I\u2019m not much of a joiner. I\u2019ve got a AAA card, sure, but I gave up on the dance class. I\u2019m not on the alumni committee, either. And this column? Strictly freelance.<\/p>\n
But in the cheese world, we Bowling Alone<\/em> types are far from the norm. With the exception of Kurt Timmermeister, that one-man-dairy from last issue\u2019s Centerfold feature, cheese is a team sport\u2014one of those things that begs for organization.<\/p>\n There\u2019s a lot of joining you can do, especially if you\u2019re in the business of cheese. There are trade groups, such as the American Cheese Society and the Raw Milk Cheesemakers Association, as well as regional collectives. I recently visited Agriform, a billion-dollar Italian distributor described as \u201ca collective of collectives.\u201d I admit that industry has its own romance; it was thrilling to watch cheese robots roam the Agriform warehouse and hoist wheels of Grana Padano the size of car tires, but in the end I don\u2019t own a cheese shop or a cow; they don\u2019t take my kind.<\/p>\n You\u2019re more likely to find me at a Bread and Cheese club, several of which have existed over the years. They are writer\u2019s clubs, the most famous one being founded by James Fenimore Cooper, author of The Last of the Mohicans<\/em>. He was already a literary star when he moved to New York City in 1822 and started a club that \u201cbrought together every week the cleverest men in the town\u201d\u2014artists, writers, philosophers, and scientists, all united under the humble mantle of cheese.<\/p>\n As founder, Cooper had sole power to nominate new members. Once a candidate was selected, though, existing members would vote by casting ballots of bread or cheese, \u201cone of cheese deciding adversely to admittance.\u201d (On second thought, maybe that\u2019s what that gift basket from the Writer\u2019s Guild was all about. . . .)<\/p>\n I\u2019ve always thought that nothing could be more pretentious than the wine-and-cheese parties of my grad school experience, but now I find they were strictly in line with academic tradition. Cheese has all the qualities that attract creative types\u2014inexpensive, filling, and a little bit ridiculous, as I discovered recently when my father handed me a copy of Operation Mincemeat<\/em>. The book is a record of the most successful counterintelligence mission of the Second World War. It was an unlikely-sounding plan based on planting fake documents on a body and arranging for it to be washed ashore where the Axis powers would find it. Not surprisingly, a cheesist was mixed up in the plot, a man by the name of Ewen Montagu.<\/p>\n Ewen was an organizer, a skill he demonstrated early on when he and his brother Ivor founded the Cheese Eater\u2019s League while they were students at Cambridge. The brothers shared a passion for cheese and founded a dining club to import and taste the most exotic dairy specimens from around the world: camel\u2019s milk cheese, Middle Eastern goat cheese, cheese made from the milk of long-horned Afghan sheep.<\/p>\n \u201cOur great ambition was to get whale\u2019s milk cheese,\u201d Ewen wrote, and to this end he contacted a whaling company to arrange that \u201cif a mother whale was killed the milk should be \u2018cheesed\u2019 and sent to us.\u201d History doesn\u2019t reveal whether the brothers ever scored this particular cheese. But we can be pretty certain that through their league they at least succeeded in bringing together some curious folk. Cheese attracts characters; like moist slices of Muenster, when they meet they adhere.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One writer contemplates cheese clubs and the power of cheese as a social adhesive throughout history<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":12095,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"wprm-recipe-roundup-name":"","wprm-recipe-roundup-description":"","cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[590],"tags":[],"coauthors":[68,620],"class_list":["post-12094","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ruminations"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n