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Short abstract:

After participating in the preparation of a shared meal, we contribute to the making of a speculative cartography by presenting a story about an undergraduate seminar on terroir, taste, and the politics of difference.

Long abstract:

Responding to university initiatives to enhance campus “Dialogues across Difference”, we designed an educational intervention focusing on how distinctions are created through terroir, or connections between taste and place [1,2]. What makes “excellent” food and wine: is it due to the soil, climate, vines, barrels, reputation, scientific innovation, folk beliefs? How do such quests for excellence exclude certain producers and consumers [3]? How do they promote new tastes from new places? Our seminar in Food Studies introduced undergraduates to terms, sensibilities, and strategies for attuning to and engaging with the sensorial, affective, and material dimensions of difference. Through tasting exercises and conversations with invited experts, we explored:

+Historical and contemporary debates on terroir and taste

+How differences in taste can heighten discernment, pleasure, and conviviality, as well as anxiety, tensions, and contestation

+How and why food “connoisseurs” attune to difference rather than sameness

+How “good taste” is legitimized, taught, and monetized

+Why cultivating a sensorial awareness of the kinds of differences that make a difference might be preferable to looking up rankings based on algorithmic averages of what can be counted [1,4].

We will contribute to the making of the speculative cartography on food transition by sharing a multi-modal story about this pedagogical encounter [5]. We present dialogues that emerged when students, academics, and industry professionals explored distinction through embodied, relational, and more-than-human practices, imagining the care-full ways that “tasting the difference” might intervene in more contentious conversations within the university and beyond.

[1] Bateson, G. (1970). Form, substance and difference. Essential readings in biosemiotics, 501.

[2] Trubek, A. B. (2009). The taste of place: a cultural journey into terroir. University of California Press.

[3] Sørensen, K.H., and Traweek, S. (2022). Questing excellence in academia: a tale of two

universities. Routledge.

[4] Chayka, K. (2024). Filterworld: how algorithms flattened culture. Penguin/Random House.

[5] Tanio, N. (2020). Coming of age in high-tech medicine: heart transplantation, collaborative visual storytelling and transformational pedagogy. University of California, Los Angeles.

[6] Nicholls, E. J., Henry, J. V., & Dennis, F. (2021). ‘Not in our name’: vexing care in the neoliberal university. Nordic Journal of Science and Technology Studies, 65–76.