In The Dark celebrates stories told through sound. This is cinema for your ears.

Terroir, from the French word meaning earth or soil. It’s, a term traditionally used in gastronomy to define and explain how the environmental factors in a wine’s provenance affects its taste. But couldn’t every single thing that is grown for us to eat be affected by its own terroir?    

As part of the the XMTR AUDIO ARTS FESTIVAL, Lucy Dearlove will bring together a series of thought-provoking audio pieces exploring how local ecology affects what we grow and eat. The works will consider the understanding of terroir and how it might more broadly apply to our wider food systems, particularly in an era of climate crisis, declining soil health and food insecurity.

Lucy Dearlove is an award-winning food podcaster and writer based in St Leonards. Her food podcast, Lecker, is a two-time winner of the Fortnum & Mason Podcast of the Year Award. The New York Times says it has “an intimate feel that sets it apart from most interview shows”.

HERE iS THE SELECTION + LISTENING LINKS FROM THE EVENT

Much of my audio work over the past decade has revolved around food. It’s taken me a while to define what exactly interests me about food and cooking, because a lot of food writing – whether that’s literal writing or audio and video work – assumes that food culture is limited to two things: recipes and restaurants. But food is so much more than that: it’s ritual, it’s community, it’s labour rights, it’s domesticity, it’s gender, it’s politics, it's environmental and land work. 

Terroir is the theory that you can taste how and where food is produced. It’s a slippery idea, and one that is traditionally only seriously used in relation to wine, but is starting to expand out more into crops like coffee and hops, and also into dairy. But I wanted to examine the possibility of applying it to everything, because if terroir can affect one thing then surely it can have an impact on the taste of everything we eat, because everything is grown or made somewhere. 

One of the threads that often I end up tracing through food stories is an idea that seems to be entrenched in this country in particular: to be interested in food, in its provenance, its taste and even the circumstances of its production is a kind of elitism. The liberal metropolitan elite, with their cappuccinos. My original encounters with the notion of terroir have been influenced by this, because I reject the idea that to be interested in eating and cooking is an elite one, and I resent that there's an implication that only experts can talk about terroir. Everybody eats and that’s the interesting thing about it.

As we live in a time of deep climate uncertainty and crisis, what impact does that have on the taste of what we eat? And in a time when borders are policed so violently and land is removed from people by force, what is our relationship with terroir in these places? I also wanted to examine a little the idea of the terroir of story: how the way we talk about our food and our sense of it as a culturally specific experience has the potential to influence how it tastes. And I also wanted to think about how terroir has the potential to impact us as humans. What can soil do to us, and for us?