Being serious, are there food terroirists?

I was reading about people who swear there are differences in honey depending on the countryside vegetation. This made me wonder if carrots, potatoes, _______ (fill in the blank) tastes better from the red clay soils of Oklahoma versus the Willakenzie soils of Oregon.

Has anyone ever done side-by-side food comparisons from different soils and found a distinctive difference?

[Robin Garr]

Has anyone ever done side-by-side food comparisons from different soils and found a distinctive difference?

I have not, but I've always deeply believed that there was. It sounds like a great foodie experiment, and I'd love to see it done - and try it myself. Good article in it, too.

I'm thinking that it would be hard to eliminate the variables, though, and that these might not be as easy to distinguish as in wine, where we usually have information about the varietal grape and the specific demarcated region. But when we compare an Idaho potato and a Maine potato and a California potato, have we eliminated all the other variables? Or are they different varieties or even different species?

I know when I first moved to California, I was bemused to find that all that vast agricultural bounty seemed bland compared with what I was used to from back East. Not sure what was up with that.

Has anyone ever done side-by-side food comparisons from different soils and found a distinctive difference?

I haven't compared things like that, but given that such differences are quite perceptible in wines, it makes sense for them to be equally perceptible in other things that get their nutriments from the soil.

Has anyone ever done side-by-side food comparisons from different soils and found a distinctive difference?

I have not, but I've always deeply believed that there was. It sounds like a great foodie experiment, and I'd love to see it done - and try it myself. Good article in it, too.

I'm thinking that it would be hard to eliminate the variables, though, and that these might not be as easy to distinguish as in wine, where we usually have information about the varietal grape and the specific demarcated region. But when we compare an Idaho potato and a Maine potato and a California potato, have we eliminated all the other variables? Or are they different varieties or even different species?

I know when I first moved to California, I was bemused to find that all that vast agricultural bounty seemed bland compared with what I was used to from back East. Not sure what was up with that.

Looking back over some old posts and came across this. This is why there is such a movement toward buying local and from folks who are dedicated to taking care of the land. The over worked soils from large, commercial growers strip the land of nutrients...they just don't taste the same. My Portuguese grand father had a huge garden and I was forbidden from going into it because I might damage a growing plant. (I liked to play with sticks and swing them at things). As I recall, he put all the chicken manure, leaves and not sure what else, into the garden. I remember cabbages that were huge. The outer leaves got pulled off and thrown back into the garden. I remember seeing beautiful tomatoes too, but don't recall eating them. Ah, the mysteries of the mind.

Getting back to honey, there is something to it. My father was a pediatric allergist. He recommended to people to give their kids a couple of tablespoons of local honey everyday. It cured many of them without shots. And no, they didn't get fat either.

The French are as serious about where a particular food comes from as they are about wine, and have appellation designations to back that up. Cheese is a good example.

There's no doubt in my mind that where a food grows can influence its flavor, for whatever reason or from whatever mechanism (soil composition, site particulars, whatever...) I had a good vegetable garden for years but I never thougth my carrots tasted very good, and I used the same seeds as friends whose carrots were sweet and tasty.

As for honey, once you get past the commercial stuff in the supermarkets, there's a great variety of different honeys that taste, and smell, very different from one another; I assume that that's due to the flowers in the bees' neighborhood, but I'd also imagine that a citrus blossom from Texas might empart something distinct from a citrus blossom from Italy.

I recently gave Jenise a jar of avocado honey, so am waiting to hear what (if anything) she does with it. She's currently in SoCal.