№ 562. Terroir

 

Woodberrys

Two years ago, Nora Lidgus, a 39-year-old baker and artist then working at a three-Michelin-star restaurant in Manhattan, was asked by her boss to make a single loaf of bread — but it had to be, he told her, “the best bread in the world.” Instead, she set out to make bread that could exist only in New York. She filled sterilized jars with sourdough starters — a combination of flour from wheat grown in New York State and tap water — then planted them around the city to suck in wild yeasts from the air, along with microbes from passers-by, souvenirs from the crush of urban life. (This was long before the coronavirus, back when we shared microbes without thinking.) One jar went in the southern end of Central Park, where it was watched over by a guard at a kiosk; another stood outside a private dining room on the fourth floor of the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the Upper East Side; and the third and riskiest was tied to a rope and slung over a beam off the Brooklyn Bridge.

Every day for two weeks she visited each site, lifted the cheesecloth covers and fed the starters flour and tap water, careful to check the jar on the bridge only when nobody was looking. (She’d petitioned the city for a permit but never heard back.) When it came time to bake the loaves, the Met’s turned out smooth and congenial, born of comfort, “the bread version of table wine,” she says, while Central Park’s was floral and crustier, a little rugged at the edges. The starter from the Brooklyn Bridge produced the most alcohol, which made the bread sweeter, so she added seeds and rye to balance it out. Still, not every locale yielded an intriguing result: When she attempted another starter near the Gowanus Canal, it never took on identity; instead, the resultant bread reminded her of the King Arthur starter kit. (She blamed this, symbiotically, on her lack of a personal connection to the neighborhood.)

To be a baker, Lidgus explains, is to be half control freak, half submissive to fate; to embrace a life of eternal adjustments. There was an element of uncertainty in hanging a jar off the Brooklyn Bridge, in that she would never know the whole story, what cars, birds and people roared, fluttered and shuffled by, or if someone spied the rope and hauled it up to take a peek. A sourdough starter effectively eats the air around us and takes part of us with it; this one, suspended at the heavily trafficked meeting point of two boroughs, had potentially invited the whole world’s microbes in. What — who — was in there, exactly? This was her ode to New York, and New York was chaos. “I like my city messy,” she says.

It’s a common misbelief that terroir is a concept singular to the French, and that no corresponding word exists in other cultures. But the Chinese “fengtu” and the Japanese “fudo” — literally, “wind and soil” — have long been used to define how geography and climate shape the character of both regions and the people who live in them. More intimately, the Korean “son-mat” translates as “the taste of your hands,” attributing the flavor of food to the touch of the person who makes it: almost a microterroir, distinct to each individual. For Lidgus’s New York project, she borrowed a term from the art world, saying, “All sourdough is site-specific” — work that is created in and for one place and would lose meaning if shifted elsewhere.

To “eat local” is a modern mantra, driven by concern over climate change and the hulking trucks that haul produce and livestock from coast to coast. But it’s also a commitment to the idea of locality — the transformation of the space we move through into a place that is recognizably ours, be it a region, a city or a single block. With honey, to eat local is to go a step further and become local, taking into your body the traces of nectar and pollen from the surrounding flowers and trees, which some believe might help your immune system learn to be in tune with your surroundings and less prone to allergies. (Paule notes that local honey put an end to months of his hacking cough.)

And maybe this is the true purpose of terroir, to anchor us in place, to give us a stake in the world. The French social theorist Henri LeFebvre, writing shortly before the May 1968 student demonstrations in Paris, which catalyzed a wave of protests and strikes and brought France to a standstill, famously declared a “right to the city” — a right to have a say in the shaping of the urban environment and to live in a place where use and pleasure are privileged over profit. A few decades later, the British social theorist and geographer David Harvey, amplifying the idea, argued that this right means more than simply access to urban resources: It is “the freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves.”

Belonging somewhere isn’t as straightforward as having an address, and even more so as the demands of virtual and global citizenship come to take precedence over the physical reality of neighborhoods. In cities like Cleveland, Detroit and New York, a neighborhood is never a constant or a given; it requires conscious engagement with others and daily traversals of space, fending off the intrusions and urgencies of capital, be they in the form of gentrification or real estate development, and wearing down what will become familiar paths, even if there’s no ultimate destination beyond returning home. Trubek writes that “locating food makes it ours,” but it also helps to tell us who we are. Before there can be a taste of place, we first must make a place of our own.