Originally publish at Dwell.com

Cooking often requires a design sensibility, skillfully balancing various weights, textures, and colors to determine the composition and presentation of a dish. Few recipes yield a more architectural outcome than a terrine—the many-layered mélange of ingredients compressed into a mold made for slicing. Like a casserole, “terrine” is the word for both the lidded crockery and the food it contains. Making a terrine is a feat of gastroengineering, and eating one is a lesson in materials and construction.

One of my favorite publishing houses, Phaidon, recently released a cookbook—which is as much a book of photography and a true feast for the eyes—dedicated to the legendary log, appropriately titled Terrine. The author, Stéphane Reynaud, is a French chef and author of another cookbook, Pork & Sons. The new book follows in the meaty tradition of the first, with many recipes that involve offal and wild game. Like a stucco house, the meaty dishes tend to have monochromatic facades, with thick pinkish-beige slabs forming the frame and foundation.

The more visually interesting—and perhaps more modern, since vegetarianism and the bright colors of farm fresh produce are decidedly current, at least stylistically—are the recipes in the Vegetables and Desserts sections. One of my favorites is the Minestrone Terrine, which looks like a castle or fortress, surrounded by cylindrical towers of asparagus. Zucchini, peas, fava beans, and basil form the chambers inside the spring vegetable spires. I also love the gelatinous Strawberry and Fresh Mint Terrine, a cross-section of which resembles the architectural glass Livinglass that has various organic materials pressed between the panes.

If you long to introduce your inner Julia Child to your inner Norman Foster, this book might be a great way to break the ice. You can get it here.
All images © Copyright Charlotte Lascève

Several weeks ago when I ate shrimp in a San Francisco restaurant I asked the chef—who is also the owner of the restaurant and buys his own ingredients—where my shrimp had been caught. He told me it was from Louisiana. I went home and began researching the Louisiana shrimp industry. I learned that Vermillion Parish has one of the largest shrimping ports in the U.S, and that most of the fishers there are Vietnamese immigrants.

According to the Lafayette Daily Advertiser, the shrimpers’ operating costs are rising, even as the retail price of shrimp is falling due to imports. It’s cheaper to catch, package, and ship shrimp from Southeast Asia than it is to source them from the U.S. gulf coast.

As it turned out, my meal intersected with this global economic reality. When I finally located the company that had provided the shrimp for my dinner, I discovered that they were actually a distributor of imported shellfish. My shrimp had come from Vietnam.

Currently, determining the economic, environmental, and human impacts of our food is nearly impossible. Despite Google’s seeming omniscience, the material returned on most any search into an ingredient’s backstory consists of 100-page academic papers, chart-heavy industry reports, and inscrutable government statistics.

A growing number of Americans express a desire to know more about the origins of their food and a willingness to base their purchasing decisions on that information. But even to those of us willing to dig deep, the workings of the food system are opaque. We can’t expect progress without transparency, but we need a better way to reveal the backstory.

By looking at a plate as a blueprint—a foodprint—we gain context for the often rootless array of colors and textures that make up a meal. We can see the carefully designed systems and human stories that each ingredient passes through, from the smallest scales—molecular gastronomy, genetic modification, food engineering; to the most ubiquitous and widely felt—industrial farming, factory production, branding and package design, global distribution networks. That narrative not only creates more informed consumers and empowered cooks, it adds layers of anecdotal umami to the eating experience.

The Foodprint Project is a place to explore these culinary microhistories through my own kitchen experiments, my growing collection of out-of-print regional cookbooks, and my undying love of obscure grocery store reconnaissance.

Photos courtesy of Hafiz Ismail and Hillary Stein.