I’ve written a couple articles for Cosmonaut on Jewish things but by trade I’m a cheesemonger, so I read with interest the recent article on food production. I have no real critiques of the piece. It’s a necessary dive into the exploitative practices that make Western luxuries possible. With regard to specific food like cheese, we can look at histories that reveal how factory production has disrupted age-old practices. The US was the first country to produce cheese en masse and this screwed up international markets so bad that they did not recover for decades; scores of cheesemakers, whose families had been producing unique recipes for centuries, were put out of business.
That said, I love my job and I love cheese. The only nationalist indulgence I have is pride that last year, the US finally won the title of World’s Best Cheese (Rogue River Blue from Oregon). European cheese makers rely on stamps of authenticity in order for their cheese to retain value: they dictate the areas in which varieties of cheese can be produced, even the type of feed for animals. “Counterfeit” cheese is a vast market of its own, worth millions of dollars. The US has no such requirements, and the experimentation with cheese making here, I believe, can be a counter to unchanging factory farming. The process of making cheese, as all food production does, the authors note, has profound implications for Marxist concepts like alienation. Cheese is one of the oldest foods in the world and it has a lot to teach us. In the words of the Frankfurt school, the West cannot be defended. Except for its cheese.
– Lane Silberstein
