REINVENTING THE WHEEL MILK, MICROBES AND THE FIGHT FOR REAL CHEESE
Bronwen Percival & Francis Percival
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www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 © Bronwen Percival and Francis Percival, 2017 Bronwen Percival and Francis Percival have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organisation acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers would be pleased to rectify any errors or omissions brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication data has been applied for. ISBN (hardback) 978-1-4729-5551-7 ISBN (ebook) 978-1-4729-5550-0 2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1 Bloomsbury Sigma, Book Thirty
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C H A P T E R T WO
Real Cheese
T
he French word for the maturation of cheese, affinage, has been adopted wholesale within the Anglo-Saxon world simply because we lack an existing term of our own. ‘Cheese maturer’ lacks the romantic ring of affineur as a job title, so the French terminology has largely won out. It conveys a sense of both the ageing and the refining of cheese as it matures, but in some important ways it does not properly embrace what is happening to the milk in the course of the entire cheesemaking process. Through making cheese and then ageing it to maturity, we have the opportunity to discover the unique character of the milk itself. Cheese is not so much milk ’s leap towards immortality as its passage to adulthood. In this respect, it is interesting to compare the language used for supervising the ageing of wine. In French, the process of looking after wine from fermentation to bottle is not affinage but rather élevage. The literal translation would be ‘raising’, in the same sense as rearing an animal or bringing up a child. It is a useful idea: not only does it capture the relationship between milk and cheese, but it also gives us a tool with which we can imagine the connection between raw materials and finished product. There is something appropriate in thinking about milk in terms of child-rearing metaphors. Consider a nursery full of newborn babies. As hospitals are all too aware, it is extremely easy to get babies mixed up. Glance in on a nursery of newborns, and they all look like Winston Churchill; if they are swaddled, then it is impossible even to guess their sex. This, then, is the state of milk: it has much potential, but this potential is as yet unrealised, making milk appear interchangeable and substitutable. Even milk as distinctive as that from Guy Chambon’s Salers cows would taste ‘milky’ if it were sold as a pint of semi-skimmed. Moreover, looking at
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newborns – or tasting fresh milk – does not give us much of a clue as to their finished character. Yes, we can spot certain defects, but there is nothing to say that the child screaming the loudest is going to be the most garrulous adult. Even birth weight does not significantly correlate with eventual adult size. Then there is the impact of parenting. Take any of those little bundles of genetic potential and subject it to a dehumanising upbringing, and you will see the consequences in the person’s character as an adult. The greater the structured brutality, the more consistent the output. In situations where institutions such as the military require recruits to subsume their individuality to an unquestioning collective identity, great emphasis is placed on dismantling the sense of self. So too for cheese. The greatest raw milk, with an ideal balance of microbes and perfect physical properties, can easily lose all sense of its own character through insensitive cheesemaking; pasteurisation is not even required to wipe the microbial slate clean. At the other extreme, if a child is raised in an environment entirely devoid of structure, the resulting adult will be a feral mess, having developed little or no language or other prized facets of our humanity. Likewise, leaving milk entirely to its own devices is not the route to great or distinctive cheese: in that direction lies mouldy yogurt. The challenge is to provide the child – or cheese, as the case may be – with just enough structure to nurture the development of a fully-fledged individual. Knowing Your Milk So how do you know the potential of your milk? What, for that matter, is good milk? When dealing with fresh liquid milk, these are difficult questions. Across the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, scientists and government regulators attempted to define milk quality, to make milk knowable beyond its milky flavour. Milk adulteration was a significant concern, and in the nineteenth-century market
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for liquid milk on both sides of the Atlantic, something as elementary as diluting it with water was a common trick used by milk traders to stretch profits. The problem for authorities was that it was impossible to tell the difference between water that had been added for nefarious reasons and water that was simply a constituent of what had come from the cow. With the variation in milk composition across the cycle of a season, any definition of ‘natural ’ would be arbitrary at best. A procession of techniques was employed, from monitoring the specific gravity of the liquid to studying its chemistry, its boiling point and its capacity to refract light. In each case, both a laboratory and expert scientific credentials were required. If unfortunate consumers do not have their own fully functioning laboratories at home, whom should they trust? It is not surprising that external – often governmentsanctioned – marks of quality have entered the market. Organic certification and the geographical indication of protected food names bring yet another layer of extra knowledge that is required of beleaguered consumers. With no hope of verifying any of these claims themselves, consumers must trust the efficiency of the certifying body’s audit and the rigour of the specification. Yet, even as nineteenth-century scientists and dairy technicians were squaring off over the best tests to verify the naturalness and authenticity of liquid milk, consumers were keenly aware of the variable quality of the cheese put before them. As early as the seventeenth century, the insatiable demand for butter in London was prompting dairy farmers in the surrounding counties to cut corners. Cream would be skimmed off to make highly profitable butter, but this left the problem of the remaining skimmed milk. It was made into cheese so consistently bad that it inspired its own doggerel. The cheese: Mocks the weak effort of the bending blade, Or in the hog-trough rests in perfect spite, Too big to swallow, and too hard to bite.1
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At least it was cheap. Unpalatable as it was, the cheese from the counties of Essex and Suffolk did find a market as provision for ships on long voyages, where its capacity to resist heat was useful. It was still universally detested. Even now, centuries later, there is very little cheese production in the counties near London. Cheese was – and still is – something that defined particular places through the experience that it gave the consumer. Thinking of her childhood, Bronwen cannot help but be amused. Natasha and Ginger, her glossy and healthy pet goats, lived in a dry environment and were milked carefully by hand into spotless utensils; they were in a position to produce exceptionally low-risk milk. But she never had the chance to discover what the milk was like, to taste the character of the land on which she grew up. Without a clear understanding of the risks, and terrified of the miasma that might have been lurking within the goat shed, when it came to making cheese she had opted to wipe the microbial slate clean and rely on a freeze-dried packet of purified bacterial strains. More than 20 years later, this destroy-and-replace approach to milk microbes is still the default mode for most cheesemaking. Safety through sterility is an approach that is so comfortingly obvious that we have taken it for granted for more than a century, both in our food production and in our daily lives. The common term for microbes in everyday, nonspecialist language is ‘germs’. In many ways, this terminology is sensible, as it reflects their status as organisms capable of growing and developing, like the seeds of a plant. But the difference between ‘germ’ and ‘pathogen’ in the collective imagination is ill defined. Language is powerful in shaping our ideas and prejudices. And we have no lay word for microorganisms that is not wrapped up with fear, fi lth and contagion. But is aiming to eliminate all microbes actually the most effective approach to fighting pathogens and staying healthy? ‘Farms and dairies are not hospitals’, according to Dr Montel. And indeed, there is more to the microbiology of milk and cheese than marauding pathogens. Raw milk is a tremendous reservoir of microbial
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diversity, with many of its residents yet to be identified and understood. Hundreds of species of bacteria, yeasts and moulds have been found in raw milk, and each of those species evolves within its farm ecosystem, adapting itself to fi ll a specific ecological niche. These microbial communities represent complex and everevolving systems that combine the microbial residents of the fields, the bedding and the feed, the animals, the equipment and even the milkers themselves. However, if you just drink liquid milk, you are never aware that they exist. It is the interaction of the two scales of farming – the macro level of the animals and plants and the microbial level within the milk – that makes (or rather can make) cheese that tastes of the farming system within which it is produced. There is no way that Guy Chambon, even with all the technology and investment in the world, could make his cheese from a large herd of animals fed on industrial by-products. Reflecting on her own homesteading experience, Bronwen came to a realisation. As she tasted cheese every day at work, it became clear to her that whereas milk is difficult to ‘know’, since fault-free milk all tastes more or less milky and sweet, cheese is dramatically more articulate. It is fully formed and speaks to you. In cheese, the aspects of milk that are most challenging to monitor, from the level of protein to the balance of microbial inhabitants, are made manifest. You are encountering an adult rather than a mewling, puking infant. Furthermore, this knowledge is accessible to anyone who tastes the cheese. Cheese is democratic. There is no requirement for superhuman tasting ability; anybody with a degree of curiosity and a modicum of experience can easily learn to make sensible judgements about the finished product. Cheese is milk made knowable. The Rewards of Dairying Exemplified If cheese makes milk knowable, how do we then know if the cheese itself is any good? Faced with constant invocations of the past and tradition, we were both intrigued by the history
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of British cheese and cheesemaking. This was the basis of Bronwen’s thesis, but she had not had an opportunity to genuinely investigate historical practice. And so the great exploration began. One of the first historical figures that we encountered is now Bronwen’s greatest cheese crush, Josiah Twamley. Perhaps it is not surprising that Bronwen fi nds Twamley such a resonant figure: he too was a cheese buyer. Whereas Bronwen visits cheesemakers and selects cheese in the twenty-fi rst century, Josiah Twamley was a London cheese factor doing exactly the same thing in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Like Bronwen, he was also determined to improve his industry. In two books, Dairying Exemplified, or The Business of Cheese-Making (1784; a revised second edition was published in 1787) and Essays on the Management of the Dairy (1816), Twamley shared his experiences selecting cheese across England and put forward a trenchant vision of best practice. He does not mince his words. Twamley’s discussion of cheesemaking in his era has been the subject of study by historians interested in the competing expertise of the male London cheese factor and Enlightenment improver and the dairymaids whose products he bought. Read by a fellow cheese factor two centuries later, his concerns are familiar. (Twamley even has an obsession with dairy hygiene, albeit from a premicrobial base of knowledge. He describes dirty dairies as bastions of ‘sluttish nastiness’, a term that has become Bronwen’s default description of poor cheese-test results.2) More to the point, Twamley has a precisely articulated philosophy of the power of uniqueness in cheese and its capacity to give both cheesemaker and factor a sustainable livelihood: Such a dealer [cheese factor] is very certain, that in a large connexion of trade, he will find some very good judges, who know how to prefer excellence in quality, and are well acquainted with the perfections required in the article, and perhaps from their situation in life, are enabled to get a much higher, than a
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common Market-price, for a superior Article: Such a Person will have such goods, in what place soever they can be met with, and knows also that in order to procure them he must give a superior Price.3 In the late eighteenth century, Twamley understood the essential covenant that still drives ambitious producers today: make a better product, a unique product, and the market will reward you with more money. For the modern food movement, the loose collection of activists and advocates who define themselves in opposition to the industrial food system, this invocation of the power of big-spending, highstatus consumers to reward the exceptional artisan smacks uncomfortably of elitism. Self-consciously complicated idiosyncrasies of production, such as those involved in the making of Salers Tradition, do not help either. ‘Not all cheese,’ they might say, ‘can be like Salers, either in terms of its methods of production or its price.’ That is unfortunate. One of the achievements of the twentieth century was to give us the illusion that we have successfully defeated nature when it comes to limitations on food production. Food – or at least the handful of commodities to which modern agriculture devotes its attention – is unprecedentedly cheap. We can see that quite clearly in the case of cheese. In the United Kingdom in 1865, the wholesale price in the London market of the top Cheddars reached 112 shillings per hundredweight. Measuring this worth by looking at the income value, the percentage of relative average income that would be used to buy the cheese, it becomes some £112 per kilogram (roughly $75 per pound) in 2015 prices.4 At wholesale, that represents roughly 10 times the modern price. We live now with the consequences of this apparent cheapness as we grapple with the costs of the unpriced externalities of the intensification of agriculture, from environmental damage to the epidemic of chronic diet-related diseases. As we discuss in Chapter 5, on feeding ruminants, a low shelf price does not mean that food is genuinely cheap.
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Moreover, not all cheese should be like Salers Tradition. Salers is a highly specific set of solutions to the problems posed by farming and cheesemaking in the mountains of the Auvergne; other cheeses fi nd their own paths without resorting to the same techniques. But we are certain that cheese itself should be more expensive. Or rather, cheese should demand more resources of us as a society, as should all other forms of animal protein. How those resources are distributed throughout our society is a separate political decision, one that in democracies we make at the ballot box. Those factors that allow for the production of ‘cheap’ cheese – the standardisation, pasteurisation and blending of milk from potentially many thousands of individual farms – are also those that pose the most danger to rural communities. By removing the identity of the farmer as producer and replacing it with a carefully constructed corporate brand, they destroy the capacity of the cheese to have a social life, that is, its ability to reach across the culturally distinct and diverse chasms between producer and consumer. This matters now more than ever. The tumultuous politics of 2016, with the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom and the presidential election in the United States, underlined the divide between urban and rural on both sides of the Atlantic: they left two distinct Great Britains and two distinct Americas that struggle to communicate and understand each other. This divide makes for awkward pauses and tense moments around farmhouse kitchen tables when we visit from London and conversation turns to politics, but cheese has the capacity to bridge this abyss. Cheesemaking is a brilliant technology to allow remote dairy farmers to access distant markets. It takes something inherently heavy and intensely fragile, in the form of milk, and transforms it into an artefact of remarkable robustness that is only 10 per cent of the original weight. Cheese is designed for cultural exchange, and it is no coincidence that those cheeses with the most ancient names, like Parmesan or Gruyère, are hard cheeses that are designed to travel.
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Lorraine Lewandrowski is a fourth-generation dairy farmer and farmer advocate in upstate New York. She is an attorney representing farmers and landowners in her rural community in Herkimer County, New York, but she also, together with her sister and brother, farms 60 Holsteins and a few pet Jerseys on some 405 hectares (1,000 acres) of meadows and rough hill country. It is a place with a strong dairying heritage: this is the New York milkshed, the traditional source of the milk consumed in New York City, and it is the place that drove the first great nineteenth-century expansion of the American cheese industry. But now it is hurting, and Lewandrowski believes that there are not many in the food movement who feel their pain. There are many large milk processors in upstate New York, such as yogurt behemoths Chobani, Fage and Dannon, but the milk they use is essentially interchangeable, and it does not matter if it is sourced locally or from as far afield as Tennessee. For Lewandrowski, the tensions within the system came to a head in 2009, when the milk price crashed globally. In rural New York state, it was a time of desperation and increasingly angry rallies. ‘I went to one rally in the summer of 2009 where I feared for my life,’ said Lewandrowski. ‘I decided that I would do what I could from my law office by making calls to people I found on the Internet who might be interested in rural Northeast farmers. Virtually every group that I spoke to said that they were really more interested in “ local ” food, “good food ”, fruits, vegetables, the Hudson River Valley.’ The disconnect between the pain of the rural dairy farmer and the urban food movement that was increasingly sceptical about milk itself was palpable. If this was the alliance on which farming was to depend, then the future looked bleak. ‘Other farm women started phoning NYC cheesemongers to at least tell them what was going on,’ Lewandrowski recalled. ‘It seemed so desperate, but to our surprise, the cheesemongers told us to a person that they were doing all that they could to inform the public of the desperate situation. They told us that artisan cheesemakers were trying to speak on behalf of those of us commodity farmers, their neighbours in the Northeast.’
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Cheesemongers were the natural allies of the farmers, their voices in communicating with an urban consumer base. During the Occupy movement in 2011, Lewandrowski presented a show on the Heritage Radio Network with New York City cheesemongers Tia Keenan and Anne Saxelby that they called ‘Occupy Dairy’. It allowed for a wide-ranging conversation on air about the state of the average Northeast dairy farm, from the dangers posed by the consolidation of buyers and the associated antitrust concerns to milk price volatility: ‘The global-scale milk processors would never encourage frank conversation.’ When, in 2013, a group of dairy farmers decided to submit proposals to speak at an urban conference called Just Food, it was again the cheesemakers who backed them up, supplying coolers of cheeses. ‘Our neighbours [were] saying … “Give ’em hell! Tell them about the land,”’ Lewandrowski recounted. ‘Sharing cheese with the people who attended our presentation, we were able to say, “This is what the landscapes taste like, this is our local dairy in central New York.”’ This is why cheeses made with integrity, those that retain their sense of place, are not elitist but rather subversive. Even when they are bought from a large supermarket, these cheeses demand of the retailer such care and attention that they must be cut carefully to order, a job that requires a face-to-face interaction with a dedicated cheesemonger. On multiple levels, cheese has the capacity to subvert industrial food systems and connect the urban and the rural. Real Cheese There is great precedent for the cheesemonger as activist and advocate. In the mid-twentieth century, the dark days of the British cheese industry that saw the retreat from farmhouse production and the rise of the supermarkets as the dominant force within the industry, there was one retailer who stood out. Major Patrick Rance had fought the Nazis, but in peacetime he found himself engaged in another existential struggle, this one based on his modest cheese shop in Streatley,
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not far from London. With his monocle and aristocratic connections, he cut an eccentric figure, but he had a clear vision of his aspirations for cheese. In his Great British Cheese Book (1982), he outlined the problem: from 1948 to 1974, there had been a drop in the number of farms making Cheddar in the southwest of England from 61 to 33. (As we write this, in 2016, there are only five.) He also proposed a solution. Taking his inspiration from the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) and the Campaign for Real Bread, Rance noted that ‘ fortunate and few are those within reach of Real Cheese to go with it’5 and called for a similar movement for cheese. Rance’s fight was with factory production. For him, the enemy – the unreal cheese – was the mountain of vacuumpacked blocks that was steadily replacing the United Kingdom’s established territorial cheeses. We agree with his sentiment, but following his inspiration, this book pushes further. The risk of defining the real and making it essential, of claiming to separate the authentic and the fake, is that it becomes an exercise in arbitrary exclusion. CAMRA, as successful as it has been at celebrating and reinvigorating British cask ales, also stands accused of stifl ing the British craft-brewing scene with its insistence that only caskconditioned ales are ‘real ’. That is not our intention; it would be absurd to claim a single style of cheese as uniquely real. Rather, for us, real cheese is a manifestation of wider biodiversity, a food that exploits all of the resources and raw materials of the farm, from the botanical to the microbial. It is an acknowledgement that dairy farming and cheesemaking are one and the same process, and of the moral hazard that comes from any intervention – whether it be aggressive use of fertilisers, pasteurisation of milk or insensitive use of microbial cultures – that obliterates the link between the cheese and the environment from which it is fashioned. At best, these interventions are simply a patch; at worst, they threaten to undermine the sustainability of the entire industry.
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An opportunity lies before us. Advances in our understanding of biology have given us the tools to begin to understand and work with natural ecosystems at every level. Evidence is accruing of the social and environmental benefits associated with food systems that look beyond the production of faceless commodity outputs. Real cheese is subversive in its simplicity: it reunites farming and flavour. And in doing so, it rewards diversity and sustainability at every level. What follows is a journey through the cheesemaking process, beginning with the very first decisions that a farmer must make about what and how to farm and continuing through each of the key stages of cheesemaking itself. We start with a primer on the mechanics of cheesemaking to provide some context for these decisions, and then follow the life of the cheese from its earliest inception. At every stage, we have deliberately chosen not to segregate the book like a textbook: the reader will encounter issues at the same time those issues would trouble the farmhouse cheesemaker rather than according to a pedagogical schema. We know that cheesemaking is inherently interdisciplinary: it is equal parts art, science and intuition. As we track the path from field to consumer, we want to convey the pitfalls and complexities facing the producer. The same is true of the geographical scope of the book. We discuss the issues involved in the context of a cheese or region where they are of particular concern. There is no absolute Real Cheese, only real cheeses made in the context of specific places.
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An extract from
Reinventing the Wheel by Bronwen & Francis Percival
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