[[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

CHEESY TERROIR-ISM: THE ABCS OF AOCS  
[[link removed]]


 

Matthew Wills

Jstor.org
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Whether it supports the production of wine or cheese, terroir is a
“particularly French conception of cultural territory” says
historian Tamara L. Whited. _

Piece of Roquefort cheese, made from sheep’s milk in the caves of
Roquefort-sur-Soulzon , Getty

 

Here’s a dictionary definition of the French term terroir: “the
combination of factors including soil, climate, and sunlight that
gives wine grapes their distinctive character.” Think sun-baked
flinty soil, gnarly old vines, south-facing hillsides that are so
steep that machines cannot be used on them; such characteristics are
said to make up uniquely regional, often, indeed unique to the
vineyard, taste.

What’s missing in this definition is the human element. Terroir,
argues historian Tamara L. Whited, is a “concept positing a set of
tight connections among foods, their places of origin, and the skilled
labor that produces them.” The land informs terroir; the land itself
has been intimately shaped by people over the centuries.

Terroir has expanded from wine to other local, artisanal foods under
the influence of regional/national gastronomic marketing and the Slow
Food movement. The French appellation d’origine contrôlée (AOC)
and the European “protected denomination of origin” are now
familiar to consumers beyond European borders.

“The modern notion of terroir has grown in France,” writes Whited,
“from the eighteenth-century insertion of food products within
highly structured markets for luxury goods and, subsequently, from the
nineteenth- and twentieth-century emergence of gastronomy and the
celebration of regional cuisines through gastronomic tourism.”

Whited calls terroir a “particularly French conception of cultural
territory.” She examines the case of “a profoundly local product
[that has] acquired the cachet of sustainability in the era of
branding and commercialization”: Ossau-Iraty, a sheep’s milk
cheese from the western French Pyrenees.

Whited argues that terroir isn’t only the result of “the
promotional, scientific, and cultural constructions.” It’s also a
product of historical and ecological shifts, “a complex and
malleable product of the interactions over time between biophysical
and anthropogenic factors.”

For example, in the Pyrenees, fire has been used to create and
maintain the high-altitude pastures known as estives for seven
thousand years. Browsing and trampling by sheep and cattle also
created these pastures. Livestock population in this region peaked
between 1875 and 1880. People, however, left—as they did from many
rural areas. Regional “depopulation led to higher
livestock-to-shepherd ratios and insufficient labor to perform
pastoral fires.” After World War II, fire almost completely
disappeared as a management tool. But it has come back: Whited notes
that some 3,200 burnings were carried out between October 2016 and
March 2017 alone.

One of the traditional shepherding rights in the community-managed
pastures was that of building a summer cabane for shelter and
cheese-making. Cheese-making began as way of preserving
highly-perishable milk. It was peasant food, locally produced and
locally consumed. The cheeses of the Pyrenees were not exported. When
mentioned by metropolitan sources up through the nineteenth century,
they were usually disparaged.

But starting around 1910, the raw material of Pyrenean meadows, the
sheep’s milk itself, became nationally marketable. It became one of
the major sources of Roquefort, the first French cheese to gain AOC
status (1925). Roquefort production sourced milk from across southern
France, which sounds contrary to the idea of terroir, except in this
case the terroir factor was attributed to the caves of
Roquefort-sur-Soulzon, where the cheese was aged.

By the last quarter of the twentieth century, Roquefort production had
shrunk because of competition from mass-produced cheeses. No longer
able to sell their milk to the Roquefort industry, Pyrenean livestock
owners and cheese makers were forced to “reinvent” a tradition:
Pyrenean sheep’s milk cheese. AOC status was granted to this in
1980, with criteria “that allowed the maintenance of key differences
between the Basque and Béarnais varieties of Ossau-Iraty.”

Whited notes that a great deal of regional, national, and European
Union funding has contributed to the “rejuvenation of pastoralism”
in the region. In 2013, some 500 shepherds were working in Béarn and
250 in neighboring Soule, managing 120,000 sheep—creating “a
terrain of quality products and sustainable development, a test case,
at least, for other temperate alpine regions.”

RESOURCES

JSTOR is a digital library for scholars, researchers, and students.
JSTOR Daily readers can access the original research behind our
articles for free on JSTOR.

TERROIR TRANSFORMED: CHEESE AND PASTORALISM IN THE WESTERN FRENCH
PYRENEES
[[link removed]]

By: Tamara L. Whited

Environmental History, Vol. 23, No. 4 (October 2018), pp. 824–846

The University of Chicago Press on behalf of American Society for
Environmental History and Forest History Society

* cheese
[[link removed]]
* terroir
[[link removed]]
* AOC
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit portside.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 



########################################################################

[link removed]

To unsubscribe from the xxxxxx list, click the following link:
[link removed]