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Dear For The Wild Community, As we arrive at the fourth course of our latest series, Fat of The Land, we have been reflecting on taste. What is taste all about? Not just in a literal sense of and not just about what we might think of as a form of preference or as an act of pleasure, but how do our tastes reflect memory and inheritance. Often, taste is something cultivated over time. It is shaped by seasons, by the hands that feed us, by the landscapes that nourish particular ingredients into being and by the stories we tell ourselves. What do we wish for? What do we believe as authentic? What is considered tasteful? And yet taste, too, is vulnerable. Vulnerable to convenience, to standardization, and to trends that move faster than the slow unfolding of regional land-based knowledge. What happens when taste becomes regulated into familiarity and optimized (often, on our behalf) for speed and export? What disappears when we no longer remember how a place tastes? Perhaps then, to taste is one of the earliest languages we learn. A sweetness that recalls childhood. The bitterness that arrives later in life, but sometimes we now crave. To lose taste is not only to lose flavor, but to lose intimacy with place, with memory, and Earth. We offer some reflections for you to consider as you, too, contemplate taste in the coming week: What desires have been shaped by markets and spectacle, and which ones still emerge from the earth itself? What tastes remain with you, long after the meal has ended?
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