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 was posted on 6 May 2026. Lissa’s piece, edited for the blog, is below.
Celebrating the publication of Food Beyond Terroir: Tasting Place and Placing Taste in Global Perspective, ed. Anna Colquhoun and Katharina Graf, Berghahn, 2025.
By Melissa L. Caldwell
Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Cruz
December 1, 2025
My assignment was to think about what Food Beyond Terroir offers to the present and, more importantly, the future of Food Studies. I could start by elaborating on how this volume disrupts conventional understandings of terroir, and then ask whether this volume has moved us beyond the concept of terroir altogether. Have the contributors, and the volume as a whole, persuasively illuminated the inadequacies, limits, contradictions, and even irrelevance of terroir for the communities they are documenting and then offered new, more complicated understandings?
I would certainly answer in the affirmative. And that, in and of itself, is an important contribution that moves Food Studies forward. But I don’t think that that is the right question. Instead, I think that what this volume does so effectively is to highlight the limits and inadequacies of the field of Food Studies itself and then point to some possible directions where Food Studies could or should go.
The contributors to this volume are not simply working at the forefront of Food Studies scholarship. Rather, they are engaging with and intervening in debates and conversations that are beyond those in Food Studies. But rather than turn their backs on those conversations in and across Food Studies, the authors offer possibilities for ethnographic and theoretical bridges that might encourage Food Studies to catch up with the cutting-edge scholarship that is happening “beyond” Food Studies.
Here I want to identify three of these possibilities.
1) Critical Cartographies, Guerrilla Mapping, Countermapping
The starting point for this volume is to rethink the taken-for-granted-ness and static-ness of the taste/place relationship that is central not only to the concept of terroir, but to Food Studies.
By emphasizing the active, making parts of the taste/place relationship – tasting place and placing taste – the contributors have unmoored, dislocated, and even unmade the places that are part of the taste/place nexus. As the contributors show, it is not so easy – or even interesting – to locate people, food, and cultures in particular places. In fact, what the authors show in so many ways is the placelessness of place. People, food, and culture can be dislocated from places because of migration or forcible upheaval and removal. Sometimes people, food, and culture can exist in multiple places simultaneously, such as with migrants or food products that are from one place and consumed in another place. Sometimes places exist only in names, brands, and memories.
Sometimes the places themselves move, such as when territorial boundaries shift, historical narratives and place names change, or soils, water, and plants are uprooted and transferred elsewhere. The recognition that places can be in motion opens up provocative questions not just about what spaces and places are, but where they are and even when they are.
Places clearly matter – but they can never be taken for granted.
By acknowledging the fluidity and dynamism of place, the authors question how particular places come to be recognized, demarcated, and given meaning at various times and in various locations. In other words, how do places come to be called into existence as places? Above all, the chapters unsettle any expectation that places can be identified, legitimized, or located in any kind of absolute or predictable way. Places are unpredictable, elusive, and unstable.
This attention to the unpredictability of places connects directly to the work being done in fields such as critical cartographies, guerrilla cartographies, anarchist geographies, and countermapping. These are approaches that take seriously the idea – and reality – that places are unstable and always partial.
More importantly, these approaches intentionally decenter and destabilize places in order to see what has been left out, what is unknown. What happens if we shift the locational frameworks that demarcate places? Who and what inhabits the spaces beyond the places that are known? How do we find them? And what does that unmapping and remapping do to place as a concept, as a location, as an experience?
Here’s where these chapters directly participate in the dislocating, unmapping, countermapping work of critical, anarchist geographies. We see homelands being created far beyond the original homelands, such as with British-Chinese chefs in London (Jakob Klein), or in the Sudanese and the Cuban diaspora (Charlotte Sanders and Hanna Garth, respectively). We see Palestinians forcibly displaced from their lands (Anne Meneley), Latvians fenced off from their lands and waters (Guntra Aistara), and Ukrainians whose agricultural soil was dug up, moved across the border, and sold to Russians (Caldwell).
And when we unmap, we start to see different realities, different communities, and very different configurations of taste/place/culture. We can start to tell the stories of the people and worlds that have never been recognized, much less included, in the taken-for-granted placeness of Food Studies.
2) Ontologies of Care and Wellbeing
In her chapter, Marion Demossier introduces the idea of “ontologies of care” by showing how French winemakers’ approaches to the taste/place relationship are informed by the practices of care that they bring to their winemaking. Her interlocutors are concerned with the wellbeing of the vines they are tending, which then extends to the wellbeing of the environment in which those vines live and grow and that ultimately produce the grapes that make the wine.
Even though Demossier is the most explicit about attending to ontologies of care, the other contributors each have something to say about relations of interaction and responsibility. Everywhere in this volume we see the contributors thinking carefully about the many different relationships that exist between people, places, foods, landscapes, and cultures. People tend physical landscapes, weather shapes soils, political boundaries determine taste preferences, cultural heritage disciplines bodies, and those same bodies alternately protect and reinvent cultural heritage. Repeatedly, we see these relationships as phenomena that are mutually constituted and infused with mutual responsibilities.
This attention to ontologies of care connects with conversations at the intersections of anthropology, philosophy, and feminist studies that have recognized that people do not exist in isolation from other things, including nonhuman beings and inanimate things. As Karen Barad has argued, we need to recognize the ways in which humans and other things are entangled in relationships of interaction – of mutual constitution. Things are always shaping and being shaped by the other things in their orbit.
Focusing more specifically on the care dimensions of the entangled relationalities between humans and nonhuman beings, Barbara King has argued that compassion and care are not unique to humans but are experiences that are mutually constituted and reciprocal when humans and nonhumans engage one another. If we change our gaze, as the authors in this volume do, we might see how plants, animals, landscapes, heritage extend care to each other and to people. It is not coincidental that so many of the authors in this volume have shown the comforting qualities that tastes and places extend to their people.
This emphasis on entangled and mutual relationalities of care, responsibility, and dependence is a key departure from a Food Studies that has remained tethered to a more narrow focus on the structural dimensions of caregiving relationships, typically framed through unidirectional production-consumption dynamics. Food studies scholarship tends to focus on care as an activity by those who grow and prepare food for others (e.g., farmers, food workers, women, parents), or by those who make decisions about who accesses food and what kinds of food (e.g., nutritionists, moral reformers, food scientists, parents). Within Food Studies, care exists in acts of feeding others and advocating for others, but not always in a larger, more holistic sense of a collective, even mutual coexistence with a shared goal of mutual compassion and wellbeing.
By illuminating the complicated dynamism inherent to interactions between people, foods, environments, and cultures, these chapters offer possibilities for rethinking how terroir might be forms of compassion, responsibility, and dependence – forms of care.
3) Disabilities Studies and Queer Studies
One of the subsections of this volume is that of the Body. Certainly by critically interrogating taste and tasting, the authors are thinking carefully about the sensory experiences of taste, including where those sensations are felt in the body and how bodies are trained to recognize and interpret particular sensations. Pleasure, disgust, comfort, familiarity, and so on – these are all sensorily experienced in and on and through the body.
The contributors also show how different types of bodies are privileged or marginalized according to their gender, age, nationality, birthplace, and perceived expertise. The contributors raise important questions: Who has the capability to recognize or appreciate particular taste/place configurations? Who has the authority to determine which taste/place configurations are authentic, legitimate, meaningful, or valuable? Whose bodies are allowed to be the repository of knowledge and tradition, and whose bodies must be rejected?
These are all certainly questions of interest to Food Studies scholars. But Food Studies is still overwhelmingly concerned with normative bodies – that is, bodies that experience the world in expected ways, through the five senses, through the mouth to the palate to the digestive system pathway, and through body parts that are fully and appropriately functioning individually and as a whole.
There has not yet been as much attention to bodies that disrupt our conventional categories of the body and, by extension, how those disruptive, non-normative bodies might disrupt the expected categories and concepts and methods in Food Studies. (Megan Moodie’s 2024 article in Gastronomica is a generative overture to a more robust consideration of non-normative bodies and food).
Although none of the authors in this volume explicitly engages with Disabilities Studies or Queer Studies, their chapters are absolutely in conversation with those fields. Because this volume intentionally calls into question tasting and placing as practices, this encourages the contributors to think differently about the bodies that perform these practices, how those bodies comply with or conform to cultural norms, how they might resist them, and even how experiences that are individually experienced are nonetheless homogenized and standardized.
Above all, the contributors reveal how the pervasiveness and persistence of normative ideas of the body do not match up with realities of ordinary people’s daily lives and personal experiences.
When the contributors invite us to think seriously about bodily differences, it opens up possibilities for a completely new set of questions. How does terroir work for people whose bodies don’t process sensations in the same way? Or people whose bodies respond to tasting in unexpected, even painful ways? People who encounter food and taste through a feeding tube, or rely on mechanical interventions – prosthetic limbs, digital technologies – to prepare, consume, or taste food and place? How do bodies that are different demand a different way to understand and appreciate terroir?
There is much more I could say. But I want to conclude by way of a provocation: I think we should consider whether Food Beyond Terroir is actually beyond Food Studies, and now it is up to the field of Food Studies to follow the pathways laid out by these authors and this volume.
FoodAnthropology 