Cheese is Good to Think With

The Camembert crisis and the work of regrowing a living culture

Bleu de Termignon (Photo: Frédérique Voisin-Demery)

“We can only know the things we tame,” said the fox. “Men no longer have time to get to know anything. They buy things readymade from the shops. But since there aren’t any shops that sell friends, men no longer have friends.”

The Little Prince¹

The autumn I turned two, our family moved to Germany. It was only for four months – an international placement as part of my dad’s last year in theological college – but four months at the age of two can mark you for life. I came back with a scattering of vocabulary, a ride-on Feuerwehr and a taste for eating cheese at breakfast time. The last of these stayed with me – and, growing up in the north of England in the 1980s, these continental breakfast habits were odd enough to draw comment.²

I’ve been thinking about cheese this morning, more than usual, on account of two pieces that I read last week. The first comes from the nomadic cheesemaker

Trevor Warmedahl

and it’s where I learned about “the Camembert crisis”. The world of cheese has been in ferment since January, when the National Centre for Scientific Research in Paris reported that Camembert and Roquefort could be on their way to extinction.

The crisis has to do with the moulds that help us make these cheeses. In the case of Camembert, the familiar white rind, with its mild mushroomy flavour, results from the use of a single strain, Penicillium camemberti, which is bought in freeze-dried packs and has become the standard for cheesemakers in France and around the world. The attraction of this strain is that it is albino: a chance genetic mutation switched off pigmentation and, combined with its smooth surface, this whiteness produces a paradox: a mould which looks clean, a lifeform whose appearance suggests sterility.

Sometimes appearances turn out to be prophetic, because sterile is what Penicillium camemberti has become. The biology of reproduction among fungi is complex, but it includes the possibility of sexual reproduction – where the genetic material of two parents is combined, with room for all the usual evolutionary variation – as well as asexual reproduction, in which the offspring is a clone, genetically identical to its parent. This second approach suits the desire for uniform, predictable outcomes, avoiding any rogue patches of blue or orange on the rind, and in fact the strain used for Camembert long since ceased to be capable of sexual reproduction. The current crisis comes about because the mould is now losing its capacity to produce the spores required for asexual reproduction.³

Faced with a crisis, people look for solutions. Is the answer to repeat the process by which we got here, starting from a wild mould, to breed a new healthy domesticated strain? Or might there be a shortcut, using genome editing to fix the errors which have crept into the existing strain? The point

Trevor Warmedahl

makes is that there is another way to look at the situation: rather than treating it as a problem to be fixed, we might recognise the Camembert crisis as containing a lesson about the way we have been going about things, a lesson about a way of inhabiting the world:

A limited number of genetically identical clones of this mold are grown on millions of cheeses, like a pristine white lawn, where weeds are not tolerated. Immaculate, white rinds are seen as the goal, and little splotches of biodiversity (blue penicillium or grey mucor) are seen as contaminants. This obsession with purity is delusional, and reflects a wider fear, of nature, of the uncontrollable.

Why would we go to enormous effort, he asks, to restore the situation that preceded the crisis? What if we took it, instead, as an opportunity “to reevaluate the sanity and safety of cheesemaking based on the paradigm of industrial agriculture”?⁴

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A day after I’d read Trevor’s piece,

Max Jones

dropped the first instalment of a series in which he asks, “Is hygiene ruining our traditional foods?” Max works alongside artisans from across Europe, as a writer, photographer, food producer and educator. In this new series, he charts a stand-off between two different foodworlds, one of which has been around for a little over a century, while the other goes back thousands of years. He began to notice the tension when he went to train with a specialist cheesemonger in London:

Mongering cheeses similar to those I had grown up with in the mountains of Piedmont in Italy was familiar, yet I remember finding them a little out of place amongst our clean whites and cheese-contact knives and tools that we washed down religiously with Topax-19, a corrosive liquid that made your eyes water and your throat sore as you inhaled it while you scrubbed.

The contrast deepens into conflict, because the traditional food producers from whom Max has learned the most often live with a sense of shame, embarrassment or fear: their methods are “wrong”, according to the standards of health and safety belonging to the modern industrial foodworld. And this conflict is asymmetric, because these industrial standards have the force of law and the ideology of progress at their back.

Names are often redacted in Max’s writing to protect his friends and informants. In one essay, he describes visiting D, who lives high up the Elvo valley, past the point where the road runs out. Most of the surrounding stone houses are abandoned. On arrival, Max notices five rough-shaped blocks of handmade butter floating in a bowl of mountain water. When he asks if he can take some photos, D tells him, “No, you can’t, I don’t want to go to prison.” This man has a part-time job in a dairy at the bottom of the valley, a small cooperative whose packaging announces that “most of our milk is from these mountains”. On the side of their packets is an image of a stone mountain dwelling like the one in which D lives, yet the butter produced in the dairy is not worked by hand: “they use added starter cultures, the building is made of concrete and plastic and stainless steel, and I cannot fall in love with what they produce.” Max is adamant about the contrast in the flavour between even this small-scale commercial production, carried out within the protocols of refrigeration, pasteurisation and chemical cleaning agents, and the cheese and butter which the same man makes at home, where his “intuitive knowledge of fermentation used as a genuine tool for preserving food … is structured into his working day.”

The detail in Max’s observations of these carriers of traditional knowledge is important, because it makes it hard to cast them in the role of modernity’s imagined other: helpless without science, at the mercy of a hostile nature, thrown back on superstition. Rather, what emerges is a picture of people whose lives are bound up with processes based on sustained attention to and relationship with the other living actors involved, processes which have served human communities for thousands of years.

In the Auvergne, he sits down to lunch with Marcel, one of the herders who make Salers de Buron cheese:

On the table was a clip-top glass jar and inside, saucisson sec and a mysterious, brownish clump of something furry. An unlucky mouse maybe?

The jar opens with a pop, and after they have eaten:

Marcel … picked out the dirty little tuft with his large sausage-fingers and lit it with a match, dropping it back in the jar and closed the lid. I realised that it was a cotton-wool ball that burned until all oxygen was consumed as the flame died, and it had created a vacuum in the jar.

Another example of the vernacular knowledge of food preservation that is woven through the practices of this traditional foodworld.

The work that Max is doing is based on a gamble: that practices which look marginal and anachronistic just now, which cling on with the help of strange alliances, are carrying knowledge that we will all need soon. When the industrial clone lines peter out, as the weather becomes too unpredictable for the patterns of farming on which global corporations built their profits, there are clues for what still works in these ways of inhabiting the world, sources of resilience to be found both in the details and in the approach which they embody.⁵

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Last autumn, we held an online series called Regrowing a Living Culture. This is language that I’ve walked with for years now, words that came along early in our journey with a school called HOME – but it was the first time we had framed an invitation around this theme. In the opening sessions, I was struck by how often the conversation turned to sourdough, yoghurt, kefir or sauerkraut. There’s a bridge between people’s experiences with these more-than-human “living cultures” and the work of regrowing our ways of being human together. They offer images that reflect, backwards and forwards, helping us give words to the work that is called for. Six months on, as I prepare to teach a new series – Further Adventures in Regrowing a Living Culture – my morning reading about cheese has brought me back to this bridge. So I want to share four crossings that I notice between the questions we are carrying at our school and the stories Max and Trevor are telling.

The first crossing has to do with the difficulty of starting from where we find ourselves. When Max has drawn out the contrast between two foodworlds – “the magnificent, human heritage of producing food harmoniously within specific geographical contexts that span millennia” and “a set of systems and protocols that only began to take shape in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, prioritising industry-centric food systems” – he goes on to acknowledge this difficulty. The Salers cows are milked by hand and the still-warm milk is poured into a gerle, a wooden barrel in which the cheese is made. Max reckons the gerles that Marcel uses are at least 150 years old; the wood itself will contain “a unique family of completely natural microbes” which are part of the cheesemaking. At the end of his visit, he writes:

I left feeling that were I to begin natural cheesemaking back home in Ireland without a cultural totem like the gerle to back me up, the struggle would be immense.

There’s a lot in that line: on the one hand, the totemic status of the traditional process provides a degree of protection for some artisanal makers against the demands and expectations of the industrial system and it protocols; on the other hand, it’s one thing to carry on a thousand-year-old tradition which revolves around objects like the gerle and its microbial community, and another to try to start one up. Doesn’t this correspond to the position in which many of us find ourselves? Convinced that industry-centric ways of being human represent a dead-end, yet far from sure as to how to find a path towards something worth the name of a living culture, given such an unpromising starting point.⁶

This is a sobering thought – and yet, before it hardens into paralysis, I want to bring in a second lesson from our microbial co-conspirators in the work of culture. Because cultures pass through bottlenecks: one small microbial community, sometimes a long way from its traditional home, can end up being the way that a particular food tradition passes through a lean time. At least, that’s a story I’ve heard over meals shared with people who know far more than I do about various kinds of fermenting. And it reminds me of hearing Sámi activists in northern Sweden speak about the importance of one folk high school, founded by missionaries in the 1940s, which turned out to be the bottleneck through which much of their language and culture could survive the hostile environment of high modernity, becoming a seedbed for their ongoing struggle. Small pockets of cultural activity can turn out to make all the difference, in ways that no one involved could have known for sure at the time.

The third crossover has to do with the “obsession with purity” which Trevor describes. The clean white rind of a Camembert sets me thinking of newly washed sheets, and this calls to mind the special norms of cleanliness that apply to the hotel room. When you stay the night at a friend’s house, you don’t expect to find the end of the toilet roll folded into a triangle. It is the anonymity of the hotel that calls for exceptional standards: sterility serves as a proxy for trust, in the absence of relationship. The sterility prized by industry-centric food systems emerges from the anonymity of the modern city, where we live on things bought readymade from shops and lack the time to get to know those on whom our lives depend. The work of regrowing a living culture involves both recovering skills and renewing relationships.

Which brings me back to the words of the fox in The Little Prince and one further thing that I’ve learned from thinking with cheese. When we push back against the “fear of nature” that governs industrial processes, it’s easy to end up speaking a language of wildness. There’s a vocabulary here that comes to hand, because it’s a binary that runs through the history of modern thought: over here we are cultured, over there they live in a “state of nature”. What goes missing from this is a middle ground which is more challenging to the assumptions of industrial modernity. Domestication does not have to look like the pursuit of control and uniformity, the enslavement of other species to our purposes; it can look like a coming into relationship, getting to know each other, coming to depend on each other, and being changed as a consequence, in ways that run in each direction. Think of the dance between species by which wolves became dogs, a dance which began with the sharing of food. As Trevor points out, a similar process takes place between humans, moulds and yeasts in the culture of cheesemaking: the caves and ageing spaces where cheeses are kept provide an abundant food source where “wild” moulds develop new characteristics, patterns of ongoing collaboration emerge and are sustained, all of this without relying on modern–industrial ways of knowing and managing the world.

What I love about this last line of thought is the language that comes with it, because the pattern by which dogs and microbes come into relation with humans is known as commensal domestication. Literally, domestication through “eating at the same table”. And as one half of a school called HOME, a school that “grows out of the conversations we bring together around our kitchen table”, this is a story which seems to have a place for the work we are doing.

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On the kitchen table

We don’t teach cheesemaking at this school. Should you find your way to the kitchen table here in Östervåla, you may well taste the fruits of Anna’s collaborations with the sourdough culture that our friend Giacomo brought and the cheeses made across the lake at Ängsholmens farm. But if you join us at the online extension of our teaching house, then you’ll meet people around the world who are in different places on their own journeys into the work of regrowing a living culture.

We travel alongside each other for a few weeks, as I share stories and make connections, looking for constellations worth steering by in these strange times. Out of these encounters, we’ve seen new paths open up for our participants, as friendships and collaborations are seeded. And anyone who has taken part in one of these series is welcome at the Long Table, where friends we made through earlier series host an ongoing rhythm of weekly and monthly gatherings.

The new series begins on 23 and 24 May, with groups that meet on a Thursday evening and a Friday morning (European time). Bookings are open now and the full details can be found on the school website.

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If you’ve enjoyed this post, then I heartily recommend subscribing to

Trevor Warmedahl

’s

Milk Trekker

and

Max Jones

’s

Up There The Last

. You may also want to check out the workshops that Max runs at his teaching house in Ireland.

Finally, for those on the far side of the Atlantic, a shout out for the Summer Sessions that

Adam Wilson

has just announced at

The Peasantry School Newsletter

in Keeseville, NY. I should add that Adam is another of the friends made through our earlier online series.

1. The quote is taken from my friend Gregory Norminton’s translation of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s marvellous novel.

2. As a tribe, the English have strong taboos around cheese: eat it too early in the day and you mark yourself as an outsider; eat it too late and you invite bad spirits to disturb your dreams. Which basically leaves lunchtime – and as I write this, I suddenly remember taking Anna to visit the corner of the world where I did my growing up, when she ordered a ploughman’s in a pub in Barnard Castle and was presented with a plate that included an entire block of supermarket cheddar chopped into four.

3. So far as I’ve understood, this happens because, over time, errors creep in to the genetic replication process, a particular gene can get switched off – and, in the absence of the capacity for sexual reproduction, it’s impossible for the mould to interbreed and pick up other genetic material that would compensate for this. If you want to learn more, start with this article by Josh Windsor.

4. Readers of At Work in the Ruins will recognise in these contrasting responses to the Camembert crisis an echo of what I call “the upstream questions”: those questions which climate change asks us, which can’t be answered by climate science alone, starting with “How did we find ourselves in this trouble?” (See Chapter 5 of the book.)

5. Again, there’s so much resonance here with the arguments I was making in At Work in the Ruins, for this is the “small and branching path” that stands in contrast to the “big path” that was meant to lead to the future, but proves to be “a fast track to nowhere”.

6. A bow here to the honesty of Stephen Jenkinson’s Orphan Wisdom school for naming this challenge upfront. What other kind of wisdom is possible, when you weren’t born into anything resembling a living cultural lineage?