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I can fully understand the love of cheese, however, there is a hidden cost to it, that I have experienced but only recently acknowledged.
The places they show on TV and in articles such as this is analogous to showing posh West End made-to-measure tailors and pretending that those SHEIN garments from Bangladesh are made the same way, with no 'slavery' involved.
I worked in a cheese factory as a student, taking up the job with an attitude that it must be 'women's work'. How wrong I was. Twelve hour shifts, with 'every object' weighing (or wheying) upwards of 25Kg and every one of your senses brutally assaulted, always with the potential to lose life, limb or another finger in a moment of lapsed focus. Just surviving became the intellectual challenge, with many not making it past two hours before throwing in the towel. Mastery was my goal and I put in the sleepless 'nights' with relentless 'tennis elbow' to get there, achievement unlocked.
Because I was a student, this was not a forever job, and there was a higher tax threshold for students, making it financially tough but worth while.
On a trip down memory lane I looked the old place up, to discover it had shut down due to numerous health and safety violations, which made me chuckle. That was the culture, and the rule, for example, those chemicals that have huge warning labels, to read such a label after getting nervous ticks after using it, would be moral cowardice. Or, if you needed someone's attention, because the machines were so loud, you would casually throw a 25 Kg object at them (a cheese or a bag of salt) as a 'gentle tap on the shoulder'.
On reflection, there is this small matter of the human cost to cheese. PETA might shock people with cheesy animal welfare issues and cardiologists might not be entirely positive about the consumption of 'saturated fat laced with salt', however, few have experienced the harsh reality of working in the industry, to have the strength to write about how extreme and ultra-violent the production of this harmless product can be.
I am not saying 'boycott the product', just 'value it more'.
> When you talk with cheese aficionados, it doesn’t usually take long for the conversation to veer this way: away from curds, whey, and mold, and toward matters of life and death. With the zeal of nineteenth-century naturalists, they discuss great lineages and endangered species, painstakingly cataloguing those cheeses that are thriving and those that are lost to history.
I recently learned of - but have never tried - a cheese from the Himalayan region of South Asia that is reputed to be the "hardest cheese in the world". Apparently it is exported to the West as a dog treat.
Living in Switzerland I've come to realize that it's pointless to obsess about cheese. Every tiny village has its own varieties. There are probably thousands. It's better to try something new whenever you can - but there are some like Sbrinz that you have over and over.
(Similar feeling about wine - as long as it's a chasselas I'll try anything and there's enough producers to last a lifetimes)
Hah, then there’s the Netherlands where I was excited for the cheese until I realised it’s basically just Gouda. It’s good! But almost all the cheese is Gouda. Kinda strange there isn’t much variety (except for putting different stuff in Gouda)
Fair, but by that logic bread is yeast burps and wine is yeast pee. We sold farmers market cheese for two summers and nobody cared how it got made until the price hit $30/lb. Casu martzu's the one where the fly part is the actual process, though.
The larvae can jump a few inches when disturbed, so people eat it with a hand over the plate, or wear glasses. Also, casu martzu is technically Sardinian. Corsica has its own version, casgiu merzu, same idea.
Is it the sourcing or the aging, though? A raw-milk wheel tasted at a mountain farm can be a different cheese after days in transit. I'd guess shops like that matter most for what they do in their own cellars, not the travel.
Me? I'd love to travel to the home of Camembert, even though I've never been to France. A pretty mundane life goal. But it brings joy to my heart knowing people like this exist.
Tip from a Frenchman: Camembert is an overglorified version of Brie. The one you need to see is where the "king of cheese" is made: Roquefort-sur-Soulzon.
Cheese is the one production system where leaving it untouched for two years is the correct strategy. Nobody pages the cheesemaker at 3am because the wheel went "off." Well, until it's the wrong kind of off.
Not exquisite taste by any means in the world of fine cheeses (which its not, just curded milk) but gets the job done in various eastern european dishes
Reminds me of preserving old software. The recipe's never the whole thing, it's the cave, the herd, the specific microbes. Lose the one farmer who's still doing it and you can't rebuild from documentation. Learned that the hard way with a 1998 build system nobody could reproduce.
I can fully understand the love of cheese, however, there is a hidden cost to it, that I have experienced but only recently acknowledged.
The places they show on TV and in articles such as this is analogous to showing posh West End made-to-measure tailors and pretending that those SHEIN garments from Bangladesh are made the same way, with no 'slavery' involved.
I worked in a cheese factory as a student, taking up the job with an attitude that it must be 'women's work'. How wrong I was. Twelve hour shifts, with 'every object' weighing (or wheying) upwards of 25Kg and every one of your senses brutally assaulted, always with the potential to lose life, limb or another finger in a moment of lapsed focus. Just surviving became the intellectual challenge, with many not making it past two hours before throwing in the towel. Mastery was my goal and I put in the sleepless 'nights' with relentless 'tennis elbow' to get there, achievement unlocked.
Because I was a student, this was not a forever job, and there was a higher tax threshold for students, making it financially tough but worth while.
On a trip down memory lane I looked the old place up, to discover it had shut down due to numerous health and safety violations, which made me chuckle. That was the culture, and the rule, for example, those chemicals that have huge warning labels, to read such a label after getting nervous ticks after using it, would be moral cowardice. Or, if you needed someone's attention, because the machines were so loud, you would casually throw a 25 Kg object at them (a cheese or a bag of salt) as a 'gentle tap on the shoulder'.
On reflection, there is this small matter of the human cost to cheese. PETA might shock people with cheesy animal welfare issues and cardiologists might not be entirely positive about the consumption of 'saturated fat laced with salt', however, few have experienced the harsh reality of working in the industry, to have the strength to write about how extreme and ultra-violent the production of this harmless product can be.
I am not saying 'boycott the product', just 'value it more'.