Le Biancane geothermal park.Photo: Yvone De Zeeuw

Pipelines carry steam directly to consumers from the power plant.Vapor escapes through mountains of white rocks. Steam billows out of a huge cauldron in the distance. The smell of sulfur stings my nose, and the ground i s hot to the touch. It’s easy to imagine I’m on another planet, or in some science fiction novel. But where I am is Tuscany, the Italian region famous for its beautiful landscapes and classic cuisine. And food producers here are harnessing vapor, steam, and sunlight to make the traditional products of the region. It’s not sci-fi, but it might just be the future of food.

Basil greenhouse grows basil year-round with geothermal heat.Italy’s volcanic past gave Tuscany its rolling hills and fertile soil, and now it’s providing the region with a source of renewable energy. Power plants dot the landscape and steam pipelines stretch along the gentle slopes. As of 2008, approximately 13 percent of the world’s energy production came from renewable sources including hydropower, biomass, and solar. Only a sliver — 0.1 percent — was from geothermal sources. The region of Tuscany is unique in that nearly 30 percent of its energy needs are met this way. In fact, some food producers use renewable energy to run their entire operation.

Mario Tanda’s sheep graze with a view of the geothermal plant.Take Parvus Flos; the botanical company grows basil 12 months a year in giant greenhouses covering 50 acres. It was a cold day when our group visited the farm, but inside the greenhouses it was downright balmy. Basil is a finicky plant that needs a warm environment of at least 64 degrees F. The farmers maintain a constant temperature with geothermal heat that arrives by pipeline and connects directly to the greenhouse heating system.

La Poderina supplies its own solar and biomass energy.Loredana Torsello is the director of the International Center for Technological Transfer for Renewable Energy Sources in Monterotondo Marittimo, Tuscany. She’s working with other associations like Slow Food Tuscany and Community Food for Renewable Energy to promote regional products grown with clean energy. Part of her job is conducting lifecycle assessments on foods grown within the scope of the project — and she’s finding huge savings. According to the studies, heating the greenhouses with fossil fuels would cost Parvus Flos around €47,500 [$63,402.99] per year; its current geothermal heating bill is one-tenth that amount.

Mario Tanda, owner and cheese maker of Podere Paterno, produces raw milk cheeses, including the classic pecorino di Toscana, from his herd of pastured sheep. His small cheese facility is powered by electricity and steam heat, both generated from the nearby geothermal plant. Torsello’s research shows that these producers aren’t just saving money; they’re saving lots in CO2 emissions — 2,800 tons a year between the two of them, to be exact.

There are other alternative energy solutions in the region, as well.

La Poderina grows olives for oil and classic Tuscan grapes like sangiovese for wine in the town of Montegiovi. Fausto Borselli founded the all-organic farm in 1996. With help from his son Davide, solar panels were installed on the farm in 2006 as well as a biomass system to convert leftovers from the olive mill into usable energy. The farm now runs self-sufficiently, and Davide estimates they save 15 tons of CO2 emissions per year. And that’s not all. Waste water from the olive mill, which is high in antioxidants, hydrates the olive grove, and Davide is working with University of Pisa to find a use for it in cosmetics and pharmaceuticals.

Since my visit, I don’t think of Tuscany as I did before. It’s not just the home of high-quality wine, cheese, and basil — the quintessential Italian food experience, if you will. Tuscans are also using alternative energy to farm fish, cure meats, preserve fruits and vegetables, make compost, and cultivate mushrooms. And now I think the region symbolizes the possibilities of future food production. 

Mangalica pigs in Hungary.

Food Studies features the voices of volunteer student bloggers from a variety of different food- and agriculture-related programs at universities around the world. You can explore the full series here.

Over the past few months I’ve visited food producers, large and small, all over Europe. I’ve been behind the scenes on a rice plantation, a coffee roastery, an apple farm, an artisan dairy, a buffalo butcher, and at least a dozen wineries. I’ve tasted some delicious food, but what makes these visits so special is getting to hear how and why the operation exists. In other words: It’s all about the stories. Some producers are keeping traditions alive, and some are starting new ones. Some reveal complicated tales of cultural identity, while others are shrouded in mystery, legend, and scandal. Here are a handful of oral histories I’ve heard in my recent travels.

Olga’s pork broth soup.I remember when Mangalitsa pork was all the rage among fancy chefs and foodies just a few years ago. So I was stoked when I got the chance to visit a Hungarian farm where they raise these curly-hair pigs. They didn’t disappoint. But the better story came from Olga Rendek. When communism spread to Hungary, the State took over the Rendek’s family farm. After the Iron Curtain fell in the early 1990s, her family bought back their land and began farming again. Now she raises Mangalica (the Hungarian spelling) pigs, which are native to Hungary. She sells cured meats from the heritage-breed pigs and a super spicy and addictive paprika paste. The day I visited, she had made a pork-broth soup with tender little dumplings. “In Hungary, we eat soup everyday,” she told me. “We love soup because it keeps us strong in the fields.” I don’t know about the field work, but her pork broth was delicious.

Pendits vineyards in Tokaj, Hungary.Hungary wasn’t on my short list of notable wine-producing countries, but a recent visit to the wine region of Tokaj moved it up to no. 1. The country’s most famous wine is Aszú, also known as Tokaji, or Tokay in the English-speaking world. Winemaker Marta Wille-Baumkauff, owner and winemaker of Pendits Winery, makes Aszú and other wines from the remarkable grapes in the region. She told me that Aszú is known as the “Wine of Kings, King of Wines.” Louis XV actually coined that title, as it was a favorite of European royalty during his time. To make the sweet Aszú, grapes are left on the vine beyond ripening, and if the weather conditions are right, they contract botrytis, a fungus nicknamed “the noble rot.” Aszú was apparently first made when Hungarians were fighting the Ottomans, and the war kept villagers away from their vineyards during harvest time. When the Ottomans retreated for Ramadan, the Hungarians returned to the vineyards and found their grapes rotten. They fermented them anyway and the result, as one legend has it, was the first Aszú. It was a serendipitous event that I’m happy to benefit from hundreds of years later.

Cooperative of Saffron Producers in Kozani, Greece.Photo: Yvonne de ZeeuwI know that saffron is among the world’s most expensive spices, but I’ve never exactly known why. During a visit to the Cooperative of Saffron Producers in Kozani, Greece, I learned about the intensity of production, the scarcity of the spice, and the fraud that runs rampant on the global saffron market. Saffron is actually the stigmas, or reproductive organs, of the Crocus sativus flower. The Cooperative, made up of 1,500 families on 40 communal farms scattered throughout the region, grows the flower and collects the red stigmas by hand for drying. One kilogram of saffron threads requires 150,000 and 200,000 hand-picked flowers grown in an area the size of a football field, so it’s super rare and extremely labor-intensive. In fact, much of the saffron on the market today isn’t true saffron at all, because it includes the petals or stems of crocus — or other flowers completely — dyed crimson. As a consumer, it’s difficult to know what you’re actually buying. The Cooperative and other quality saffron growers rely on designation of origin protection from the European Union, which guarantees it’s the real deal.

The Villnösser Brillenschaf is the oldest breed of sheep in South Tyrol, a region at the base of the Dolomites in Northern Italy. The breed’s name literally translates to “glasses-wearing sheep from Funes Valley,” because the snow-white sheep have black rings around their eyes. Originally bred for its meat, the Villnösser Brillenschaf nearly died off in during the Second World War. (As the story goes, Hitler was a race purist among animals too, and he ordered them to be killed off.) Luckily, just enough remained, the breed was revived, and now it’s raised for artisanal cured meat and wool products, and listed as an endangered species by the E.U.

Enikö the “Goat Whisperer” and her herd.Enikö lives alone in the Hungarian countryside with no running water. Well, she’s not completely alone. She’s got a small herd of goats, one horse, and a few very sweet dogs. She makes raw goat cheese that she sells to restaurants in Budapest. When her goats are pregnant, she sleeps in the barn to be nearby when they’re ready to birth. I’ve dubbed her “The Goat Whisperer.” When asked why she started raising goats, she replied: “Someone owed me money. He didn’t have any, so he gave me a few goats instead. So I learn how to milk them.” Now, it’s obvious, they’re her family.

Sometimes I wonder if the cheese or lamb or even that Tokaji Aszú would be as good without the stories that accompany them. The story gives a sense of place, time, and significance to the making — and eating — of a product, and that’s what makes it memorable.

Aroma training.Photo: Isabelle Pinzauti

Food Studies features the voices of 11 volunteer student bloggers from a variety of different food- and agriculture-related programs at universities around the world. You can explore the full series here.

Wine tasting gets a bad rap. We all know the classic stereotype of the arrogant wine snob swirling and sniffing his glass. Roald Dahl captures it perfectly with the voice of Richard Pratt in his short story Taste:

“A prudent wine,” he would say, “rather diffident and evasive, but quite prudent.” Or, “A good-humored wine, benevolent and cheerful — slightly obscene, perhaps, but none the less good-humored.”

I love wine and I’ve done my share of formal tastings, but even I roll my eyes at the extravagant way some people describe what they supposedly smell and taste. With descriptions like lemon meringue pie or a forest after a rainstorm, it’s no wonder wine tasting is simultaneously intimidating and obnoxious.

But in my recent wine sensory analysis class, professor Ann Noble taught us that there is a way to describe wine without succumbing to snobbery — and, better yet, it’s something you can easily do at home, following this description.

Noble is a sensory chemist, a retired professor from the University of California, Davis, and creator of the Aroma Wheel, a nifty tool for identifying the smells and flavors in wine. She started class by explaining that most of the flavor notes used to describe wines are better detected with our noses than our tastebuds. Although up to 1,700 different volatile compounds make up a wine’s aroma, you can actually train yourself to recognize a lot of them!

The aroma wheel.Photo: Yvonne de ZeeuwOur class split into groups and sat at tables with rows and rows of black wine glasses. It’s a blind exercise, so the black glass prevents us from seeing inside. We were instructed to sniff each glass and guess what we were smelling. I put my nose into glass after glass, inhaling deeply, and concentrating as hard as I could — it was tough! The problem is that detecting a specific aroma is easy, but identifying it is tricky. The whiff of spice is obvious, for example, but which spice — cinnamon, black pepper, clove, or something else altogether?

Noble’s Aroma Wheel helps because it prompts you with broad categories you might recognize: fruity, nutty, woody, spicy, etc. If you smell fruit, the Wheel prompts you to narrow it to berry, tropical, or citrus fruit; then you can drill down to lemon, lime, or grapefruit. But it starts with just smelling fruit.

I quickly learned that I have difficultly distinguishing between tropical fruits. I didn’t grow up eating pineapple, lychee, or mango, so I don’t have a strong memory association for those aromas. And I’ll admit, I cheated a few times and peeked in the glass. I was surprised to find bits of green bell pepper, whole lychee, cinnamon sticks, or wood chips placed right into the wine. In the wine-judging world, these are called “standards.” I thought the aroma came from some chemical tincture added to wine, but in fact, it’s the actual thing you’re using as a descriptive analogy, placed in a neutral red or white base wine. Why didn’t I think of that? I could have done this at home years ago and shown those wine snobs a thing or two.

This exercise is easy and fun to replicate at home. You can make your own standards using a neutral, inexpensive wine. For example, prepare glasses of base white wine with a few pieces of bell pepper, a drop of vanilla or butter extract, or a teaspoon of citrus juice or peach puree. It’s an easy way to train yourself to recognize and identify the smell of key wine descriptors.

Wine standard.Photo: Isabelle PinzautiDuring the next session, we were presented with eight unlabeled white wines, no funny stuff added, and asked to describe the aroma and taste. The labeled standards were still on the table to use as a smell reference. Moving back and forth between the wine and the standards definitely helped me with the tricky tropicals, and it got easier and easier as we moved on to a batch of unlabeled red wines alongside standards of oak, black pepper, berry jam, cocoa, etc.

After we assessed each wine individually, we discussed among our group and came to a consensus on the aroma and flavor properties. What’s amazing is that the only reason we were able to come to consensus is because we were working with the same vocabulary. I should note that none of our standards were labeled things like “cheerful,” “evasive,” or “good-humored.” Aside from sounding pretentious, these terms are subjective and not universally shared.

Once you have the vocabulary, all it takes is practice. I recently tasted an Italian white wine aged in oak barrels. I detected citrus (lemon to be specific), a toasted or burnt sugar aroma, and a bit of butter. I could say it was reminiscent of lemon meringue pie, but I won’t.

Sense of smell class.Photo: Yvonne de Zeeuw

Food Studies features the voices of 11 volunteer student bloggers from a variety of different food- and agriculture-related programs at universities around the world. You can explore the full series here.

I haven’t been hungry in months. I can barely even remember what it feels like. This is because in May I began a masters program at the University of Gastronomic Sciences (UNISG) in Northern Italy. Since then, I’ve done little except think, read, write, and talk about food. But mostly I’ve been eating.

UNISG, located in the region of Piemonte, is also known as Slow Food University. The original founders of Slow Food — the international movement that links food with community and the environment — started the university in 2004. The school aims to equip students with a holistic approach to food, and the masters program in Food Culture and Communication is no exception. It’s a one-year program with nine months of study followed by a three-month internship. The curriculum covers a broad spectrum of humanities, science, and communication skills. Sensory and tasting classes train our palates. When we’re done, we should be able to recognize, understand, and communicate the importance of quality food.

When it comes to tasting classes, your mood, appetite, and food preferences really don’t matter. We’ve had mandatory beer sampling at 9 in the morning, and tasted some of the world’s rarest cheeses right after lunch. In the sensory lab, we evaluated six different strawberry jams, four prosciuttos, and eight types of yogurt all in one sitting. We’re asked to discern the aromas in olive oils, describe wines with technical terms, and know the difference between various cured meats.

In addition to honing our palates, we also get plenty of theory and philosophy. We’ve had lectures on the definition of organic, analyzed the meaning of terroir, and debated whether “authentic” food actually exists. We get a heavy dose of science, too, from the chemistry of cheese making to the basics of botany.

Textbooks.But our learning isn’t limited to the classroom. The curriculum also incorporates study trips to food-producing regions throughout Italy and Europe. During these trips we meet working food producers — farmers, vintners, cheese makers, ranchers — in order to understand how artisanal products are made. We get to see some conventional food production as well, for comparison. During these trips we’re treated to the typical cuisine and products of the region — and lots of it. We’re usually served things we might never taste again, so we never say no and try our best to clean our plates.

When I explain my course, I usually get asked (especially by my mother) what I’m going to do when I’m done eating in Italy. The truth is, I don’t know yet. Before coming to Italy, I worked in marketing at Bon Appétit Management Company, which is where my interest in the food system began. I have an itch to get my hands dirty, to grow or make things. I’m secretly waiting for a lightning bolt to hit me so I’ll realize: It’s goat cheese! You want to make goat cheese for the rest of your life! Alas, no lightening bolts yet — there is so much to learn about how we feed ourselves.

One thing I do know is that this year, despite the formal lectures and field trips, I’ll end up learning the most from my fellow students, during conversations on bus rides and over wine at the piazza. We’re a class of 25 from all over the world: South Korea, Brazil, Lebanon, Japan, New Zealand, Denmark, The Netherlands, Poland, Germany, and every region of the U.S. are represented. We’re all figuring out how to take what we learn back home, not just to make a living but also to make changes in our food systems.

And when one of those classmates brings a Lebanese specialty or fig tart made with foraged fruit to lunch, it doesn’t matter that you’re completely stuffed from cheese-tasting class. In fact, if anyone asks if you’re full, you can be sure it’s a trick question. For the next year, the only aspect of our food system that we won’t be experiencing firsthand is hunger.