Taste of Place

8:00 pm, first Friday in September. Oakland Art Murmur. I wove my way through the crowded Mama Buzz Café, occasionally looking over my shoulder to make sure my friend Jon hadn’t been engulfed by the waves of people pressing upon us. I pushed myself forward, searching for some small corridor of space in which the two of us could squeeze from the coffee bar into the gallery to look at this month’s selection.

Jon has newly relocated to Oakland from the California Central Valley. We both grew up there, but I have been living in the Bay Area for around five years now. I feel a certain responsibility as “city mouse” to introduce him to urban life, culture, and the flourishing hip-ness that envelops concrete. Unfortunately I hadn’t been doing a good job at my introductions. The Oakland Art Murmur was my reconciliation.

Jon is a fledgling photographer, full of potential but lacking confidence. The Murmur was the perfect opportunity to introduce him to the Oakland scene. The streets were as crowded and full of excitement as inside the galleries. Squinting my eyes, all the people spilling out onto the streets, mingling among the grit and the graffiti transformed the cityscape into one giant gallery. We roamed. Discussed the work, its political-social-emotional-symbolic-bullshit implications. I put on cosmopolitan airs.

As I was looking at a nature illustration at the Chandra Cerrito Contemporary, Jon tapped me on the shoulder and asked me if I had been up stairs yet. “No.” I hadn’t. Knowing I have an obsession for all things food related he mumbled something about an artist getting people to eat dirt and said I had to see it.

The stairs were in the back of the gallery. We walked up and turned left. In front of us there was a crowded bar. An young man with curly black hair and dark eyes was setting a wine glass full of diluted dirt in front of a man and a woman at the far end of the bar. Jon and I, bellies forward, up against the bar, peered down upon a square white plate with several French Breakfast radishes and slices of zucchini. Beside the vegetables stood three large beakers of soil labeled with the name of the vegetable that was grown in the soil, the name of the farm that the soil was from and where the farm was located. It was all very scientific. Right down to the bartender’s lab-coat inspired starched apron.

I noticed right away that two of the beakers held soil from T&D Willey Farms, an organic Community Agriculture based farm located in my hometown, Madera, CA. My dad is friends with Tom Willey and has been cooking with Willey’s vegetables for years now. Every Tuesday night when the weekly vegetables in the T&D Willey Farms box were distributed, he would invite our friends over for a night of friendly libations and experimental cooking, using the seasonal vegetables found in the box as the base for the meal. Tuesday nights became so infamous that within our circle of friends that Tuesday night is now colloquially known as “Willey Box Night”.

Soon we were being served our own glasses of delectable dirt. The bartender scooped some of the soil from the T&D Willey radish beaker and placed it in a wine glass. Then he poured in a small amount of water to stimulate the earth aromas. As he worked he began to explain the process. First we were to smell the soil and develop an impression of the flavors present, much like smelling a glass of wine. Then we were to taste the radish and explore the relationships between the radish and the soil.

I swirled the dark soil with the ostensible skill of an enologist, raised the glass to my nose and took a deep and resolute sniff. Underneath the smell of a first rain there was a distinct spicy character that tingled my nostrils. I tasted the radish, smelled the soil and suddenly I understood. My mind distilled the intangible spicy scent into the distinct form of a radish. I watched, before my eyes, a slide show of soil and radish in their previous life together, radish nestled in the arms of the warm soil. My mind zoomed out from beneath the soil to above ground, from their happy home with their friends’ worm and ant, to the whole farm, and then all of Madera and my own home. I couldn’t help but feel deeply connected to the little radish now resting in my tummy. We grew off the same land. I grinned.

The artist, Laura Parker, is a San Francisco based artist and a good friend of Tom Willey. Her work often focuses on agriculture, the environment and social structure. It was her intent to provide a space for public dialogue about the origins of food and the process in which it is grown. “Soil, the medium of every farmer, makes up the palette that creates the distinction among growers. It differentiates between farms; between the family farm and agribusiness, sustainable practices and non-sustainable ones, the caretaker and the cavalier.” (Parker, Taste of Place pamphlet, 2007)

It is precisely these issues, which Laura Parker’s work evokes about the relationship between the taste of the place where a food is grown and that of the food itself, in Parker’s case soil and a radish, which I will elicit in my vivid personal tales of the origins of food. However, I will not only focus on the flavors of soil but rather the entire place of origin, including the geographical and cultural landscape. Be it a story about Matsutake mushrooms or cranberry pancakes, I will divulge everything, all the hidden secrets and all the subtle flavors will be revealed. And I guarantee that if you read this blog, food will taste better.


Oakland, California.