The eureka moment that led to the creation of the Ecogastronomy Research Group came during a period of reflection on agriculture and its inextricable link to human agency; food is a product of not just ecology but also human endeavour. Further, those endeavours are shaped, constrained and facilitated by local cultural norms which themselves have been shaped by place-based evolution. It is this last point that I find most intriguing. Through the work of anthropologists Robert Boyd and Joseph Henrich among others, culture is now known to be just as susceptible to, and amended by, evolution as is the length of a femur or the shape of a bird’s beak. In other words, the boundaries delineating cultural diversity, and indeed cultural diversity itself arise and are maintained by the same fundamental processes governing biotic diversity. This has at least two exciting ramifications; first is that the same tools used to assess and understand biotic processes and evolution can be deployed to understand cultural diversity creation, maintenance, sustainability. Secondly this perspective provides the lens necessary to understand and describe terroir as a tripartite cultural-biotic-physical co-evolutionary process. Indeed, if biological and cultural contexts co-evolve in response to physical heterogeneity, then terroir is not only an inevitable consequence but is also dynamic, not a static snapshot in time. The upshot of all this is that quality, sustainability, diversity, security and sovereignty are all facilitated (and inhibited) by place-based coevolutionary processes that until recently appeared too disparate to address simultaneously, let alone coherently. We seek to change that…