Artisanal food. Those two words have been joined at the verbal hip for the last few years. The definition was always fuzzy—Traditional? High-quality? Hand-crafted? Locally sourced? Socially conscious?—but it's even murkier now as small-scale "artisanal" food makers find success and the appeal of mass production.
As Hanna Raskin writes in SF Weekly:
...the term is being stretched like saltwater taffy, and its limits are being closely monitored by food producers who have to make immediate decisions about if, when, and how to grow their endeavors without dishonoring the principles that first led them to the kitchen. Few artisans are vocally doctrinaire; none of the dozens interviewed for this story were willing to attach their names to the questions they raised about the legitimacy of mechanized equipment, co-packing arrangements, and corporate backing... But the field remains unsettled. When determining the size and scope of their businesses, artisans must place such unwieldy concepts as beauty, social justice, heritage, sustainability, and taste on opposite sides of the same scale. The process has exposed a gamut of intellectual, geographic, and economic tensions in a community reluctant to acknowledge conflict.
Do you consider yourself an artisan? Do you buy artisanal products? How do you define it, and how do you think the term evolves as the "artisanal" brand, whatever it may be, gets bigger?
Read More: The Artisanal Irony: The Mass-Produced Hand-Crafted Food Dilemma at SF Weekly
Read More: Twee Food: Debating the Brooklyn Artisanal Food Movement
(Image: John Keatley for SF Weekly)
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To me this is related to the discussion last week about "craft" beer. I have no problem with quality producers scaling up, but I realize that some people might be bothered by attaching the "artisan" label to those ventures. Personally, I don't care what it's called as long as it's made with care and tastes good.
I would find it amusing to see something made by say, Kraft Foods billing itself as "artisanal." And I know many people love the recipes in Artisanal Bread in Some Really Short Amount of Time a Day, but again--it's a little funny. After all, the RECIPE is not what makes it "artisanal," it's the fact that an actual artisan, someone with great skill, makes it! My bread is pretty good, but am I an artisan? No! But I guess I don't take it terribly seriously. I'm more bothered by fudging labels like "organic" or non-GMO or something like that. Artisanal is just an adjective, not a legal category.
I think if something really is artisanal, it really doesn't need to be labeled as such.
Considering that Dominos now sells as "artisanal" pizza, the term obviously doesn't mean anything on a package at this point.
I met a smart and funny man named Jeff Roberts at a cheese event I attended for work this week; he wrote The Atlas of American Artisan Cheese, and we discussed this very subject for a bit. I asked him where that fine line between artisanal and mass production fell, and he appropriated Justice Byron White's famous pornography quote: "I can't define it, but I know it when I see it." I found it hilariously fitting.
That said, the term is indeed abused, but I'd agree with KatePK -- the real stuff probably doesn't even bother (or need) to mention it.
I would add that the term was originally an attempt to capture the integrity of traditional European production, especially French, with their AOC.
Thus, to me, the term would mean hand-crafted in a traditional manner with noble ingredients (locally sourced).
But of course, it has just become a marketing term. A cheap, meaningless, marketing gimmick.
We really need to have something with the rigour of the AOC -- appellation d'origine contrôlée .