“Terroir is a French term used to describe the environmental factors that affect a crop's phenotype, including unique environment contexts, farming practices and a crop's specific growth habitat.” Wikipedia
The importance of context is of limited concern to American culture, yet the spectrum of environmental factors surrounding our development and routine life are important for who we are and who we become. As humans we build the niche that our future generations turn around and occupy. We have learned to move our visible trash and bodily refuse away from our dwellings, but we are mostly unaware of what’s accumulating in our tissues and circulating in our blood. In many cultures there is an appreciation of the contextual factors surrounding an event or a crop production. In French, ‘le terroir’ is a very important concept to describe all the factors of the land and environment that affect the final look and structure of a grape crop. The contents of the soil, the heat, the humidity and the temperature all flow into and affect what the organism and its reproductive product, the grape becomes. The phenotype of the grape is a product of many external factors. Humans and our development are likewise dramatically impacted by the multi-factor environments we inhabit, yet we are built psychologically to habituate and to ignore all the things around us that do not seem to differ or stand out. Unfortunately, many of the patterns we accept and the substances we habituate to are working against our physical and mental well being.
The nuanced interplay of our developmental code and the environment seems to be absent in the public discourse around health and disease. We have been hoodwinked by the news and research promoters about the power of genetics and single bullet molecules. Of course, genes like breakthrough drugs are important, but we are not passive recipients of deterministic sentences from genes or the market of pharmaceuticals. Decoding the genome we thought we were finishing a sort of race...or that is how the investment was sold. In terms of knowledge it seems we were only warming up. The foundations are critical, but epigenetics, the biology of all the “junk” DNA and various other mechanisms that regulate the conditionality of genes is ever being worked out. Mapping all those mechanisms is a herculean task. That said, much of the conditional epigenetic logic is preserved through the evolution of species and is approachable by looking at related organisms and how they manage and change in varying environments. Old fashioned biology still has great power to inform those curious enough to inquire.
Political, economic and psychological authorities are not quick to highlight the implications of epigenetics. This is likely because responsibility is threatening to the people and organizations that would prefer to avoid it. It is convenient to blame victims of poor terrain for having “bad genes”, but we must become wise to this kind of ruse. We can have more agency than we might assume. My opinion after years of reading and researching is that most of the health, social and psychological problems we face can be seen flowing from the ignorance of the environmental conditions best suited to humans.