{"id":20781,"date":"2015-08-24T07:00:43","date_gmt":"2015-08-24T11:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/developer83.wordpress-developer.us\/culturecheesemag\/?p=20781"},"modified":"2015-05-21T15:31:20","modified_gmt":"2015-05-21T19:31:20","slug":"voicings-heather-paxson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/developer83.wordpress-developer.us\/culturecheesemag\/voicings-heather-paxson\/","title":{"rendered":"Voicings: Heather Paxson"},"content":{"rendered":"

It was Cato Corner Farm Hooligan that sparked anthropologist Heather Paxson\u2019s cheese curiosity\u2014especially after she discovered that the stinky, washed-rind wedge purchased from New York City\u2019s Union Square Greenmarket was made by Mark Gillman, a fellow Haverford College alum. How had the philosophy major she knew become an artisan cheesemaker? This and the other stories she collected from interviewing makers and visiting farms around the country were the basis for her 2012 book, The Life of Cheese: Crafting Food and Value in America<\/a><\/em>. Here, the 46-year-old Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor\u2014who is working on the forthcoming Oxford Companion to Cheese<\/em>\u2014talks passion and quince paste.<\/p>\n

\n

ON EARLY FOOD MEMORIES:<\/strong><\/em> \u201cI grew up in the Midwest, in southern Illinois, but my parents are from the East Coast. And I think I had a sense of myself as a food snob because I refused to drink soda\u2014I hated it. I couldn\u2019t stand sweet, carbonated beverages. I still can\u2019t. And I couldn\u2019t stand American or Velveeta cheese, so we always had cheddar or baby Swiss or Muenster.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

ON CHEESEMAKERS:<\/strong> \u201cThere\u2019s very little in common among these people other than they make cheese\u2014[that] they\u2019ve decided to devote their lives and much of their resources to this kind of crazy endeavor. They all come to it with different skills and different material resources, and they all want to get something out of it besides money, because they\u2019re not going to make money, anyway. They all have something that they see in the labor, in the devotion to the animals, or to the craft, or to their commitment to being part of an ethical food system. Whatever it is, there is a huge range of sentiments or values that motivate these people to do something that\u2019s really not rational. There is no one profile of the artisan cheesemaker.\u201d<\/p>\n

ON THE PERFECT CHEESE PLATE<\/strong>:<\/em> \u201cI love sheep\u2019s milk cheese\u2014Basque sheep\u2019s milk cheese. I love alpine-style cheeses. And then I love creamy robiola-type cheeses. I don\u2019t always get blue cheese, but I like a Stilton or a Roquefort rather than the crumbly kind.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Heather<\/a>

Photo courtesy of Jonathan Sachs<\/p><\/div>\n

ON THE PERCEPTION CHALLENGES CHEESEMAKERS FACE:<\/strong> \u201cAs an outside anthropological observer, I think there are a lot of misconceptions about artisan food makers and artisans in general. I think the public likes to put artisan producers on a moral pedestal and wants them to conform to the consumer\u2019s romantic ideal of moral virtue in food production and doesn\u2019t want to see things that would compromise that expectation of moral purity. And that\u2019s not fair.\u201d<\/p>\n

ON RECLAIMING THE WORD \u201cARTISAN\u201d:<\/strong> \u201cArtisanship, craftsmanship\u2014these are very old concepts, and cheesemaking has a very old history of practice. I think it\u2019s actually important for artisan food makers to reclaim the word and to be able to explain why what they\u2019re doing is not what Nabisco is doing with their crackers or not what Domino\u2019s is doing with their pizzas. I think the consuming public would be open to learning what that distinction is.\u201d<\/p>\n

ON PAIRINGS:<\/strong> \u201cI have a graduate student who\u2019s Brazilian who brought me a homemade quince paste from her uncle\u2019s farm, which has been really fun. That\u2019s gone really well with an herbed, fluffy sheep\u2019s milk cheese that I picked up. And wine.\u201d<\/p>\n

ON MONGERS<\/strong>:<\/em> \u201cThe cheesemonger is the interface between the rural producer and the urban consumer. . . . They have a few important roles. One is the ability to convey the story, to convey an understanding of the labor that went into the cheese that helps account for the price\u2014 the story that helps that price go down a little more smoothly. But it\u2019s not just about rhetorical skills. It\u2019s a practical skill to care for the cheese, because [mongers] have to work with an inventory that is changing. The monger has to be able to sell the cheese at different stages of ripeness.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Heather Paxson, Anthropologist, author of The Life of Cheese, and MIT professor, sits down with editor Courtney Hollands to talk about cheese<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":58,"featured_media":20783,"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":[14],"tags":[],"coauthors":[716],"class_list":["post-20781","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-voicings"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nVoicings: Heather Paxson - culture: the word on cheese<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Heather Paxson, Anthropologist, author of The Life of Cheese, and MIT professor, sits down with editor Courtney Hollands to talk about cheese\" \/>\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\/voicings-heather-paxson\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Voicings: Heather Paxson\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Heather Paxson, Anthropologist, author of The Life of Cheese, and MIT professor, sits down with editor Courtney Hollands to talk about cheese\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/developer83.wordpress-developer.us\/culturecheesemag\/voicings-heather-paxson\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"culture: the word on cheese\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:author\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/courtney.hollands\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2015-08-24T11:00:43+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/developer83.wordpress-developer.us\/culturecheesemag\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/SUM15-Voicings-HeatherPaxson-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=\"Courtney Hollands\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Courtney Hollands\" \/>\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\/voicings-heather-paxson\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/developer83.wordpress-developer.us\/culturecheesemag\/voicings-heather-paxson\/\",\"name\":\"Voicings: Heather Paxson - 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