Under centuries-old oak trees in southwest Spain, black Iberian pigs snuffle at the ground. These pure-bred animals will eventually become jamón ibérico, the cured ham known worldwide for its cultural significance and flavor.
Cinco Jotas is one of the most respected producers of this ham; the company raises 100 percent black Iberian pigs and only sells the ham under the government-regulated black label, the highest mark available for jamón ibérico.
The time their pigs spend nosing around for acorns is essential to the ham’s quality, flavor, and premium price tag. The acorns, meadows, and free-range lifestyle all create jamón ibérico’s signature flavor. But the increasing frequency of heat waves and droughts in the Iberian Peninsula, where a five-year drought is ongoing, mean lower yields of acorns and grasses.
The pigs reared by Cinco Jotas will eventually become Jamon Iberico, a prized Spanish ham. Access to enough acorns and grasses creates the ham’s signature flavor, but climate change is causing drought conditions that imperil the pigs’ feed.
Photograph by Gunnar Knechtel, laif/Redux
Without acorns and meadows, pigs would have to be cross-bred or given supplemental feed like cereals and would lose some of the color, aroma, and texture associated with the black-label ham. At Cinco Jotas, this is a big concern; oak trees take 30 years to produce acorns. Swapping for another food source high in oleic acid, like olives, would make the meat bitter and spicy.
“When you depend completely on natural resources, as we do, you’re always thinking, looking, trying to predict how it is going to be. Because we depend on nature, we cannot grow it,” says María Castro Bermúdez-Coronel, the communications director at Cinco Jotas and a biologist who lives in the forests where the pigs forage.
Cinco Jotas isn’t alone. Globally, the people who produce our food are contending with weather that has been destabilized by climate change.
And all of it is changing not only the quantity and quality of the foods we eat, but also the flavor itself.
Why things taste the way they do
To describe wine, sommeliers use the French term terroir to describe how environmental conditions like soil and climate affected the taste of wine grapes. But wine isn’t the only food with terroir.
Kathryn De Master, an environmental resource scientist at University of California, Berkeley, explains that terrior is even more expansive than just the ecological components that go into the taste and quality of food. Terroir also encompasses the social practices that go into making a food, like the way Cinco Jotas’ managers do everything in the curing process by hand, without machinery.
The term is fluid, though, because there are many factors that influence a food’s terroir and end flavor.
Flavor, which is comprised of both aroma and taste, starts long before we dice, cure, and cook. When we taste something, we’re reacting to specific chemical compounds. Identifying these chemicals has allowed us to make foods that contain tastes like strawberry flavoring, without harming any strawberries in the process.
Soil, fungi, temperature, moisture, shade—each plays a role. Even pests influence the way produce tastes, inducing certain plants to release more chemicals that attract the pests’ predators or repel the insects themselves. By isolating the compounds, scientists are beginning to better understand the environmental factors that influence them.
For foods like meat and dairy, the plants the animals eat—and when and how they eat it—creates variations in fat, chemical compounds, and muscle.
The business of flavor
In North Carolina, Matt Schwab is thinking about flavor, too. Schwab is the owner and farmer at Hold Fast Oyster Co., which farms its oysters at two locations in the New River. The water there is brackish, a mix of salt and freshwater. But already, as sea levels rise and the salinity in the river increases, the two locations will become more similar in flavor.
“The oysters that are less briny, you can get more complexity in the flavor profile,” Schwab says. “But as the salinity has gone up you kind of lose some of that more subtle flavor.”
Other foods’ flavor compounds are highly susceptible to moisture and temperature fluctuations.
Studies have shown that temperature has more impact on strawberry’s sweetness or acidity than the method by which they are grown. Warm days and cool nights increase the fruit’s sugar and acid content, both of which are needed for optimum flavor.
Similarly, temperature-driven early blooms and high temperature during maturation have both been shown to influence the flavor of apples in Japan. The acid level, fruit firmness, and water content all decreased, meaning the apples were less crisp and flavorful.
In Yunnan province in China, tea grown in a typical dry season has higher concentrations of the compounds that create high quality, flavorful tea, meaning the product has to be grown before the monsoons. Yet Yunnan is in the midst of extreme drought, which means it’s harder to grow tea plants at all in the pre-monsoon season when the quality is highest.
In China’s Yunnan province, tea is grown during the dry season to ensure it has a high concentration of the compounds that imbue the best flavor.
Photograph by Deng Guohui, VCG/ Getty Images
The province is in the midst of an extreme drought, and some farmers have had to grow tea during the monsoon season as a result. Tea grown during this period is less flavorful and fetches a lower price.
Photograph by Christopher Pillitz, Getty Images
Cheesemakers in both the United States and Europe are grappling with new flavors, too. In Italy, early research indicates that the quality of Bettelmatt cheese, which relies heavily on the alpine pastures where cows graze, is likely to decline. The government in France, where cheese is deeply embedded in culture, is even considering loosening the strict rules that govern its cheesemakers. These accommodations have become increasingly necessary as pastures and milking barns suffer in more extreme heat.
These changes in flavor have social repercussions; farmers who produce tea during the monsoon season make 30 to 50 percent less income because the leaves are lower quality and less flavorful. For Schwab, hotter, saltier water raises the risk of diseases and oyster mortality.
An unpredictable flavor future
It’s not clear what the future of flavor is, especially for small producers. In North Carolina, Schwab is considering options like farming in deeper waters, which are less susceptible to changes in salinity and temperature. But that also means a completely different method of farming with completely different equipment.
Among the oak forests, Cinco Jotas staff are accustomed to thinking about how to preserve the breed. They’ve been producing ham since 1867, and there are references to cured ham as far back as the Roman Empire in the prose of Martial and a proclamation by Emperor Dicoletian.
Since 2014, researchers employed by Cinco Jotas have been studying a fungal-like disease that more effectively kills trees during prolonged periods of drought. Some trees are naturally more resistant, and Cinco Jotas wants to help those ones spread. Castro Bermúdez-Coronel is hopeful that the old, massive trees, which has expansive root systems much more resilient than the grasses, will survive the climate changes.
“Nature adapts to everything,” she says. “It will transform, but it will adapt. Nature always adapts to the new changes.
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