanding), and more because of human controlled elements, like policy choices.
  • robg 3y ago
    Have you looked at the research into environmental noise and brain development?
• deleted 3y ago
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• anon84873628 3y ago
  Terroir was invented by feudal landlord wine makers to justify their price fixing schemes. It has little basis in science besides the fact that plants require certain inputs. In the coffee world the term has the effect of disempowering producers by making it seem like their labor to increase quality is futile or not valuable; that at the end it was the soil not their hard work. Places with a reputation for low quality coffee can in fact grow excellent coffee that deserves high prices. And of course you can also get bad coffee from regions with a good reputation. The term "provenance" is preferred by some folks instead.
  • nerdponx 3y ago
    I've been wondering about this for a long time. Does the same grape grown under different conditions but processed identically produce different wine? Surely that's been studied before.
    • anon84873628 3y ago
      Absolutely. I mean, the reason different vintages taste differently is because of the climate that year. Temperature, rainfall, sunlight are all important variables. And in the case of coffee you are often relying on wild microbial communities as well, rather than cultivated inoculants. When wine brands link soil type to flavor it is complete BS. Plant roots don't absorb minerals, they absorb the water soluble molecular components like phosphate and calcium. (Moreover those nutrients primarily come from the humus layer rather than dirt). However those nutrients can be tasted by humans even at low concentrations, hence the conflation with soil quality and using "minerality" as an ambiguous flavor descriptor.