https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terroir
Seems to not only explain crops and tastes but also more abstractly people, and the differences in outcomes by zip codes, for instance. You are where you grow.
It refers to a region and the practices/traditions of the people living there, particularly for agricultural products. It doesn't have much deeper meaning than "traditional production of Devon" (or whatever other place): it _implies_ that the environment is important but it's not really what it _means_.
In the coffee world the term has the effect of disempowering producers by making it seem like their labor to increase quality is futile or not valuable; that at the end it was the soil not their hard work. Places with a reputation for low quality coffee can in fact grow excellent coffee that deserves high prices. And of course you can also get bad coffee from regions with a good reputation.
The term "provenance" is preferred by some folks instead.
When wine brands link soil type to flavor it is complete BS. Plant roots don't absorb minerals, they absorb the water soluble molecular components like phosphate and calcium. (Moreover those nutrients primarily come from the humus layer rather than dirt). However those nutrients can be tasted by humans even at low concentrations, hence the conflation with soil quality and using "minerality" as an ambiguous flavor descriptor.
I feel it is important to point out that when talking about people, this less because of the physical properties of the land (proximity to superfund sites not withstanding), and more because of human controlled elements, like policy choices.
Easy shortcut to explaining why our fruits and veggies have no taste or nutrition anymore.
We destroyed any natural terroir through tilling, fertilizer and pest control
I remember reading years ago that organic peanuts at industrial scale can basically only be grown in arid regions, because the only effective alternative to fungicide is dry weather. That means organic peanuts are actually really bad for the environment, and due to the way water is priced in the US, the price on the shelf does not reflect its true cost.
Likewise for organic blueberries and cherries shipped up from Peru and Chile in January. It's hard to comprehend how wastefully luxurious that would have seemed at a not-too-distant time in history. And odds are high that those berries are bred for bruise and rot resistance, rather than nutrient content and flavor.
We're optimising for length of time the produce looks good on a supermarket shelf after travelling halfway around the world in a container ship.
All other concerns get thrown under the bus.
The really insidious aspect of this, though, is that this isn't the result of some deliberate plot; supermarkets sell what people will most buy.
If enough people switch to buying tasty nutritious misshapen local in-season produce instead of the tasteless bland cheap good-looking year-round stuff, we'll see more of that.
Time and time again, though, we all vote with our wallets for beautiful insipid gratification, and so that is what we get.
There are at least 1000s of distinct terroirs that any given crop might grow in. It's far beyond most people's cognitive ability to know any significant fraction of them.
Maybe you could devise a sharding scheme, where each grocery store got carrots from 10-20 different fields in different growing belts for year-round availability. With a limited set, consumer might learn their favorites.
Other produce does now has less nutrition (due to the farming methods you mention), and they could improve the produce if that was their goal. But it's not, because people aren't demanding improved produce. They demand "Organic", because they fear unorganic, because they fear it's going to make them sick. They don't fear a lack of nutrition (or taste), so they aren't concerned with it, so they don't demand more nutritious or delicious food, so it isn't made that way.
Americans have been programmed since the 1950s to prefer convenience, salt, sugar, and fat, over quality. Go to France, see how they eat, what produce they have. It's not because their farms are different. Their consumers just want good quality, local, seasonal food. So they get it.
Putting aside that American supermarket tomatoes are fatally flawed (they are full of flavorless water and have a mealy texture), it's amazing to me how behind even expensive grocery stores are.
Don't even get me started on the cider...
Here's another tangent. Americans have less conceptual agreement with terroir, which is why beer and even wine now have strange names and labels. I'm being flippant but: "Total Death Winery" with a skull and crossbones logo, or 'Whisper' and other random names like this instead of a town and last name or producer.
And it's funny that French and Spanish wine labels (and I'm sure others) selling to the American market started to pull the same label marketing technique. Make it artistic, ironic/funny and memorable.
I'm old school so I don't appreciate it. But there's definitely a cultural difference. Perhaps because the US does not have a long history. In contrast, apples and wine have been a French speciality for literally thousands of years.