The problem is it's actually a super fun thought experiment/engineering problem to try to figure out how to do this technologically, but any such attempt would (rightly) be taken as an attack on this profession because even if it was a silly blog post about overthinking a silly problem, silly blogposts are potentially upstream of (maybe even someone else) a commercial implementation that eventually destroys a profession.

It sucks.

> end up with industrially-produced bad cheese.

It does't have to be, of course, but the people with enough capital to set up automation tend to care more about money than cheese.

Tradition isn't just nostalgia - sometimes it's a protective layer against that slippery slope toward mediocrity disguised as efficiency

>I am glad that this continues to be done by hand, and expect, based on Italian attitudes towards food and tradition, that it will continue being done by hand for another hundred years.

It has been fun watching Starbucks' various attempts at cracking into the Italian market.

based on Italian attitudes towards food and tradition, that it will continue being done by hand for another hundred years.

I'm unfamiliar with the regs on this, but can the duties of the battitore be written into the standard for the cheese?

Maybe, and the promise of AI nowadays seems to be "we'll automate art and science and creativity so you have more time to do low-value manufacturing".

It’s also worth considering that at most you’d be automating 24 jobs.

If the price of cheese was the only factor then I’m sure practices would have changed. But people will pay a premium for what they perceive as a premium product, so practices like this just add to the ‘experience’.

The watch on my arm is (mostly) handmade and worth a fortune, there are plenty of other cheaper watches that are arguably better due to them being made by robots.

Same principle, I think.

- "For all their expertise, I am sure a technical solution would also easily be able to detect what they are looking for: voids within the cheese, or lack of uniform density..."

Out of pure curiosity, how would an industrial process engineer approach this problem, de novo?

replacing these humans with machines would be the start of a short process that would end up with indistrially-produced bad cheese.

I agree. As soon as you replace humans with machines, the next step is so-called "value engineering," where squeezing pennies out of a process becomes more important than the product.

Let the tech people do tech. Let the artists do art. Food is an art.

as always it's not that automation is inherently bad, it's a matter of how it is used and to whose benefit. the luddites knew this. a lot of people misunderstand, but they didn't want to destroy the mills, they wanted to own them.

I can’t really rate cheeses on a scale; A 36-months comté or emmental has very different flavours from a 36-months Parmigiano and I wouldn’t rate one "better" than the other. Like any good cheese, I agree that Parmigiano Reggiano is best eaten on its own.

I’m French and something that surprise me is that both Italy and France have very good cheeses, but only in France we eat cheese on its own as part of the meal: the traditional French meal is: starter / main plate / cheese (sometimes with salad) / dessert. In Italian restaurants you sometimes find them as antipasti, but not always, and (at least in my experience) at home people don’t really eat cheese on its own.

Also Italian, lots of really interesting cheeses out there.

Appenzeller medium, young Asiago, sake trappist cheese, blue brie, extra sharp English cheddar, and of course mozzarella and halloumi.

I think both the Grana and the Parmiggiano are great in some places but not everywhere, so I couldn't pick them as sole winners.

For those who didn't know, the rind can also be dropped into an otherwise ordinary pot of soup and add a lot of flavor.

Thanks for the risotto tip; gonna have to try that. I've never tasted the rind after cooking it in soup: it's not an appealing look to my eye.

What size should the rind be chopped up for risotto?

I got home today from my first trip to Italy (we went to Verona for Vin Italy) and cheese was at the top of my shopping list of things to bring back. As it happens, I’m right now eating some 36 month aged Parmigiano Reggiano; absolutely beautiful. The food and wine I enjoyed in your country were on another level! On the subject of risotto, I had my first ever(!) risotto last night: a risotto amarone, and wow! Absolutely incredible, molto interessante!

For just raw cheese taste, me and my whole family both older and younger (which grew up in eastern europe where absolutely none of these was known behind iron curtain, not even as cheap stolen bad copies), AOC Gruyère surchoix and aged Gouda are top.

From italian its pecorino pepato (specifc, I know) and then black truffles variants, usually also of pecorino.

Maybe cheese you mention are more of an acquired taste rather than love at first sight, can't tell but will keep trying :)

I agree, they're so good on their own for snacking, a really good Reggiano has such an interesting flavor, I can't get enough. Runners-up for me include gruyere, a dark aged gouda, or camembert or reblochon. I just had a piece of locally-produced but nothing compares to Reggiano.

Also I always add the rind to my risotto too!

I tried Grana Padano once and my take away was that I would never choose that cheese over Parmigiano Reggiano. Isn't it just an inferior similar cheese?

I take some when I go hiking for a few days, they can handle spending a few days in a backpack and have a good calories / weight ratio.

I didn't grow up with it like you did, but the first time I tried a chunk of it on its own with a little honey and bread… game over.

There are variants (without the trademarked? names) - 'Uguale', is a nice cheese, without the geo-protected price tag.

I absolutely love them. I don't like how it melts on pasta, so I eat it directly.

I love them as well, but they seem to be too hard and too strong to pair well with bread. They really do seem to work best grated into things like pasta, risotto, and soup, or as shavings in salad.

I mean, you do you, but you'd find me reaching for a lot of other cheeses first to go with my bread.

Um… but pecorino romano exists…

As a controls engineer, building automated manufacturing equipment, the general principle that we've found to work best is to let the humans do human things and the machines do machine things.

A person with a spoon, tediously and laboriously stirring ingredients in a pot, is a poor way to make use of that person's intelligence, creativity, and flexibility. An electric motor just does the job better.

On the other hand, by the Anna Karenina principle, cheese inspection is one of those tasks where there are a thousand unique and unexpected ways for a cheese to be wrong but only one way for it to be right. It's very hard to design an inspection that would catch everything and miss nothing that a human would trivially see, smell, or feel, while also minimizing false positives.

The robotic wheel flipper is somewhere in the middle: humans are great at navigating complex environments, and while you can design a uniform, controlled environment that a complex AMR can navigate, and space the wheels out regularly, it seems like half the task (rotating the cheese) is something ideally suited for a robot arm and half the task (getting to the cheese) is something better suited for a human. Humans can maintain the environment and debug the process, the robots can flip the cheese.

With respect to the cheese testing, I think a good middle ground is tool-assisted human inspection. Instead of/in addition to a hammer, give them an ultrasonic transducer and audio analysis toolset. Let them manipulate the cheese, but also give them objective numerical data on the frequency response and calculated porosity. It's easy for a person to recognize when a cheese is more hollow-sounding than the previous, but the first cheese of the day might be hard to for a human to recognize, and better tools than a primitive hammer can help with that.

This reminds me of a news piece from my area about 10 years ago. A field was to be mowed, and they were considering options. They could get some high tech self guided lawn mower, or they could let a herd of goats graze on it. They went with the goats.

It did not go over well with the former lawn mower operators, who found themselves no more employed than they would have been if the robotic lawn mower took their job instead.

the problem with automating inspections is humans are good at noticing things that are 'different'. I can make a machine see the common wrong things but if I miss one rare situation that passes bad product.

many farmers don't use automated milking machines because you still need a human to inspect each cow and thus the machine doesn't save much labor.

Let the machines do the hard mixing and lifting. Let the humans do the parts that are fun or may require a bit of artistry. It certainly sounds smarter than building AI to do our writing and art so that we can flip burgers for a living.

I always find the Italian kitchen a fascinating contrast between an appreciation for artisanal handmade food and the love of shiny stainless steel gadgets.

Why repeat a common joke as if it were a historical event?

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/03/06/tap/

Funny how both cheese tapping and generator listening come down to the same core skill: quiet mastery built from experience, not textbooks

How much is the legal obligation to pay such a bill, legally speaking? It sounds like they hadn't agreed on a figure beforehand, so could he have billed an arbitrary amount (say, a million dollars) and would Ford have been required to pay that too? What is the limit?

I’ve met a handful of technicians who have been somewhere up and to the right on the skill / experience axes, and they’ve typically know what the problem is immediately upon listening to, or otherwise observing, a machine, or plant / equipment in general.

They’re usually a pleasure to work with, and I’ve found they’re typically the sort of people who are more than happy to share their knowledge.

The modern equivalent of this would be a one-line change in a codebase that fixes a significant issue. If you then log three days of effort on the ticket, people may also start questioning that, but:

Changing a line: 1 minute

Knowing which line to change (which includes making sure that the change doesn't break something else): 23 hours, 59 minutes

Interesting! I was reminded of the skills of older physicians, who could make an informed diagnosis going just on the symptoms and maybe using a stethoscope, whereas younger ones immediately order a full blood test and maybe throw in an MRI just to be sure.

Thanks. I almost missed this because I searched the comment page for “video” so I’m mentioning video here so others can find it. :)

From what I understand, all parmigiano is sold through a consortium/coop. The only dairy identifying mark is three digits stencilled onto the rind.

https://www.parmigianoreggiano.com/product-guide-seals-and-m...

If you buy it vacuum-sealed from a shop, the packaging usually has additional branding from the producer.

Not a "favorite dairy", but if it's convenient to do so, I usually look for the "vacche rosse" type, which is more expensive but also noticeably different (and better). Of course it would be a waste to grate it over pasta; better to eat it on its own.

Cheese cultures have been bred to be relatively genetically stable but they still experience genetic drift over time that can affect the product in unforeseen ways. Contamination can also introduce unknown pathogens and bacteriophages can cause mutations. Cheesemakers can eliminate the vast majority of the variation in the process but its core input is still very much alive and organic so there’s only so much they can control it.

What do you do with the whey? I make paneer at home and use the whey to make chapati (bread).

Almost sounds like it’s related to some fermented product, so it wouldn’t surprise me if it was indeed cheese. I don’t think scent is great for much besides checking current state.

Wait, you just hit keys on a keyboard all day and see if it works??

Your job looks really easy to an outsider too, regardless of what you do

> I'm certain it was related to the "vegetarian enzymes"

How can you be so certain? I did not find any credible source correlating microbial rennet to rash. Thus I would not rule out that this was simply a coincidence or at least not applicable for most people.

Maybe it was an allergic reaction to the mold inhibitor? Vegetarian rennet and animal rennet are both chymosin.

[dead]

"Piano piano" does mean "slowly slowly" in a literal way, but I guess she meant it as a reference of the full saying "piano piano si va lontano", meaning "slowly slowly you get far". You were commenting on the amount of work ahead, and she was telling you "it's a marathon, not a sprint".

It's been possible to automate this job away for decades, with no AI necessary. You could image these cheese wheels with ultrasound or X-rays and establish thresholds for the size of voids which are tolerable. This must be a concern wherever parts are cast, so surely there are off the shelf solutions. Presumably this isn't news to the relevant parties and they value having human battitores over the savings.

Not even an AI, there are simpler ways. But as an italian, I will be in the pitchforks-armed horrified mob if this will be proposed. Not a chance.

ML algorithm probably could do parts of the job. The tap and sound.

But there is most likely also large amount general QA of environment going on. Are things done right, is temperature right, is humidity right, is there weird touch. And so on.

All of this is much harder to understand and gather under scope of AI... Lot of it is likely not even conscious...

Technically? Not long. Socially and politically? My money’s on the battitore.