{"id":12098,"date":"2009-11-18T14:50:53","date_gmt":"2009-11-18T19:50:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/developer83.wordpress-developer.us\/culturecheesemag\/?p=12098"},"modified":"2021-02-26T16:09:48","modified_gmt":"2021-02-26T21:09:48","slug":"origin-cheese","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/developer83.wordpress-developer.us\/culturecheesemag\/origin-cheese\/","title":{"rendered":"Ruminations: The Origin of Cheese"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dating a biologist is a blast, especially if you write a food column. All I\u2019ve got to do is form a vague question (\u201cAre pickles alcoholic?\u201d) or make some half-informed assertion (\u201cIsn\u2019t whale milk the highest-calorie food on earth?\u201d) and Minda starts pulling reference books. Not knowing the real answer drives her nuts<\/em>. It\u2019s way more fun than Google, and much cuter.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re both lucky, though, to live in an age when the mechanics of life are well understood. Before microscopes and omne vivum ex ovo<\/em> (\u201cevery living thing comes from an egg\u201d), nobody even agreed on where animals came from. For thousands of years, \u201cspontaneous generation\u201d was a popular theory stating that living creatures, especially \u201clower forms,\u201d could emerge fully formed from basic ingredients. Grapes ferment into wine and milk curdles into cheese, so why couldn\u2019t meat spoil and become flies? Epicurus (culture<\/strong>\u2019s patron philosopher) thought so, and so did St. Augustine; didn\u2019t God create Adam from clay and breath? Touting this theory, the 17th-century scientist Jan Van Helmont gave a specific recipe for mice: wrap grain and cheese in soiled linen and let stand in a quiet corner. Voil\u00e0<\/em>!<\/p>\n

Cheese was often a key ingredient in spontaneous generations. After all, medieval food wasn\u2019t refrigerated, so it was common to find otherwise inexplicable varmints popping out of your breakfast. But for some thinkers, the link between cheese and life was more profound than that. Carlo Ginzburg\u2019s 1992 book The Cheese and the Worms<\/em> details the beliefs of Domenico Scandella, a 16th-century Italian miller who was tried by the Roman Inquisition for claiming the world had formed by putrefaction. In Scandella\u2019s own words:<\/p>\n

\u201cI have said that, in my opinion, [in the beginning] there was chaos… and out of that bulk a mass formed\u2014just as cheese is made out of milk\u2014and worms appeared in it, and these were the angels. The most holy majesty decreed that these should be the angels, and among that number of angels, there was also God, he too having been created out of that mass at the same time.\u201d<\/p>\n

While Scandella might seem like a lone weirdo, his beliefs were similar to those put forth in the Hindu Vedas, where the world is curdled from the ocean, and especially the Mongolian Kalmyk people\u2019s genesis story, which gives the same cheese\u2014worms\u2014angels\u2014God progression.<\/p>\n

Ginzburg thought the theory had been passed all the way across Asia by word of mouth, but I don\u2019t think that\u2019s it. In the time before plastic and Silly Putty, there wasn\u2019t a lot of generic, malleable stuff<\/em> around\u2014just clay, poop, dough, and cheese. So when an Italian miller (or a Kalmyk sheepherder) tried to picture the world before creation, he thought of something like cheese: shapeless, nourishing, melty matter that wasn\u2019t really animal, vegetable, or mineral, and which, if left alone, naturally grows worms and mice and little green fuzz.<\/p>\n

Of course, Minda would like you all to know that spontaneous generation has been thoroughly refuted\u2014Francesco Redi proved that meat didn\u2019t sprout maggots in 1668, and Louis Pasteur (culture<\/strong>\u2019s patron scientist) finally disproved the spontaneous generation of microbes in 1864. Remember, however, that Minda\u2019s not a physicist: you are free to believe in the universe\u2019s origin as cheese until further notice.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While today the origin of cheese as food is still disputed, in the middle ages (and earlier) some believed that cheese was the stuff of earthly creation<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":12099,"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-12098","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ruminations"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nRuminations: The Origin of Cheese - culture: the word on cheese<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"While today the origin of cheese as food is still disputed, in the middle ages (and earlier) some believed that cheese was the stuff of earthly creation\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/developer83.wordpress-developer.us\/culturecheesemag\/origin-cheese\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Ruminations: The Origin of Cheese\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"While today the origin of cheese as food is still disputed, in the middle ages (and earlier) some believed that cheese was the stuff of earthly creation\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/developer83.wordpress-developer.us\/culturecheesemag\/origin-cheese\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"culture: the word on cheese\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2009-11-18T19:50:53+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2021-02-26T21:09:48+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/developer83.wordpress-developer.us\/culturecheesemag\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/07\/Fall-2009-ruminations-creationism-750x368.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"750\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"368\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Will Fertman, Illustrator Amos Goldbaum\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Will Fertman, Illustrator Amos Goldbaum\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"3 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/developer83.wordpress-developer.us\/culturecheesemag\/origin-cheese\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/developer83.wordpress-developer.us\/culturecheesemag\/origin-cheese\/\",\"name\":\"Ruminations: The Origin of Cheese - 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