Here’s the place to find links to the Tasting Labs with Foodoir curriculum of the Food Media and Tasting Research component.  And here, at this website, is your individual project website for independent case studies within the Terroir/Meroir program. The design of this year-long program begins with faculty presenting and facilitating case studies of particular terroir/meroir laden foods throughout fall and winter quarters and builds toward students designing, engaging, and presenting case studies of your choice spring quarter.  Your project website listed here under PROJECTS provides you with a template for designing and documenting your case study.  If you’re a senior or just have a strong passion, motivation, and necessary skills, contact faculty about starting an independent case study sooner than spring quarter.  Case studies can include apprenticeships, internships, and community-based service and learning.

SURF Projects to ILC Projects: The two SURF (Summer Undergraduate Research Fellows) students who developed our hyper-local terroir/meroir case studies are enrolled in ILCs (Individual Learning Contracts) fall quarter.  Check out their ILC PROJECT websites to see examples of upper division student work and track what’s happening with Makenna Medrano’s project at the campus beach shellfish garden and Caleb Poppe’s project at the campus organic farm radicchio field trial.

Faculty and Other Student Research:  Check out other examples of some independent project websites that will appear here throughout the year.

Time Management Challenges?  Your website template includes an Excel spreadsheet for easy tracking of your hours and activities each week.  Consider using this to support your success fall and winter quarters, not just spring quarter.

Note: This program website is at Evergreen’s academic instance of WordPress called “sites.evergreen”.  There is another instance called “wordpress.evergreen” where you independently can create non-program websites. And, again, wordpress.evergreen is where you’ll find the Tasting Labs with Foodoir curriculum of the Food Media and Tasting Research component.  Suggestion: Find the link in the right side bar widget and save each of these WP websites in your computer’s toolbar menu.

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Below is our PROGRAM DESCRIPTION (or click here for the College catalog program link) to support both your reflection on the year-long curricular design and your imagination regarding the terroir/meroir case study of your desire!

Terroir/Meroir: Toward Agroecological Agribusiness?

Regeneration is in the air –– and the ground, and the sea. We will explore how food movements focused on ‘terroir’ and ‘meroir,’ the tastes of place from land and sea, might regenerate diverse food traditions, economies, and bio-cultural landscapes and seascapes in the face of pandemic injustices, globalizing standardization, and climate change. What is required for a sea change in how we value food, farming, aquaculture, and increasing regenerative agriculture and resilient local food networks? How can cultivating a sense of taste and an appreciation for specific foods produced in specific places change our very notion of value? How much are you willing to support distant farmers and ecosystems that supply our magical and exotic elixers –– coffee, tea, chocolate? This revolution will require more than self-care and indulgence; we need cooperation, equity, and a commitment to honoring place and cultivating culturally relevant, nutritious, and flavorful nourishment.

As we explore these possibilities, we will look to understand taste and flavor in theory and practice: we will analyze their anatomies, which are often gendered; describe their properties, which relate to the infrastructures of which they are part; and investigate their aesthetics, which are paradoxically both cultural and individual. Our approaches will engage many learning modalities: readings, films, seminars, lectures, guest speakers, hands-on practicums, and technology workshops to begin, and as pandemic conditions allow, during winter and spring we’ll aim for tasting labs, industry and research conferences, and field trips to independent and cooperative enterprises that exemplify emerging trends in agribusiness, agritourism, and agroecology. We will take up both evolutionary and historical perspectives as we explore oysters, geoduck, salmon, hops, craft malting, brewing and distilling, and the burgeoning Pacific Northwest apple, wine, chicory, and grain industries, as well as the global worlds of chocolate, coffee and tea.

This program is designed as a year-long, team-taught, interdisciplinary learning community. Fall quarter will focus on political agroecology as a social movement, including topics from food sovereignty, social and environmental justice. We’ll use Evergreen’s campus farm and shoreline shellfish garden to explore farming and shellfish aquaculture through hands-on practicums, paired with learning the natural history of these foods and their role in food cultures. To understand how terroir/meroir is nature-culture, both science and myth, marketing and aesthetics, memory and dream we’ll watch, interpret, and analyze food in media as well as create our own documentation of tasting experiences. Winter quarter, we will extend our focus on power and oppression in food systems and add ecological agriculture, soil science and agroforestry to explore how climate, soil, and farming practices influence flavor and food system sustainability. Because climate change is impacting all of what we will study, we’ll examine how regenerative farming and aquaculture practices can contribute to climate solutions and increase the resiliency of food and farming systems. Spring quarter, we will focus on research methods to apply what we have learned by designing student research projects or community-based internships, which can serve advanced students as an opportunity for capstone projects. We will work to support all students in creatively engaging with the opportunities and challenges of new cooperative food economies and changing climates.