The Tomato and the Grape: Whole Foods, Terroir and the Independent Farm

"It's very hard to make money selling whole food." says Michael Pollan in a talk given at the Free Library in Philadelphia on the 10th of January 2008 about his new book In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto and available as video through C-SPAN BookTv. He explains whole foods are not as profitable as processed foods because the whole food cannot distinguish itself from other foods in the marketplace. There is nothing special about plain oats to make them cost more. By processing the oats and packaging them in a way that distinguishes them from ordinary oats, the profit is higher because people are willing to pay more for a unique product. Independent farmers face this problem every day, but there is a solution.

An idea developed through centuries of French winemaking based on observations of the special characteristics bestowed on individual wines by geography. The term denoting this special characteristic, which no other wine could claim even if made from the same grapes, is termed terroir, which loosely means "sense of place." If the concept of terroir could be extended to all whole foods, it would then be possible to distinguish one whole food from another creating competition among producers of whole foods. This is what happened to French wines, with wine of one terroir becoming more highly prized than another, thus producing a higher profit than a generic wine. Applied to farming, it becomes possible to distinguish a heirloom tomato from the regulation, perfectly spherical, artificially red, tomato in name only served up at fast food joints and found in supermarkets.

This has already begun to take shape in an ad hoc and unvoiced way as the remaining independent farms become boutique farms, selling high end produce to sophisticated farm stand buyers and knowledgeable chefs at gourmet restaurants. Survivors of the agricultural contraction seen during the last century have implicitly adopted the idea of terroir. This idea of adapting terroir to farming came up frequently in my discussions with Tom Davenport over the last two years during the planning of farmfoody.org, our social networking site for farmers and foodies. He was insistent that the idea of terroir be incorporated in some way into our site, tirelessly pushing for the development of features involving geographical location.