So I was asked to write about what I do as a cheese importer, how I find my cheese gems. There isn’t one specific way. Often, it’s about recognizing when an opportunity presents itself—“having the eye,” as a colleague once described to me.
Take the goat cheese Leonora, for example, that I bring in from León, Spain. I stumbled on that one at a trade show when I went to say hello to Tomas, the producer of Valdeón cheese. It was a cool-looking white brick tucked away in a refrigerated...
It started with my mother’s quest to find a snack food that would suit my toddler palate and dexterity. When she handed me a few Cheerios, I tasted one and handed the rest back. A series of other toddler snack attempts followed, but to no avail. Just when it appeared that I was destined for a snackless life, cheese came along, in the form of a fish: cheddar Goldfish, to be precise.
I was hooked. Goldfish were my...
I asked the woman at the motel desk how I could find the big cheddar.
She replied, “You mean the big cheddar replica?”
For a moment I thought, “Why does the World’s Largest Talking Cow [Chatty Bell in Wisconsin] get to be a real cow, but the World’s Largest Cheese has to be a mere replica?” But I didn’t dwell. Maybe the clerk was a vegan. I had made my friend Anna, a sociologist, drive a couple of hundred miles out...
It’s possible that, even more than cheese, eggs are having their cultural moment. Recently, the Scientist and I attended a talk on home chicken-keeping by Susan Orlean, author of The Orchid Thief, who broke a cardinal actor’s rule by sharing the stage with a pair of charismatic, misbehaving hens. Still, nearly a hundred urban homesteaders turned out to watch the famous writer be upstaged by a pair of squawking...
I’m not much of a joiner. I’ve got a AAA card, sure, but I gave up on the dance class. I’m not on the alumni committee, either. And this column? Strictly freelance.
But in the cheese world, we Bowling Alone types are far from the norm. With the exception of Kurt Timmermeister, that one-man-dairy from last issue’s Centerfold feature, cheese is a team sport—one of those things that begs for organization.
...
“You’re not a lawyer, are you?”
This was the first question David Burton asked me, and it wasn’t an unreasonable one. It’s not because Burton edits a magazine devoted to marijuana, which is legal for medical use in California, where Burton is based. It’s because his magazine is also called Culture. Fortunately, his publication’s tag line is not “The word on weed” but rather "Southern California’s...
Cheese chicanery fascinates me. Last issue, it was thievery, murder, and smuggling that I ruminated about. This time around, I’ve been preoccupied with a similar subject: the cheese doppelganger.
“Imitation” has a lot of negative connotations for culture readers, but there’s plenty to be said for the practice. Wasn’t Mimolette just a French rip-off of Dutch Edam? Supposedly, Louis XIV wanted to get around a Dutch cheese embargo, so he commissioned a knockoff. And let’s face it, the...
Cheese might seem like a wholesome business on the surface, but here at culture we’re not afraid to peel back the wax and give you a taste of the gamier side:
Dec. 7, 2005,
Memphis, TN (AP):
Jessica Sandy Booth, 18, was arrested over the weekend and charged with four counts of attempted murder and four counts of soliciting a murder . . . According to police, Booth was in the intended victims’ home last week when she mistook a block of queso fresco for cocaine, inspiring...
Between 2007 and 2008, I lived in Beijing, China, with my friend, Ellen, the Cheddar Shark. The food we ate was amazing, but a question quickly arose: Why was there no Chinese cheese? After all, the region is surrounded by dairy-loving neighbors—the Tibetans, who like their cheese crunchy; the Mongolians, for whom it represents purity; the sheep-herding Uyghirs; and, of course, cow-venerating Indians. But the ethnic Han in northern China don’t share this enthusiasm for cheese.
The...
Dating a biologist is a blast, especially if you write a food column. All I’ve got to do is form a vague question (“Are pickles alcoholic?”) or make some half-informed assertion (“Isn’t whale milk the highest-calorie food on earth?”) and Minda starts pulling reference books. Not knowing the real answer drives her nuts. It’s way more fun than Google, and much cuter.
We’re both lucky, though, to live in an age when the mechanics of life are well understood. Before microscopes and omne...
• Preserving the British Crumblies
• Winter Wonder
• The Accidental Cheesemaker
• Cheese Portraits
