Terroir and the sensory experience of being alive on the Earth
Tasting "the very soil itself and the cultivator's hand."
As global temperatures continue to rise and wildfires rage across Canada, Brazil, and the Western United states, several billionaires are funding space projects to colonize other planets. Elon Musk projects that moving to Mars could eventually cost less than $500,000, which is less than property in most parts of the United States. If the Earth can’t sustain human activities, why not mosey somewhere else, like Mars?
Astronauts in space often report impaired taste buds. They crave spice and seek flavors they wouldn’t normally enjoy at home. One theory about why food tastes worse outside of our atmosphere is that body fluids accumulate in the head and cause nasal congestion, blocking the sense of smell. Another theory is that the unique odors of the space station create a different experience of tasting food. Hot sauce is the most coveted condiment for overcoming a dulled sense of taste. Salt and pepper is available, but must be dissolved in oil so the particles don’t fly off into the astronaut’s eyes.
Once Astronaut John Young snuck a contraband corned-beef sandwich onto a flight and then lamented that the pieces wouldn’t hold together when he tried to eat it.
In the cookbook The Bordeaux Kitchen, Tania Teschke explores traditional French cooking in an effort to improve her own health. Before sharing any recipes, she spends more than a hundred pages explaining French perspectives on food, which might be necessary for an American audience. This perspective is rooted in terroir, which Teschke describes as “the concept that climate and geography, indeed the very soil itself (and by extension, the soil microbiome) along with the cultivator’s hand, give the food and wine grown in a region its own distinctive taste and flavor.” The cuisine is hyper-local and favors regional pairings, local food with local drinks, such as in Bretagne where buckwheat crepes called galettes are enjoyed with cider.
NOTE: The Northwestern peninsula of Bretagne is called Brittany in English, which is also the name of the piece of earth that is my body. I used to feel a disconnect with this name because it brought to mind mean cheerleaders and agile purebred dogs. With some research into my ancestry, I learned about my French ancestors who immigrated to Quebec City as filles du roi, or daughters of the king. These women traveled from Paris, La Rochelle, Rouen, and Bretagne to become wives to the men who populated the French colony, which probably felt to them like a Martian expedition. My name reminds me that I have roots that reach back in time towards a landmass that is reaching back.
The particular flavors of cheeses encapsulate the unique conditions of the regions they come from and often have long names connecting them to their home. Teschke writes, “Rocamadour cheese comes from the Rocamadour goats, who live on the steep hillsides around the medieval town of Rocamadour, a town itself hewn into the rocky hillside.” In addition to location, the production of many cheeses rely on seasonal cycles, the circadian rhythms of animals who produce milk, and the richness of the pastures. This means there are seasons when the cheeses aren’t produced because the conditions are not ideal. Most cheese is made in the spring when the pastures are teeming with plantlife, but summer herbs and flowers lead to different fragrant milks. Animals usually stop producing milk in the autumn when there is less of the lush vegetation to graze on.
Regional cuisines are a collaboration between humans, plants, animals, and environment. In The Land in Our Bones, Layla K. Feghali explores our historical kinship with the plants and calls them our “plantcestors.” She writes, “They drink the minerals of the soil and water where we live, touched by every pollinator and organism in their midst, and absorb the sunlight, moon and star patterns of constellations in the particular arrangement that frequents our specific placement on earth. Then, we eat, breath, and drink them, absorbing all this life and memory; all its mysteries, cycles, and medicines wake up in our own beings, attuning us to the life-affirming relationships of the lands we are a part of.” We engage with the plantcestors through our bodies and receive their stories through our senses. Feghali calls this process Plantcestral Poetics.
Once in my community herbalist program my class meditated with an essential oil blend for sleep. We inhaled the pungent blend and observed the sensations in our bodies and the images we received. My mind took me to sea. The bottle smelled like briny air and I saw an image of gentle waves refracting sunlight.
“Maybe I’m doing this wrong, but I’m imagining the ocean,” I told my group. But even if our sensory experiences seem random, there is always something significant. This blend included rosemary, an herb native to the Mediterranean region. Its genus name Rosmarinus translates to “dew of the sea.” Lavender, another Mediterranean native, is also present in this blend and Southern France is blanketed in fields of its purple blooms. Perhaps the scent opened a doorway to a memory that wasn’t mine, but was folded into my DNA.
Sometimes in the supermarket I have a premonition of life in space and I do not like it. Zucchinis flattened onto styrofoam trays with Saran wrap, apples coated in a layer of wax, and scentless cantaloupes with pale, rubbery meat available in January. It’s no wonder many people on TikTok think that our food is lab-generated. Why do Americans eat like astronauts?
If dining in space sounds nearly void of pleasure, consider sex in space, which according to NASA has never happened. (As far as they know.) Deep space travel comes with a host of issues for human reproduction, including cosmic radiation, changes in gravity, disrupted circadian rhythms, and the stress of being in space. Exposure to microgravity leads to lower bone density, muscle atrophy, insulin resistance, and low blood pressure, among other concerns. Add to that the extra-spicy possibility of collision with objects, such as rogue bits of corned beef sandwich.
However, if you surrender to space sex being stressful and complicated, studies suggest that pregnancy is possible but perilous. Ionizing radiation can cause oxidative stress, leading to DNA damage. Sperm quality was impaired by short-term space travel, but healthy eggs are able to compensate for the damage. However, the female reproductive system seems especially sensitive to these inhospitable conditions, with risks of damaged ovarian follicles and premature ovarian failure. Eggs that have traveled into space might not be able to compensate for damaged sperm. In studies replicating the effects of hypergravity, Rats produced offspring with lower birth weights and chance of survival.
It seems that even if we normalized space travel, there are significant barriers to living in space long-term. Humans would still need to reproduce on Earth and import and other resource from the mother planet.
Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune is a fictional oral history set 50 years into the future by Eman Abdelhadi and M E O’Brien. In this version of New York, billionaires have accomplished their goal of living on space stations while those on the ground endure pandemics, civil war, climate catastrophes, and mass starvation. Nevertheless, dutiful employees on the ground make life on the space stations possible by sending regular shipments of provisions into space. When the space program is seized by a group of revolutionaries, they stop shipping supplies. Eventually the inhabitants of the space stations are forced to fly their orbital pods back to Earth.
The group that seized the space program and made it a public resource continued developing the technology to send people into space and directed their efforts into building a space elevator that anyone could use. I found this interesting, since space exploration is a majorly polluting industry that exacerbates climate change and depletes the ozone layer. What technologies were they imagining that would make this sustainable in a world that had already suffered so much?
A brief spurt of space tourism sounds nice for the cosmic views, but eventually I would want to come back to Earth where I could smell, taste, and keep my ovaries relatively intact. Why can’t we redirect our efforts to making the Earth livable? Why should it be more viable (and cheaper) to live on Mars than a piece of terrestrial land that we appear to be designed to live on? In this imagined future of possible space travel, I would rather be a Rocamadour goat relishing in my ancestral relationship with the Rocamadour grass in the stony hills of Rocamadour near the remarkably preserved Medieval town of Rocamadour. I would rather be a spiky bush on an oceanside cliff memorizing the scent of the sea.
Events and Offerings
Gaza fundraiser - I’m continuing this fundraiser for one more week and switching gears for September! Palestinians in Gaza still need our help to afford basic resources. You can still get a tarot/oracle readings with a suggested plant ally in exchange for $30 donations to various fundraisers. More info here.
The OK Den - Things are winding down at The OK Den Hudson, NY and it is your last chance to stumble upon its secret magic. You can find my ritual oils there alongside records, vintage clothes, leather goods, mermaid jewelry, and artwork. Check out @theokden on IG for more info.
Love Notes
This period of long, research-heavy pieces is coming to an end because I’m returning to work. It was nice to have some time to go deeper with ideas that have been pooling in my brain and in my notebooks. Thank you for reading these chaotic ramblings!
I quoted The Land in Our Bones by Layla K. Feghali above - I’m still reading it and hope to finish before I return to my job. It is a beautiful ode to our relationship with the plants.
I loved this piece by Ellie Robbins called “This moment needs your deep weirdness and your intellectual rigour.” It’s about our limited ideas about consciousness and how expanding them is a revolutionary activity. I already shared it in a Substack note, but just in case you missed it…
so interesting, but also : why would humans ever wish to leave their home for a synthetic, inhospitable world...