Thanks to Amy B. Trubek for this guest post. Trubek is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Nutrition and Food Sciences at the University of Vermont. She’s also the author of The Taste of Place: A Cultural Journey into Terroir.

Have you ever gone to a delicatessen, ordered smoked fish with cream cheese, a bagel and horseradish, and ended up disappointed, as though somehow the taste was not right – the horseradish too mild, the fish too salty? If so, where did your idea of something “tasting good” come from?

Somehow you developed an expectation or standard, perhaps from an inherited food memory of the tastes of Eastern Europe or from contemporary socio-economic definitions of what is “good” (i.e. better to be more expensive or imported). Really, the particularity of the fish, the method of smoking, and the preparation of the horseradish that create either a taste of happiness or disappointment, can be described as Eastern European terroir.

Terroir is a French word that has come to describe the relationship between culture and environment. In Europe, and increasingly in the United States, terroir is understood as the interacting natural and human factors in a particular place that contribute to the unique tastes and qualities of a food (smoked fish, cheese) or drink (wine, port). The power of terroir lies in the opportunity to taste how the natural environment – the type of fish, the soil the horseradish emerges from – combined with the human domain – the style of smoking, the tradition of grating – can keep a constant connection to a certain place and time.

In the United States, more food artisans – farmers, cheesemakers, winemakers, chefs – are using terroir to organize what they do and urge people to sense taste. Terroir helps us all move away from the tendency to look for food that always tastes the same, whether in Louisiana or Maine, and instead appreciate the different tastes of different regions and artisans. Making terroir an important means of discerning what tastes “good” could help us all taste happiness, even if from eating a simple carrot from a nearby area where we know the farmer works hard to make a living. Now we just need to figure out how to create great smoked chub in every region of the United States!