“Can you describe it?”: A Teacher-Researcher’s Reflections on Crisis and Hope

Drawing on experiences as a Franco-American food anthropologist and enseignant-chercheur, this paper reflects on crisis and hope through two encounters: Jenny, a novice anthropology student navigating culture shock in a Parisian café, and René, a newly retired Comté farmer learning descriptive tasting on a sensory panel, the jury terroir. Reframing crisis as a threshold – a liminal space of encounter between different systems of meaning – the paper proposes thick description as a methodology for