A note from Katharina Graf: On 1 December 2025 we launched the edited volume “Food Beyond Terroir: Tasting Place and Placing Taste in Global Perspective” (open access), edited by my colleague Anna Colquhoun and myself. We invited two fellow food anthropologists, David Sutton and Lissa Caldwell, to give a 10-minute talk celebrating the launch of the book. David’s talk focused on the book as a resource for teaching food and Lissa’s talk focused on what the book offers present and future food studies. Both talks were so great and spoke to food research beyond the book itself, that we think they ought to be made available publicly. David’s piece, edited for the blog, is below. Lissa’s will be posted in the coming weeks.
Celebrating the publication of Food Beyond Terroir: Tasting Place and Placing Taste in Global Perspective, ed. Anna Colquhoun and Katharina Graf, Berghahn, 2025.
By David E. Sutton
SOAS Food Studies Centre at SOAS University of London
December 1, 2025
I’ve been tasked with speaking to the value of Food Beyond Terroir in the classroom. When I first started teaching food anthropology way back in 1999, there were much fewer anthropological sources to draw on. Of course there was Sidney Mintz, Mary Douglas and a handful of ethnographies. Back then I found that people had trouble even imagining what an anthropological course on food would actually be about. Maybe some of the older folk there share this experience. Times have changed in the past 25 years, and just as we have a glut of food shows and videos of various kinds, from Pasta Grannies to Mukbang, we now have an abundance of riches when it comes to anthropological work on all aspects of the production, exchange, marketing, acquisition, preparation, consumption, digestion, and disposal of food. And almost no one seems in the dark about food as a valid and interesting anthropological topic to study (though it can still be pigeonholed as a niche topic rather than as central to anthropological understanding of kinship, ritual, political economy, power, and certainly inseparable from all of these). So, while I don’t have to search quite as hard for readings, it is still truly rare that I will find a collection of essays that merits a focus in my undergraduate food class. In any collection there will be no more than a handful of useful pieces.
That’s what makes Food Beyond Terroir so unusual, if not unique: this is a collection that stands up to a full read. In terms of both style and content, these separate chapters are all on topic yet distinct, helping to build a sense of a new approach to terroir through the different sections of the book on land, law, bodies and imaginaries; inductively through the beautifully written ethnography in each chapter, and deductively through a new approach to thinking taste and place (as gerunds) that runs through the collection. So, kudos to the editors, and to the process of putting this book together with maximal consultation among authors. I truly wish all edited collections went through a similar process in order to build on each other; this book is a real testament to the benefits of a collaborative scholarship rather than the model of the lone anthropologist riffed on so well nearly 40 years ago by Renato Rosaldo.
So, what does one look for in a teaching volume in a class on food? First that the writing is accessible, clear and readable, which, as I’ve already suggested, this volume with its process of multiple editing’s has ensured. Second that writing on food should do two things: use food as a window onto larger issues, as this collection does beautifully with contributions dealing with climate change and displacement to Gaza and Ukraine, globalization, nationalism and localism, always attached to small, grounded practices, for example, “Moving between the microbes involved in cidermaking and the folkways through which cider is celebrated” (p.13). But it should also show how food is not only a window but also a topic in its own right, developing its own theoretical approaches. And again, this is carried out beautifully in this collection by revisiting taste and place – what could be called the terror of terroir – as both are theoretical concepts in need of modification to reflect the many sites in which taste and place are made, the fact that terroir may be contested or irrelevant in particular sites. And, like most of our theoretical terms these days, taste and place are on the ground concepts, what we used to mark with the patronizing prefix ethno-. But concepts which we need to engage and dialog with, as some of the explorations of words like domaće and beldi, or the work of women as everyday tastemakers in Cuba as culinary, cultural and racial creators of mestizaje (or mixing), or in Ghana, where the word/concept of chop is used to talk about what I would call a gustemological approach to land and life. To quote the author Brandi Simpson Miller: “The embodied knowledge women built up over generations of how to grow, process, cook, and serve their starchy staple was reinforced in their cosmology. The relationship between food, place, and personhood was revealed in the concept of chop as it reflected historical migration, conflict, and centuries of trade” (p.219). Or among Sudanese migrants in the UK, where once again, to quote Charlotte Sanders: “taste and place are not predetermined but, rather, emergent through women’s everyday efforts” (p.236). These contributions allow us to teach the importance of an anthropological approach to issues and concepts that are used in other fields, but often without the sensitivity to local variations that make us recognize what is lost in comparative abstractions like “the taste of place”.
A book that I would want to use (and maybe some of you share this prejudice) would also consider questions of time, memory and the senses in relation to food and the taste of place. Indeed, Charlotte Sanders’ chapter just mentioned focuses on how Sudanese women are “producing in the present conditions of possibility for future emplacement” (p. 249), thus thinking through the relation of past, present and future. These temporal and sensory connections are highlighted in a number of chapters. But I’ll finish by tipping my hat to another chapter that does this really beautifully (and my apologies to all whom I didn’t get to in my 10 minutes, as I’ve said, all the chapters are really stimulating).
If I were teaching, one chapter I would enjoy sharing with my students is by Yuson Jung on Bulgarian wine makers who, while speaking of terroir, and “using the term occasionally to market their wine, [use it] not so much as a quality standard for distant wine connoisseurs but as a means for associating their wines with a particular ancient place, which could then be ‘sensed’ by visitors to the region as part of their experience of distinctive local heritage” (p.280), as a way of accessing the sensory experience of Bulgarian soul, as well as connecting to a kinship tradition, passed down from grandfather to father to son through the hands picking the grapes. “It includes emotional and affective senses, such as the feel/mood/vibe of a shared memory (firsthand and imagined) around the winemaking practice” (p.281). Thus, this chapter, like the one by Marion Demossier, focuses on the product for which terroir was originally developed, but expanding it beyond that of objective tastes certified by experts in the field. I would compare this with Greek ideas of products of the land, which connect kinship to history, such as the beekeeper on Kalymnos who had followed the family tradition handed down to him, and who told me that I should imagine a 2000-year old pot that he had brought up from the sea and placed in my hands as if it was made by a grandparent. I would further compare Yuson Jung’s description with what I found in Greece and labeled a localized, bottom-up notion of terroir in which the particular histories and particular climatic conditions of different parts of Greece are discussed as producing the meaningful differences of a polytemporal landscape; polytemporal in the sense that its fertility feeds in the present, provides hope for the future, as well as connecting people to its local and other pasts.
Each chapter in this collection provides ample opportunity for this kind of rich discussion that refuses to be pigeonholed as a niche topic, as per my earlier point, as people have tried to do for food anthropology. Furthermore, this collection as a whole helps to bring food anthropology to life not as an abstract comparative exercise, but as grounded in the shared understandings of the multisensory experience of food, place, and taste that still provides hope of resistance to the industrialized food system that threatens all of our distinctions. Buy the book, read the book, teach the book, thank you.
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