CELA Abstract about food, identity, and place

Jeff Logsdon and Gaële de Bettignies
February 2002

"Landscape on your Plate"

The earth's crust is a platform and a plate. Food on our plate is the map locating and telling us where we are, who we are, and where we dwell in a landscape we inhabit.

"Landscape on your plate" is a guide, a fusion of senses, and an entry to the idea of knowing where we dwell, where we are anchored. A measure of our place is the food of our place whether it is an object or a form inspired by an incredible recipe.

For me, this is the landscape I am ready to taste. I savor this moment's experience through sensations of daylight where sunny is one taste, cloudy, another. All in-between is possible. I see the day and the evening, the light condition, moisture, black soils, continental winds and weather create a sensation within the micro-place of where I live. I'm inspired by a sense of scale and a sense that only this moment and this condition will happen here. I find the competitive edge of this dark soil, ample rainfall, mostly sunny sky, and specific winds laden with oxygen. The green jungle and gently rolling hills of this place in Iowa has produced small hidden loci that only this soil, this wind, this rain, this temperature, this weather dynamic relinquishes. This so specific taste is the landscape on the plate I know best. It tastes as though I'm eating and breathing something I see and hear and smell, cooking in the place I dwell, embedded in a landscape I cannot escape.

Raspberries, mushrooms, plums, apples, and squash placed in a basket made from the Salix by the pond and covered by large fresh moist oak leaves also speak about landscape. When you taste the bright yellow flesh of a squash ripened by the Iowan sun, grown in the black rich Iowan soil, right here by the pond, then you have a piece of the "terroir" in your mouth. The terroir is many things: the geomorphology that produced the physical base, as in statue bases and the climate acting on this ground and forging some layers above and below. The life dynamics bring their print, where people arrive as an intellectual project that orients everything. People grow and use and invent. Generations learn and make the synthesis between many layers and ignore others.

Here come the raspberry jam, the maple syrup, and the squash soup. Made with ingredients from the land and emerging from the landscape. The produce of an entity that is punctual on a map and unique: soil + climate + culture + savoir-faire + expectations. Recognition of the value of this concept is the beginning of a stronger respect for a place, a landscape, a region or a country. Faith in the terroir to make specific goods emerge, goods that are encouraged to develop as much specificity as they can, so that no, you COULD NOT have the same honey 50 miles further north, and you COULD NOT have made the same raspberry pies or squash soup. Each of us have potential to develop this individual notion of specificity when associated with local produce, it becomes a matter of landscape.