An All-Too-Moveable Feast Ernest Hemingway and the Stakes of Terroir

The expatriate circles of the Lost Generation were peopled with devotees to food and viticulture. Sylvia Beach worked as a vo lunteer agricultural laborer during World War I when male farmhands were in short supply, and she spent her vacations living on a farm—indeed in a barn—away from the conveniences of Paris.¹ Alice B. Toklas collected regional recipes throughout the interwar years and World War II, culminating in her popular cookbook.² William Bird of the Three Mountains Press, the first publisher of Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time and William Carlos Williams’s Great American Novel, wrote a muchadmired monograph on traditional French wines.³ For expatriate writers, to adopt European terroir was to stake a claim to intellectual and aesthetic territory as well.⁴ Indeed, the ideal of terroir—region and place of production taking a central and shaping role in the cultivation of ingredients, the preparation of dishes, and the resulting flavor of food and wine—grew in direct response to the global and industrial forces reshaping food systems. Though the rhetoric asserting and defending it claimed (and claims) timelessness, terroir is a modern idea.⁵ The modernist style innovated by Hemingway, Williams, and Gertrude Stein—characterized by minimalism, parataxis, and the vernacular—shares with terroir the aspiration to reshape the individual’s relationship to a global commodity system through the rigorous testing of the palate and retraining attention on local terrain. This essay takes up Hemingway’s stylistic and thematic investment in terroir. In so doing, I suggest an area in which Hemingway’s relevance to the environmental humanities has been underdeveloped—namely, the theorization of the local as an imaginative response to the global.⁶

In adumbrating Hemingway’s “slow foods” aesthetic avant la lettre, I benefit from an exciting moment of critical convergence between modernist literary criticism and food studies. Food studies links aesthetic form with the appetitive body, an important materialization of modernism’s cultural aspirations. For example, Jennifer Fleissner connects Henry James’s deliberative narrative style with the turn-of-the-century food fad of Fletcherism and thus unpacks his attempt to imagine a “truly embodied subjectivity.”⁷ This sensitivity to stylistic somaticism also behooves the critic of Hemingway, an author whose bibulous and gustatory appetites were notoriously excessive but who is famous for the trim silhouette of his sentences. Hemingway’s catalogues of regional foods highlight cornucopian abundance, but his eschewal of ornamentation and abstraction proposes an ethics of restraint that acknowledges ecological and social interdependence. Food studies also places the work of literary modernists within economies of global production and distribution. For example, in Global Appetites Allison Carruth points out that the emergent food industry was intimately linked to the American war machine and connects Willa Cather’s depiction of the industrialization and capitalization of midwestern farms to her criticisms of World War I.⁸ Hemingway’s valorization of local food rituals demands a similarly global contextualization.

This is not to dismiss the important objections to Hemingway’s individualist and imperialist attitudes that have been voiced by such critics as Glenn Love and Thomas Strychacz.⁹ Indeed, the limitations in this viewpoint may be endemic to the slow foods philosophy. Kyla Wazana Tompkins warns that “white, bourgeois urban subject positions” are often reinforced by “romanticized and insufficiently theorized attachments to ‘local’ or organic foodways, attachments that at times suspiciously echo nativist ideological formations.”¹⁰ It is no surprise, after all, that Robert Cohn, depicted as a broad Jewish stereotype in The Sun Also Rises, has “bad taste.” Hemingway’s ideal model of expatriation—which seems like an opportunity for a cosmopolitan imagining of global belonging through networks of localism—still defines exiles and others.

As Amy Trubek discusses in The Taste of Place, the first two decades of the twentieth century saw the rise of the discourse of terroir and the related introduction of regulations in French food and wine labeling, the appellations d’origine contrôlées, which responded to the increasing mobility and globalism of modern food products by guaranteeing regional authenticity. (Spain followed suit in 1926 with the Denominación de Origen for Rioja.) This process of naming and, by the 1930s, judging the quality and characteristics of regional products attempted to legislate cultural authenticity at a historical moment when local flavor seemed both desirable (and hence commodifiable) and fragile.¹¹ The discourse of terroir had a vexed relationship to the nation-state. On the one hand, food writers of the 1920s framed French regional cooking as a testament to a superior national culinary achievement.¹² Indeed, as Italian food historian Massimo Montanari points out, the unification of Italy into a nation-state was culturally reinforced by turn-of-the-century cookbooks that compiled regional delicacies.¹³ On the other hand, maps of regional products meant to assert national identity inadvertently remind readers that these food rituals could (and did) blur national borders.

Adding another wrinkle to the relationship between region, nation, and globe, modern gastronomic literature promoting terroir was generated in part to ensure tourism to rural France.¹⁴ By associating ingredients and specialties with their points of origin, books like Curnon-sky’s La France gastronomique (1921) mapped the provinces in part to encourage global travelers like Hemingway to come taste the real thing. Indeed, in the early 1920s, Hemingway recommended a series of guides gastronomiques to Toklas, who took his advice and subscribed to the series, inspiring her travel to the rural French province of Ain, which in turn became a favorite annual retreat for Toklas and Stein.¹⁵ Much as the contemporary slow foods movement began in the 1980s in response to the opening of an Italian McDonald’s, the terroir movement of the first three decades of the twentieth century insisted on regional and national particularity in response to a newly industrialized and globalized food industry. As Stein wrote in “American Food and American Houses” in 1935, “In spite of all the changes the American way is a different way from the French way it really is and that is what I have to say.”¹⁶

Hemingway’s fascination with place and his catalogues of the foods and food rituals associated with a particular place implicitly mourn the erosion of situatedness in modern global food culture. Hemingway describes traditional meals in the Basque region in The Sun Also Rises (1926): “fried trout … and some sort of a stew and a big bowl full of wild strawberries.”¹⁷ An American writer, Jake Barnes has to travel the globe to find places—like rural Spain—that have preserved premodern food traditions, a journey that implicitly acknowledges the industrialization and standardization in the United States. While Jake emphasizes his own role as an American outsider unused to European commensal traditions (“The first meal in Spain was always a shock with the hors d’oeuvres, an egg course, two meat courses, vegetables, salad, and dessert and fruit”), his immersive and indeed intoxicated approach to joining the local food culture (“You have to drink plenty of wine to get it all down”) is patently superior (according to Hemingway’s implicit food ethics) to Robert Cohn’s protestations that bring him an inferior substitute (“the waitress brought him something else as a replacement, a plate of cold meats, I think”).¹⁸

In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway’s late-career defense of his artistic sensibility and its perceived depreciation, he links his minimalist aesthetic to the authentic taste of regional foods, creating an implicit parallel between the two. In an anecdote that connects his early writing with the authenticity of his cheap café dining, Hemingway describes how he “closed up” a new story in his notebook, stowing it in his “inside pocket,” and then ordered “oysters portugaises,” the memory of which he recounts rhapsodically:

As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.¹⁹

The closed, pocketed story anticipates the closed oyster shells that must be pried open by the appreciative gourmand. Hemingway the eater, like Hemingway the writer, eliminates distractions (“wash[ing] away, leaving only”); privileges place and the senses (“the sea taste and the succulent texture”); celebrates aesthetic containment (“drank their cold liquid from each shell”); and finds the “cold” and “crisp” refreshing. This passage recasts Hemingway’s famous iceberg principle in the shape of the oyster. Emptying the oysters, Hemingway becomes emotionally full, just as the reader of Hemingway’s minimalist prose discovers a sea of emotional content within his shell of restraint.

It is no coincidence that this metaphorical reverie on writing is an appraisal of a regional food; indeed, there is an implicit suggestion that the attuned palate should be able to attribute Hemingway’s authorial imprimatur as clearly as it can taste the cold sea in oysters portugaises.²⁰ Hemingway’s preoccupation with authenticity might be read as evidence of regrettable snobbery or the antimodernism of this cultural moment; indeed, it would be hard to dismiss the claim that these factors play a role in Hemingway’s depiction of authentic alimentation.²¹ However, the particular example of oysters portugaises shows the complexity of conceptualizing localism through the medium of food. This oyster—described as characteristically French by M. F. K. Fisher and Julia Child—betrays in its very name the transnational realities of ecology and trade.²² The Portuguese oyster was accidentally brought to Portugal from India in the sixteenth century and then from Portugal to France by a shipwreck in the Gironde in 1868. Belon oysters, the oysters native to Brittany, were hit by disease in the 1920s, which may have influenced young Hemingway’s eating habits (oysters portugaises were heartier and cheaper, though they too would fall prey to disease in the 1970s, replaced in turn by Pacific oysters).²³ Thus, the taste of place so heralded by the purveyors of terroir bespeaks the mobility of modernity and globalization.

In Hemingway’s fiction, he emphasizes the friction between national boundaries and regional identities through food rituals connected to the local environment. For example, the short story “Out of Season,” collected in In Our Time (1925), features a drunk Italian guide hired to bring an American tourist and his wife on an ill-fated fishing trip. The title “Out of Season” suggests that the participants are at odds with the timetable of nature, the pastoral emphasis on the seasons, and that their urban sensibilities—not to mention the money they bring to hire the locals—have dislocated them from place.²⁴ The title also alludes to the hunting and fishing seasons determined by the Fascist regime, which dominates the town’s public space: “The bank clerk stared at him from the door of the Fascist café.”²⁵ Rather than capitulate to the regulations of the Fascist regime, the local guide Peduzzi leads the Americans on a buffoonish drunken walk down the main street. The political charge of this comic procession becomes evident in the American tourist’s wary reaction: “Everybody in the town saw us going through with these rods. We’re probably being followed by the game police now” (“Out of Season,” 137).

In spite of (or perhaps because of) the illegality of his actions, Peduzzi is connected to the life of the town and to the local environment: “Everyone in this town likes me. I sell frogs. What if it is forbidden to fish? Not a thing. Nothing. No trouble. Big trout, I tell you. Lots of them” (“Out of Season,” 137). The frogs that Peduzzi illegally hunts complicate gaming and fishing regulations because of their amphibious nature.²⁶ Peduzzi too is neither fish nor fowl, neither of the town (unclaimed by his daughter, whom he points out to the visiting tourists) nor an expatriate cosmopolite. He is a war veteran, still cloaked in his military coat, penurious and alcoholic, a victim of global economies rather than their master. Nonetheless, the shadow economies he participates in—“spading the hotel garden,” guiding the Americans to good fishing, selling frogs to the locals (“Out of Season,” 135)—flourish in the shadows of the Fascist regime, due in large part to Peduzzi’s knowledge of the local environment.

In spite of their desire to experience local life, the Americans do not understand the rites and tools of fishing. Though their “stuff is all clean and new,” the American tourists fail to bring the necessary lead for the line, the piombo: “You said you had everything,” Peduzzi laments (“Out of Season,” 138). It is suggestive that during this discussion, Peduzzi uses an Italian word to describe the missing piece: “You must have piombo. Piombo. A little piombo. Just here. Just above the hook or your bait will float on the water. You must have it. Just a little piombo” (“Out of Season,” 138). The Americans lack the gravity that would enable immersion in the stream of another culture, and that weight is figured as linguistic inscrutability. In promising that tomorrow he will bring “Pane, salami, formaggio,” Pedruzzi invites the American man to partake in the linguistic and gustatory pleasures of the local, and the American and Peduzzi drink from the same bottle of marsala wine, a scene that anticipates a similar scene of wine-quaffing in The Sun Also Rises.

In spite of this potential for transnational communion, these two men are separated by taste. Peduzzi cherishes this Sicilian fortified wine, and the American sees it as a sign of the Italian’s foppishness: “That’s what Max Beerbohm drinks” (“Out of Season,” 136). Ultimately the American sees Peduzzi’s bid for fraternity as a presumptuous adoption of familiarity “in the tone of one member of the Carleton Club accepting the Morning Post from another” (“Out of Season,” 137). By assessing Peduzzi’s wine and warmth through an Anglo-American frame of social distinction, the expatriate overwrites a transnational sense of local belonging with class hierarchies and nativist feeling, codified rather than eroded by a discourse of taste. Peduzzi’s thirst, piqued by addiction, and his hunger are evidence of his embarrassing embodied need, so challenging to the bourgeois model of discreet appetites. Peduzzi hopes that this connection with the American will allow his ascension from the scatological: “He was through with the hotel garden, breaking up frozen manure with a dung fork. Life was opening out” (“Out of Season,” 139). Frightened of the permeability and intimacy such an “opening out” might entail, the young American man “put[s] his purse back in his pocket” and reasserts bureaucratic distance: “I will leave word with the padrone at the hotel office” (“Out of Season,” 139).

In The Sun Also Rises Hemingway dramatizes the transgressive power of region and locality through the transnational practices of fishing and animal husbandry. When Jake Barnes and Bill begin their fishing trip in Basque country, they cross the border from France into Spain. They see “Basques with oxen, or cattle, hauling carts,” on the French side of the border, an image that emphasizes mobility and traditionalism in the same breath.²⁷ The modesty of the bridge that marks the national border makes the soldiers’ uniforms appear theatrical and excessive: “There was a little stream and a bridge, and Spanish carabineers, with patent-leather Bonaparte hats, and short guns on their backs, on one side, and on the other fat Frenchmen in kepis and mustaches” (The Sun Also Rises, 98). The soldiers prefer a static, instrumental view of the countryside around them. When Jake asks the carabineer if he fishes in the stream that he defends, “he said no, that he didn’t care for it” (The Sun Also Rises, 98).

Up until this point in the exchange, the oppositional relationship between local food rituals and the boundaries of the nation-state has remained implicit—oxen and cattle herding unites Basques on both sides of the bridge, and trout fishing inspires Jake, Robert Cohn, and Bill to traverse the border—but then it becomes explicit with the arrival of a smuggler. Hemingway emphasizes the temporal and geographic disruption that this character represents with the phrase “Just then,” interrupting Jake’s conversation with the soldier who stays aloof from the local fishing culture: “Just then an old man with long, sunburned hair and beard … came striding up to the bridge. He was carrying a long staff, and he had a kid slung on his back, tied by the four legs, the head hanging down” (The Sun Also Rises, 98). Though the soldier waves the goatherd back over the border, he acknowledges to Jake that the old man will “‘just wade across the stream’” (The Sun Also Rises, 98). The political theater at the bridges does not in fact fend off the daily, mundane creation of locality that crosses the borders of the nation-state.

It is the transformative power of this localism, opposed to the politics of empire and conquest emblematized by French kepis and Bonaparte hats, that Hemingway evokes in his Edenic treatment of the rural landscape. The Basques teach Jake and Bill to drink the local wine from a wineskin, inviting the foreigners’ participation in this community (The Sun Also Rises, 110–11). Bill and Jake travel through “grain-fields”—Hemingway repeats this noun phrase, adding the adjective “rich” to emphasize their fecundity—and then they arrive at “a sudden green valley. A stream went through the centre of the town and fields of grapes touched the houses” (The Sun Also Rises, 111). The town is shaped, not by bureaucratic or military boundaries, but by intimacy and cooperation with nature. This benign reciprocity is symbolized in this passage by viticulture, which was the first agricultural arena to celebrate and popularize terroir.

In the posada that Jake and Bill enter to buy a drink, there are “hams and slabs of bacon and white garlics and long sausages hanging from the roof” (The Sun Also Rises, 111–12). This catalog of cured food draws attention to folk processes of food preservation that predate refrigeration. Early maps celebrating regional cuisines, such as France’s Le cours gastronomique (1809), featured wines, cheeses, and charcuterie.²⁸ The artisanal production of cured meats represents a rebuke to the industrial food system; potted hams and sausages exemplify the potentially deadly estrangement of the consumer from the circumstances of industrial meat production in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906).²⁹ Even today, cured meats serve as an emblem of the microbial and cultural richness of traditional food preservation in contrast with the nutritional and gustatory impoverishment of industrial production.³⁰ Placing his literary artistry on the side of artisanship, Hemingway uses these cured foods as an implicit objective correlative to his narrative style, which dries out descriptors, preserving objects and images in long strings of parataxis. His style partakes in the authenticity of the local.

This romanticization of regional foods and identification with artisanal producers is both delicious and potentially disturbing, as it incorporates these foods into a cosmopolitan modernist aesthetic without interrogating the social circumstances of their production or indeed of the regional identity they are meant to render ingestible. Is Hemingway romanticizing the Basque countryside in the service of touristic consumerism, internalizing authenticity? After all, he does not articulate or even acknowledge the vexed politics of Basque nationalism, choosing instead to emphasize the peace of this agricultural idyll.³¹ In spite of this pastoralizing (and perhaps as a result patronizing) move, it is important to note that Jake and his compatriots are not the only world travelers in the Basque countryside. Indeed, one of the Basque men with whom Jake strikes up a conversation admits that he lived in America forty years ago. He says that he lived in California and that it was “fine,” and he lists all the major cities he visited: “I been in Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, Denver, Los Angeles, Salt Lake City” (The Sun Also Rises, 113). Global modernity sees many populations becoming more mobile, which also gives them an opportunity for comparison and critique. The Basque man observes of the wine that they share, “You can’t get this in America, eh?” and Jake answers, “There’s plenty if you can pay for it” (The Sun Also Rises, 113). This nod to Prohibition implies a shared assessment of the limitations of American mores and markets. After exploring America, the Basque has chosen this place as his own, making the adoption of the local volitional rather than hereditary, symbolic rather than merely pragmatic.

This combination of volition and mobility create an opening for the expat who might also take up the mantle of the local as his own. The Basque hails Jake as a friend when he appears to recognize the landscape’s beauty: “He sat back comfortably and smiled at me when I turned around to look at the country” (The Sun Also Rises, 113). In this encounter, transnational community seems not only possible but imminent. Ultimately, however, the pressures of Americanization foreclose the possibility of alterity. Hemingway writes that “the effort of talking American seems to have tired him. He did not say anything after that” (The Sun Also Rises, 113). Though Jake “talk[s] Spanish” later in the novel to Romero, he does not bridge the conversation gap with the Basque, perhaps reflecting the arrogance of the tourist who thinks that the native should introduce him to local culture, perhaps suggesting that the Basque man speaks only the local dialect, a linguistic gap that underlines that it is easier to eat and drink the fruits of local culture than it is to breathe and speak its idiom (The Sun Also Rises, 177). By the time he returns to the Basque region at the end of the book, Jake has lost his sense of immersion, seeing (and smelling) only the foreign and the revolting: “[The waiter] said Izzarra was made of the flowers of the Pyrenees. The veritable flowers of the Pyrenees. It looked like hair-oil and smelled like Italian strega. I told him to take the flowers of the Pyrenees away and bring me a vieux marc” (The Sun Also Rises, 236–37). Jake’s sense of himself as a tourist and consumer have overtaken his capacity for communion, for imagining local belonging: “The waiter seemed a little offended about the flowers of the Pyrenees, so I overtipped him. That made him happy. It felt comfortable to be in a country where it is so simple to make people happy” (The Sun Also Rises, 237). Jake’s generalizations about nation betoken his shift to a limited, consumerist outlook on place.

Both of these examples, “Out of Season” and The Sun Also Rises, address transnational localism through the lens of tourism, exposing that local populations participate in global economies and imaginaries and that expatriate tourists often fail at imagining new forms of social belonging. A tension emerges in these scenes between local foods as a generative practice that puts people in contact with the environment (fishing for trout or herding goats) and local foods as a commodified sign of local identity that the tourist would like to quaff (like Basque wine) or dismiss as not to their taste (like the liqueur of the Pyrenees). In the latter cases, it appears that food products—the Sicilian marsala wine Peduzzi covets in the northern city of Cortina or the vieux marc from the northern regions of Champagne and Bourgogne that Jake orders in southern Bayonne—are all too portable, inviting disidentification from place and rendering the flavor of authenticity unsettlingly mobile and perhaps correspondingly illusory.

War provides an even more pressing context for interrogating both the impoverishment and the potentiality of the local. In A Farewell to Arms (1929) Frederic discusses military rations with Gino, an Italian soldier. Gino acknowledges that while “the soil is sacred,” the soldiers receive too little food, and the few supplies they can scrounge up are actually potatoes planted by the Austrian soldiers stationed there before them. Frederic realizes that the problem is war profiteering and black markets: “The dogfish are selling it somewhere else”; and Gino laments that “something is wrong somewhere. There should be plenty of food.”³² Through this conversation, Hemingway establishes a crucial contrast between the current circumstances of want and the dream that “the soil is sacred,” a guiding principle of terroir.

This tension between local pastoral traditions and global military provisions anticipates the contrast that Frederic describes between concrete language and abstract nouns:

Only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and dates.

(A Farewell to Arms, 185)

This passage suggests that the documentation of local detail and geography can resist the patriotic myth of nationalism. Frederic’s locally rooted attention to “names of villages” and “names of rivers” provides an entrance point to an ecocentric and (potentially) to a socially just approach to food. Rather than honoring the sacred soil in the abstract and accepting that markets transport the bounty of the local woods and fields elsewhere, Hemingway retrains our attention on the terroir of villages and rivers. Frederic draws his metaphor for the carnage of World War I from the US industrial food system: “The sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it” (A Farewell to Arms, 185). Hemingway thus implies that the ethical stakes of terroir move beyond the pleasures of regional flavor and into the geopolitics of industrial impersonality, a frightening rationalism that minimizes the environmental and human costs of conceptualizing the globe only through profit margins and power.