Three Bourbons....

As tends to happen in the coffee industry, for whatever reason, a Twitter fight erupted several months ago concerning the importance of botanical cultivars versus geographic designations in retail coffee bag labelling (tawdry and banal, I know). The argument is a sensible one, trying to figure two things at once: one, which point of information is both more relateable and useful for consumers for us to transmit, and two, which of the two functions gives us a better idea of the flavor profile of a given coffee? 

My mind on this at the time was a bit of an eye-roll. As I've written previously, the flavor development in coffee comes from a number of factors -- soil, environment, processing, varietal, storage & age of the coffee, and the hows and reasons for roasting, to name just a few variables -- play into what flavors we find in a coffee. Of those, the soil & environment interplay with varietal to produce the general flavor outcomes we find in a given coffee, manipulated by roast and brewing method.  All of these variables -- such as a country's predominant botanical strain, the predominant style of processing, etc -- give way to the "general characteristics" that have long defined the flavor profile of regions or countries. On top of that, the history of testing all of those characteristics to determine what the "individual" quality of a given botanical is under average conditions -- something wine has been able to do to a point that we know what specific clones of Cabernet will do in clay, loam, and sand under various elevations and environments -- does not exist in a way that gives us something more than "Bourbons tend to be sweeter, cleaner" or "Jember tend to be earthy and herbal". A lot of coffee cultivars were bred specifically for certain conditions (SL-28, et al) or for specific resistance to diseases (Catimor), and so flavor in some varieties were not entirely a consideration. So to have this argument -- which says more, country of origin or botanical cultivar, is somewhat unnecessary. 

Now granted, this is changing -- individual farms, processors and co-ops are experimenting or examining individual cultivars, creating seperated lots, or trying different styles of processing (the 2008-9 craze of honey processing and Central American natural processing, anyone?). This degree of exploration is allowing the process of cataloguing to begin on an individual farm level (the way individual chateau do so in wine-making) and in certain cases creating national registers such as what Anacafe in Guatemala has been doing for a few years now. That all said, we need to keep an open mind when talking about the notion of which comes first -- the country or the cultivar. (The farm, for the moment, will stay out of this particular conversation, though as in wine, it can have a mixed record of use in terms of consumer utility.)

This brings me to the three samples of bourbon I've had the chance over the last week or so to sample: Stumptown's El Injerto Bourbon (Guatemala, Washed), Counter Culture's Varietal: Bourbon (a blend of two bourbons -- Guatemala and El Salvador, both washed) and the MadCap Coffee Varietal Series El Porvenir (which is Bourbon with trace amounts of Typica, all washed). All three were sampled from days 4 - 15 post-roast, stored appropriately, and done either as V60 pour-overs or as Japanese-style iced coffee (hot-brew). All three bags emphasize that these are rooted in the varietal / botanical cultivar of coffee and are supposed to be representative of the cultivar in question, in this case Bourbon.

Here's where things get tricky. Bourbon is not a uniform class of coffee -- there are a number of sub-cultivars and mutations that exist in its class. Orange, Yellow, Red and "pink" Bourbon exist, as well as a number of cultivars ("Kent") that are taken as Bourbon but do represent in some cases a biologically distinct cultivar. All coffees are washed, which I won't take argument with here (based upon distinctions that may exist in certain cases, but largely speaking we considered the processing here to be a constant). Also in consideration but not weighted was soil -- all the farms connected here have differing soil types, elevations, and enrichment programs (speaking for El Porvenir, there is an extensive composting and enrichment program that exists at all of Gloria's farms). Lastly, the roasters in question are all qualified, and all produce awesome product. Aside from regional distinctions in roasting profiles, we also considered these constants, of a sort.

The reason I raise the points above -- all three were distinctly different coffees. El Injerto was a bright, snappy, deeply citrus-and-olive oil affair, fruity with a balance familiar to coffees from Huehuetenango; the El Porvenir deeply chocolately, heavy bodied, and unctuous, with a kirsch-like element; and the Varietal Bourbon was the most balanced and delicate of the bunch, with an elegant acidity and a mild spice-cake like finish. These are three radically different taste profiles coming from 3 roasters (4 farms total) from 2 countries (Guatemala and El Salvador) and 2 regions (Huehuetenango and Apaneca-Illanpatec). From this view, its hard to say that there is/was a firm case that arguing cultivar is a key way to inform consumers when the notion of what those cultivars do -- in conjunction with all those other stages -- can be so very distinct. This is not a criticism of cultivar-centric labelling or projects, but as coffee pros we need to be open to the ways in which coffee, and the ways we manipulate it, can be as individual and distinct as the people who grow it. I'll get the taste clouds posted soon -- Squarespace is having an issue bringing them up, but I'm sure they'd be insightful. 

Taking a Stab at Authenticity

So the street fesitval for the celebration of San Gennaro is happening now in NYC, and for a month vendors are set up in Manhattans Little Italy (or what's left of it), spreading cheer, raising money for charities, and selling a whole lot of food. Pizzas, meatballs, cannoli dominate, but last year sparked a minor contraversey when the organization handling the Manhattan Festival of San Gennaro invited a number of high-end Italian chefs -- Mario Batali, the boys who run Torrisi Italian Specialties, Donatella Arapia, among others -- to participate in the festival, brining "gourmet" versions of the same foods that many vendors had been producing for years. This, along with a couple of traditional neighborhood ribbings, did launch into an argument over the "authenticity" of the San Gennaro festival. Class issues! Ethnic imperialism! Everything the culinary world likes to slave attention over got to be front and center, and then whispered away without ever being answered. 

And the issue does keep bubbling up. Mission Chinese Food and Andy Richter's Pok Pok ignited the debate about whether or not non-ethnic people could serve up "authentic" interpretations of "ethnic cuisines". And the latest salvo comes from Aunty Beeb, where the BBC1 Nigella Lawson Italian special has ignited a bit of a stir as to whether or not the talented Nigella could be considered Italian, or if Italian has just become another theme in the food carnival that is modern day food fetishism. The article does an awesome job of breaking down some of the more important things to note about foodways in historical context: most are recent (as of the Columbian Exchange, no more than 100-200 years ago recent) phenomenons, and in the last 100 or so, many of those "traditions" have become marketed as "authentic" to outside worlds (French paysan and bourgeoise fare? Pasta and sauces? All pretty recent, and many of them pushed by food companies trying to break out. Think its limited to Europe? The Thai government has been using institutionalized menus as public diplomacy for nearly two decades). 

This plays into the push and pull of the authentic, as argued as a notion. See, from the purvey of food anthropology, "traditional' can be anything done between two or more generations (so for some, eating at McDonald's IS traditional foodways) and authenticity is built from the stones of what is contextual. Someone having cacio e pepe in Northern Italy is having something that is as authentic as someone having blue-box mac n' cheese as someone having dan dan mein in Sichuan. Any of these foods, while "pasta" or "noodles" under a general banner, also have a vertical basis -- "upscale" mac n' cheese, "cheaters" dan dan mein using peanut butter, the "appropriated" cacio e pepe someone had at some nonna's cucina in Umbria. All of these can fit into the vetting of authentic, depending entirely on ones circusmtances, context, and in the multi-culti interconnected (and frankly, novelty-starved) world in which we live, those lines can get blurry, fast, especially once we consider the class issues and the general knowledge of where foodstuffs originate, or where even those foods got their beginnings. 

Some places look to the ideas of a thing. Case in point: I grew up eating a doctored up form of Kraft Mac n Cheese. My father made "white sauce" -- basically a bechemel by another name -- with flour, butter, and a bit of milk, added some Tilamook sharp cheddar, the contents of the blue box, and whatever leftovers (peas! carrots! turkey! schnitzel!) we had in the fridge and made one-pot meals from it. This recipe became the inspiration for one of the many mac n' cheeses at the Oakland restaurant Homeroom, which my sister co-owns. The variation she makes there is delicious, tastes damn close to the real thing (if a little more consistent), and sends me back to a childhood place (in the way that umami* -- the real goddamn meaning of the word -- sends you back there). The only difference, in my mind, is the sense of place of both dishes. My fathers mac n cheese was one of stretching a product, making it economical and palateable.  My sisters is economical in a different way -- she uses farmers market produce, artisan cheeses and organic milk to make her mac, because part of the belief system of the restaurant is doing well by awesome producers. Both are authentic to the idea of a food, but belie that authenticity can be rooted in different ideas. 

(Less iffy here -- that of botanical varieties used in certain recipes. This bit of kitchen literacy is one of the harder things in today's world to argue for, seeing as so many recipes call on "substitutions". As I mention in my last post, substitutions are usually a lie, at least where flavor comes into the picture. You cannot get the sensations from Sichuan peppercorn from any other item. Same way  that certain tomatoes are made for pasting, others for sauce, and others eat well right out of hand. Most of this fits into the regional/geographic/botantical authenticity of a dish, or series of traditions, like rice noodles versus egg noodles in N/W China versus E/S China. Most would not only consider it inauthentic to sub one for the other, but also highly offensive. Talked to folks in New Orleans about their foodways? You get a good idea there about what the significance is from those folks. And they're awesome.)

So when we talk authenticity, we're talking about something that simultaneously is and is not in the eye of the beholder. It's something that we need to be open to, and something that we need to be aware of, in terms of class, ethnicities, and personal histories. There are traditions that don't change over time -- and there are people who update traditions to keep them relevant (as Leslie Marmon Silko reminded up so many times in Ceremony). That said, I also have the feeling that inauthenticity is easy to spot. It's an empty, hollow thing, and like communist countries, you know it when you see it. 

Like cupcakes. Those folks can suck it. 

Where Policy Meets the Kitchen

As a member of the NYU Food Studies program, people oftentimes wonder what it is "i do". It's not an easy question to answer. As with any interdisciplinary program, Food Studies draws from a number of different studies -- anthropology, economics, botany, agronomy, sociology, marketing and cognitive science, to name but a few -- to both draw together the various elements that make the food system a system, and to inform, depending on your focus, the ways in which we can change or adapt those things. As with any sort of study, there are a number of different angles and agencies: the student trying to figure out how school food purchasing works as to better include regional farmers; the public health official looking at the best way to create alternatives to bad food habits and how to shift them; the person figuring out how to best assist businesses navigate through the various food-based regulations that can stymie smaller businesses. The person studying the evolution of Chinese-American foodways. And the list can go on. 

For me, the course of study I follow has been evolving for a coupld of years; from studying farmers markets and specialty coffee supply chains, the US Farm bill and regulatory regimes related to geographic-indicators (i.e. France's AOC system) I've been focusing on diversity. Not only in the realm of crops, tho, but biodiveristy as part and parcel to cultural and culinary diversity. To me, these topics are not that far apart; being a student of Fernand Braudel while at Berkeley, the intersection between geography, environment, and cultural/political/economic development are very closely linked. Certain foodways spawned out of the conditions that people found themselves surrounded by and existed in. Salami? The evolution of needing to preserve boar meat. Fish sauce & liquamen? The need to provide salts and flavor in spaces where salt production was not easily had. Rye bread? Because when you tried to grow wheat in those climes it died. Cholent, pot roast, brisket were all foods of poverty that evolved as dishes that met the Sabbath need to be cooked only in radiant heat left over because you technically couldn't cook it on the Sabbath. 

So too it happens with botanicals. The wines of the Rhone would not be the same if they were tempranillo and blaufrankisch grapes. The holy basil and fish peppers that flavor pho would not be replaced by jalapenos and Basilicata basil. Cuisine is filled with such things (and hence my ire when in cookbooks there is always the reference of "substitutions". You ever wonder why mom's apple pie never tastes the same when you do? it's because of the substitutions you make), and the cultural connection to the making of dishes and what grows in the ground does, in fact, matter. Nowhere is it more clear than in this recent piece in the NY Times food section, looking at the attempts to continue the foodways of second- and third-generation immigrant households in the US. 

Now you might wonder, where does food systems or food policy fit into this, and the article half-answers this. Political missions have always infringed upon cultural agency -- turn of the century firms that attempted to integrate new immigrants found spicy foods distasteful, and therefore dissuaded their production by new immigrants. Certain crops could not be found in this country, so some were grown by family gardeners, others found suitable substitutions in American produce. The American post-ww2 policies where agricultural production are concerned have had, across the board, great impacts on what is grow, and in turn, the bulk of what is considered "food" in the American cultural context. 

A friend of mine in high school told me how "he had no culture -- he was just a white kid". Nevermind that his background was Italian-Jewish, and his parents, while divorced, had each brought to the table specific memories and foodways that he could recall, but had no connectivity to. This doesn't have to be the case. And every case that is like it is a loss of cultural agency, a loss of power, one more thing that we accept as acceptable -- and that is one step away from generic products and the futuristic (as in the Italian futurist) way of looking at food merely as a bodily imput, and not as a form of sustenance in both the nutriative and vaguely spiritual way that sometimes talking about culture can be. This is not some waxing poetic for a idealized past; it is the focus on foods that bring with them a specific type of literacy -- a cultural or kitchen literacy -- that is part and parcel to the types of cultural agency that keeps people from being simply cogs in a machine, but very active agents of our own lives and societies (this argument is best laid out in the book "Kitchen Literacy" by Anne Vileisis).

Ultimately, my work is about stemming such a tide, and more particularly, doing so at mutliple levels. It's about working on agricultural diversity as to preserve and encourage cultural diversity in the kitchen. It's about economic development as part and parcel to cultural development. Doing so in places where policies can be changed that ultimately come to effect the home environment, to afford people the space to be able to do more and, as one of Burning Man's many valuable lessons come in, encourage a form of radical self-reliance, not in the sense of living off the land and off the grid, but in the sense of taking ownership in one of the most important spaces one can -- the privacy of the home and the convivium of the hearth and table. 

And We're Back

After a 3 week hiatus, Terroirism is back on the record as being up and running.

Two weeks were spent in the lovely Black Rock Desert at Burning Man, where along with some delicious music and gorgeous artwork, we participated in a pop-up ramen shop, taught two workshops in stone-masonry oven construction and use, two sourdough baking workshops, and one fermentation workshop with produce brought it (and remarkably well maintained) from the Central Coast of California on the way up. It was a good goal year -- I've never done workshops like this before, and the feedback was awesome. Baking on stone masonry hearth was equally awesome to do again, seeing as NYC apartments tend not to leave much room for such things. 

Re-entry has been awesome, settling back into classes at NYU, getting back on track with two coffee-related gigs (Craft Coffee & Everyman SoHo), and my internship with Good Profit, working up in New Rochelle. Busy, but not busy enough to be taking the day off for the Rosh Hashanah holiday. I've got a couple of posts lined up that'll be making their way up in the week, so keep an eye out, and l'shanah tovah, y'all. 

The Good Food Merchants Guild

Last week be touched on the nature of what I call "fauxtisanal" production and the issue of La Boulange bakery in SF, going national with their buy-out from Starbucks, in the latters hope of improving their stagnant pastry program (and sales in prepared foods). In one of the final notes on the post, I made mention to the issue of defining the parameters by which something can be measured as "artisan" versus not, and left it to the "walks like a duck talks like a duck parameter". 

 The Good Food Merchants Guild is one such organization that seeks to be both a promoter and an independent regulator of what constitutes "artisanal" food production. The terms are pretty good -- for a specific fee, they will help promote your business as well as supply assistance for getting the business off the ground, put you in contact with collaborators, and depending on the size be able to help you "move up" the chain of the market. (See, even us hippies are, at heart, market-driven.) Brought to us by Seedling projects, the same folks who do the Good Food Awards, the project can act as a trade union, marketing board, and incubator all in one -- all whilst still promoting the essential need for standards in a food marketplace overrun by "heirloom brownies" and "artisan cupcakes". (And yes, I will continue my cupcake disdain until such a time as someone can show me a good one.) 

Such regimes obviously put a great amount of trust in the founding organization and the integrity of the board; that said the projects put on by Seedling in the past have done very well at vetting their vendors and participants and have a very good vision about the type of food system they are attempting to construct. (Full disclosure: when working for Barefoot Coffee Roasters in San Jose, CA, we participated and interacted with The Good Food Awards. It was an awesome experience and they definitely fielded a good selection of judges and the systems they utilized were not too far from those I would wish to use myself.) Ultimately, groups like this, in conjunction with other institutional players such as incubators and shared marketplaces can be essential to growing businesses, and especially in helping those that understand the spirit also understand the requirements and follow through of those particular values.