How we Taste, and Why

Sitting around the table at dinner, the young couple across the table raising two pre-school children talked about how much their kids pick up from them.  Like sponges, they notice the profanity that erupts when a careless driver causes Mom to swerve; they notice that Dad is growing a garden, and ask "why" questions when their parents do this or that.  "It is," I observed, "the human expression of terroir" -- taste of place; the "soil" of home imparting the flavor itself.  We understand that kids learn what they live; we comprehend how they pick up the flavor of their environment.  But for some reasons we doubt it when it comes to vegetables and congregations.  Bizarre.

We began the day with greens -- various specialty leafy growths that Coger Farms produces for markets and restaurants like the Inn.  They grow them year around -- with the exception of about 6-weeks in the dead of winter when the plants essentially shut down even in the greenhouses.  We pulled leaves, sampled, and listened.  We learned about the economic roulette these guys play, and the passion that keeps them in the game, despite the challenges. 

We met with a Christine, a clergywoman serving as an interim minister of a church trying to transition from being a large, wealthy and prestigious church in a burgeoning town, to a hospitable congregation of ordinary people in a decayed town that bears little resemblance to its former self.  Everyone we have talked with describes this town as suffering from depression, having gone from economic titan to a welfare city in just a couple of generations as technical manufacturing moved elsewhere.  Nonetheless, Christine pointed out, "nothing is wasted in God's economy.  Nothing is wasted." 

Not even, at least as she sees it, the challenge and grief of a lost of past and a stripped endowment.  "God has a use for it all."  And I thought back to our May experience of touring Stone Barns near Tarrytown, New York, and how nothing, at least if they can help it, is wasted or lost -- not office paper, not grass, not manure, not the compost-generated heat, not the residual bones from slaughter.  Everything is re-utilized.  The by-product and waste of one process becomes the raw material of the next process.  "Nothing is wasted in God's economy."  Nothing, including personal and corporate experiences of gain and loss, scarcity and abundance, power but also weakness, accomplishment and loss, vibrance but also grief. 

We met Frank whose hobby is raising cattle -- the only one of our visits who seems to have any money, though he made his elsewhere, doing other things.  And he tried to downplay his connection to the cows, but he wasn't very convincing.  Despite his buying and breeding and selling and butchering, he knows those cows  on a first-name basis, and their progeny on the tip of his tongue.  Frank is clearly paying attention, and caring. 

And tonight we ate.  Well.  And along with the eating, tried to explain to those seated around us why we four clergymen are here.  And it's funny; though people may never have heard of the French word "terroir," there is something instinctually graspable about the concept that instantly rings true.  Environment matters.  We neglect where we are at our own peril.  Place -- whether it be the farm place or the homeplace -- is important.  Generalities ultimately only matter in their specificity.  We aren't, after all, abstractions. 

"Do you have a business card or something," the woman across the table asked, and Alan managed to oblige; "I'd like to feel some connection," she explained.

Which, of course, is part of the point -- connection, and location, and figuring out and celebrating the glorious ways that we fit in.  And how it is that we taste.  And why.