three

Grass, Farmland, and Where

My Cheese Love Story Begins

I was called to jury duty last year. When we walked into the court-
room for selection, each potential juror had to inform the court of
his or her name, neighborhood, and occupation. When my turn came
(and, like a punch line, I was last), I said, “My name is Gordon Edgar,
I live in Duboce Triangle, and I work at Rainbow Grocery Cooperative
as a cheesemonger.”
Everyone laughed. The lawyers laughed. The potential jurors
laughed. Even the judge and the court reporter snickered. Only the
eighty-five-year-old plaintiff, who had been run over by the defen-
dant, didn’t crack a smile—but she had an excuse since she only
spoke Cantonese. Her lawyer recovered, and then asked me, in open
court, for any cheese tips I might have.
Like everyone else ever in the history of jury duty, I was frustrated
by the glacially slow jury selection process. We were in our second
day, and since the plaintiff’s attorney was getting paid quite well, I
didn’t feel like sharing my professional knowledge for free. “Don’t get
me started,” I replied curtly.
After we were chosen, the remaining jurors asked if I could bring
cheese to the deliberations. I brought chunked pieces of four-year-
aged Gouda, Bravo Silver Mountain Cheddar, and Italian Piave in

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clear, compostable, sixteen-ounce bulk containers for the lunch

breaks. I brought doughnuts to our two-hour deliberation because it
started at eight thirty in the morning.
I often get asked my opinion on the relationship Americans have
with cheese, usually by a customer who has a pet theory about
how society works. Often these theories are pessimistic: Processed
American Cheese symbolizes soulless suburban white-bread culture;
commodity block Cheddars are emblems of Americans’ disconnect
from their cultural roots; the relatively small number of choices we
have (outside of a few urban centers) when buying cheese reveals
how much control factory farming has over the food supply. Jury
duty provided a good amount of time to think about this question:
How do Americans relate to cheese?
When conversing with me over the counter, customers often
declare that Americans, excluding themselves of course, don’t appre-
ciate cheese. Yet every American, on average, consumes over thirty
pounds of cheese a year. That’s less than half what the people of
Greece, the world leader, consume, according to the International
Dairy Association. Still, it’s good enough for seventh place in the
world.2 In 2005 the United States produced over nine billion pounds
of cheese. Clearly Americans love cheese.3
An oft-spoken critique is that Americans don’t appreciate “good”
cheese. If we assume that “good cheese” means cheese in the
$10-a-pound and up range, we have to remember that, in the more
fancy-cheese-friendly nations, cheese is much cheaper. In Berlin I
once visited a department store with a huge cheese selection. There
was no American-made cheese there, but the same European cheeses
we carry in San Francisco were about a third of the price. And this
was a very high-end place. Ten thousand fewer travel miles, and a
smaller number of people with their hands in the pie, make a differ-
ence in pricing, to be sure.
Holding a huge bag of cheese and trying to find an exit, I stumbled
across the US food section. Imported Pop-Tarts were about $10 a box.
Small plastic jars of Skippy peanut butter were even more. When

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American foodies mock other Americans for not appreciating fine

cheese, they should remember that the US equivalent to French Brie
is a forty-pound block of commodity Cheddar.
Of course it’s ridiculous to generalize about “Americans.” But I find
there’s a default reaction—amusement—among most people when I
tell them what I do, a fact confirmed by my experience in one of the
most diverse civic gathering places of all: the jury room. The reason
for their bemusement is simple: Most Americans think cheese is funny.
Don’t get me wrong. I love the cheese. I’d like to think it loves me
back. But there is a certain absurdity associated with my job that I’ve
become immune to noticing, and it’s helpful to get an outside view
every once in a while. Cheese is funny to almost everyone except
dairy farmers and cheesemakers. I have a great job: full benefits,
worker-run store, decent pay for eating cheese all day long. I’m not
complaining in the least. But when I say that cheese is funny, I mean
funny in the sense that when I tell strangers what I do, as in the jury
room, they tend to laugh.
Fancy cheese might be funny to most Americans, even if the indi-
vidual ingredients aren’t amusing. Most cheese is made of milk, starter
culture, rennet, and salt, and I’ll go into great detail about all these
ingredients. But where’s the amusement here? Nothing funny about
milk. In fact, before chemical companies began messing around with
the recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH), milk was looked
upon as a symbol of purity. Starter culture determines certain chemi-
cal reactions in the cheesemaking process and the overall finished
flavor, but starter culture is often used in breadmaking and no one
laughs at bakers. Rennet, traditionally an enzyme from the lining of a
calf’s stomach, used to coagulate milk, is not in any way funny. Gross
yes, funny no. Salt? I can’t think of a less amusing basic ingredient.
As a whole, only fancy cheeses get mocked. Nobody, except elit-
ist foodies, really laughs at processed cheese. Forty-pound blocks
of commodity Jack, Cheddar, and mozzarella demand a grudging
respect because they are honest and relatively cheap. They go on
pizzas and nachos. They are useful.

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But moldy, stinky, fragile little cheeses? People love to come to our
store and laugh at them. I had to make a special sign for the Le Farto
brand of French Reblochon because I got tired of hearing the same
attempts at humor every day. The sign starts off by saying, ok, first
off, we don’t wanna hear your “cutting the cheese” jokes. People, people!

I assure you. I beg you. Your cheesemonger has heard that fart joke
you are contemplating. Just move on.
The need customers have to make fun of the Le Farto puts a visi-
ble strain on their faces. I get to observe people physically trying to
hold their comments to themselves, nudging their friends, pointing at
the sign. The sign also gives us cheese workers free rein, if someone
actually does attempt a fart joke, to just stare back at them and say,
“Excuse me sir”—and 90 percent of the time it is a sir—“did you read
the sign?” Shaming customers is not something one is supposed to
do in retail work, which makes the technique all the more effective.
Of course, the occasional actually-French-from-France customers
often say, “I do not und-air-stand. What iz zee meaning of zis sign?”
And I have to explain what fart means. This can be quite embarrass-
ing, depending on how much English they speak. Pantomiming a fart
and a bad smell to a customer would probably get me fired at another
job, but when the non-cheese-workers at our store see stuff like that
they just shrug.

There are things to laugh at, of course. Whenever people invest

their self-esteem in whose-provolone-is-bigger battles citing specific
arcana, outsiders will mock. It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about
record collectors, D&D wizards, or cheese fetishists. I guess the ques-
tion is, why do I sometimes think of myself as an outsider?
I have spent more than forty hours a week for well over a decade
hanging out with cheese folks. I have argued with cheese folks, drunk
with cheese folks, attended their weddings and funerals, been on
panels with them, even slept with some of them. I have a cheese
tattoo for Christ’s sake. Who am I trying to kid?
The cheesemonger life still strikes me as rather absurd, and I try to

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keep an emotional distance, because while I once debated whether

or not the Paris General Strike of 1968 was a truly revolutionary
moment, now I discuss the goats of Périgord and know, against my
will, that Mimolette—a French cow’s milk cheese, often aged until
riddled with cheese mites and acquiring a caramel-sweet, sharp
flavor—was de Gaulle’s favorite cheese. If I knew what student leader
Daniel Cohn-Bendit’s favorite cheese was, perhaps I could claim I was
working on a clear continuum. I did, briefly, sell Slow Food pioneer
and McDonald’s dismantler José Bové’s cheese before he went to jail.
I’m just not sure that’s enough.
I try to maintain this continuum. Since French cheese is ubiqui-
tous, it seems appropriate to look to their revolutionary movements
for inspiration. The Situationists, a loose political group who created
much of the revolutionary art in Paris 1968 through the reuse and
captioning of everyday images, might appreciate my reuse, unaltered
except for lamination, of a graphic I cut out of a trade magazine.
I like to leave it on our table of cheese samples. It’s a picture of a
goateed hipster from the mid-1990s who might be putting on his
flannel shirt and going to see Nirvana after work. He wears latex
gloves and is caught in the act of happily doling out food. The caption
reads gen xers love samples. I think it’s hilarious to remind people that
they are being marketed to, but it is doubtful that the Situationists
would appreciate that the image is used to sell cheese.
Like an aged cheese, the path of my life was determined by many
factors. It would be a mistake to discuss any life as simply the prod-
uct of one experience or action. Certainly one event, say childhood
trauma in humans or massive change in humidity in cheese, can have
a long-lasting effect. My love for cheese, however, went through a
natural maturation process.

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