This article explores the evolving concept of terroir, broadly understood today to designate a grouping of territories within a region that yield one or more characteristic food products or wine. Through a case study of sheep’s milk cheese made in the western French Pyrenees, my analysis moves beyond contemporary articulations of terroir, which are described here as the promotional, the scientific, and the culturally constructed. I show that Pyrenean landscapes linked to sheep’s milk cheese are the product of historical and ecological shifts that have joined human consumption to community regulations, structures of property ownership, fire, livestock, flora, and soil profiles. Such a view neither romanticizes terroir nor renders it static; more than a cultural construction, Pyrenean terroir emerges as contingent and, at times, unstable. Furthermore, the twentieth-century history of sheep raising and sheep’s milk cheese production in the western Pyrenees reveals the dramatic short-term changes in terroir that have resulted in the wake of demographic and economic mutations. By the early twenty-first century, however, Pyrenean pastoralism in the service of sheep’s milk cheese had emerged as a beacon of sustainability, illustrating both long-term continuities and a turn away from the twentieth-century norm.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Article
Patrick van Zwanenberg;
Erik Millstone;
(2015)
Taste and Power: The Flavouring Industry and Flavour Additive Regulation
(/isis/citation/CBB643247857/)
Book
Guy Crosby Ph.D;
(2019)
Cook, Taste, Learn: How the Evolution of Science Transformed the Art of Cooking
(/isis/citation/CBB401051280/)
Book
Pont, Jean-Claude;
Lacki, Jan;
(2000)
Une cordée originale: Histoire des relations entre science et montagne
(/isis/citation/CBB000110120/)
Book
Andrea S. Wiley;
(2014)
Cultures of Milk: The Biology and Meaning of Dairy Products in the United States and India
(/isis/citation/CBB026246346/)
Article
Gaard, Greta;
(2013)
Toward a Feminist Postcolonial Milk Studies
(/isis/citation/CBB001201819/)
Article
Fernando Collantes;
(2019)
Why did the industrial diet triumph? The massification of dairy consumption in Spain, 1965–90
(/isis/citation/CBB245733911/)
Thesis
Steere-Williams, Jacob;
(2011)
The Perfect Food and the Filth Disease: Milk, Typhoid Fever, and the Science of State Medicine in Victorian Britain, 1850--1900
(/isis/citation/CBB001567315/)
Book
Vaccaro, Ismael;
Beltran, Oriol;
(2010)
Social and Ecological History of the Pyrenees: State, Market, and Landscape
(/isis/citation/CBB001421935/)
Article
Jean-Pierre Rozelot;
Jagdev Singh;
(2022)
Spectrographic observations of the ionized iron coronal emission lines at Pic du Midi Observatory (F) in the mid-60s
(/isis/citation/CBB032304615/)
Article
Michael Mcvaugh;
(2017)
Determining a Drug's Properties: Medieval Experimental Protocols
(/isis/citation/CBB780661518/)
Article
Daszkiewicz, Piotr;
(2015)
Pyrenean Plants for the Botanical Garden of Berlin: Botany as a Symbol of Power during the Napoleonic Era
(/isis/citation/CBB001500448/)
Article
Slavin, Philip;
(2014)
Market Failure during The Great Famine in England and Wales (1315--1317)
(/isis/citation/CBB001213850/)
Article
Spengler, Robert N., III;
(2014)
Niche Dwelling vs. Niche Construction: Landscape Modification in the Bronze and Iron Ages of Central Asia
(/isis/citation/CBB001421944/)
Article
Hugh Lacey;
(2021)
The methodological strategies of agroecological research and the values with which they are linked
(/isis/citation/CBB212751179/)
Article
Carlos A Almenara;
Annie Aimé;
Christophe Maïano;
(2020)
Vinegar and weight loss in women of eighteenth-century France: a lesson from the past
(/isis/citation/CBB663437918/)
Article
Tigner, Amy L.;
(2012)
The Tradescants' Culinary Treasures
(/isis/citation/CBB001320001/)
Article
Carolyn Cobbold;
(2020)
The Introduction of Chemical Dyes into Food in the Nineteenth Century
(/isis/citation/CBB617924605/)
Article
Armand Le Noxaïc;
(2015)
Comment Blaise Pascal a pu envisager et réaliser l’expérience des liqueurs de Rouen
(/isis/citation/CBB689962236/)
Chapter
Lynch, Edouard;
(2012)
Food Stocks, the Black Market, and Town and Country Tensions in France during Two World Wars and beyond
(/isis/citation/CBB001201989/)
Article
Mouré, Kenneth;
(2015)
La Capitale de la Faim: Black Market Restaurants in Paris, 1940-1944
(/isis/citation/CBB001500569/)
Be the first to comment!