Theodores
3 days ago
"You must be joking.."
I can fully understand the love of cheese, however, there is a hidden cost to it, that I have experienced but only recently acknowledged.
The places they show on TV and in articles such as this is analogous to showing posh West End made-to-measure tailors and pretending that those SHEIN garments from Bangladesh are made the same way, with no 'slavery' involved.
I worked in a cheese factory as a student, taking up the job with an attitude that it must be 'women's work'. How wrong I was. Twelve hour shifts, with 'every object' weighing (or wheying) upwards of 25Kg and every one of your senses brutally assaulted, always with the potential to lose life, limb or another finger in a moment of lapsed focus. Just surviving became the intellectual challenge, with many not making it past two hours before throwing in the towel. Mastery was my goal and I put in the sleepless 'nights' with relentless 'tennis elbow' to get there, achievement unlocked.
Because I was a student, this was not a forever job, and there was a higher tax threshold for students, making it financially tough but worth while.
On a trip down memory lane I looked the old place up, to discover it had shut down due to numerous health and safety violations, which made me chuckle. That was the culture, and the rule, for example, those chemicals that have huge warning labels, to read such a label after getting nervous ticks after using it, would be moral cowardice. Or, if you needed someone's attention, because the machines were so loud, you would casually throw a 25 Kg object at them (a cheese or a bag of salt) as a 'gentle tap on the shoulder'.
On reflection, there is this small matter of the human cost to cheese. PETA might shock people with cheesy animal welfare issues and cardiologists might not be entirely positive about the consumption of 'saturated fat laced with salt', however, few have experienced the harsh reality of working in the industry, to have the strength to write about how extreme and ultra-violent the production of this harmless product can be.
I am not saying 'boycott the product', just 'value it more'.
cucumber3732842
3 days ago
I was a janitor at a Cabot facility in college. It's an industrial product like anything else. Tanker trailers drain go into one side of the factory. Reefers of finished product exit the other.
jeffrallen
3 days ago
I took my Swiss wife to the Tillamook factory in Oregon and she was laughing at how industrial it is. Later she took me to a Swiss mountain cheese maker, accessible only by hiking, making cheese over a wood-fired kettle.
arethuza
2 days ago
When I was a student I worked in the summers at a maltings making malt for Scotch whisky - a very large, highly automated facility and nothing like the romantic visions we all have of distilleries.
ycombinete
3 days ago
Do you think cheese is unique in this regard, or part of a special class of product? Or is that just the hidden cost of all our niceties?
ericbarrett
3 days ago
You write well. I get the sense you have some interesting stories from your time in the cheese factory!
Theodores
4 hours ago
Many thanks for your kind words. I do have plenty of stories from the cheese factory, not all of them negative, for example, our cups of tea were the best ever, with water from the mountains and unpasteurised milk from a 100ft 'milk jug' that reached into the sky (with a miniature tap in the bottom).
Nowadays there is absolutely no dairy in my life. No cheese, no milk, no chocolate and not even butter. Yet, as an white Brit, I have to acknowledge that my ancestors owe a lot to dairy and I probably would not be here, had it not been for dairy farming. The Romans documented how 'Celts' drank milk and were quite disgusted by it. The Romans were lactose intolerant, and from a warm climate where milk just went sour, so they could not believe what they saw.
The history of tin comes into it too, the Phoenicians brought the recipe for clotted cream to Britain ('land of tin') some three thousand years ago, enabling year-round calories for tin miners. They got their copper from Afghanistan to make bronze in the Levant, to found an empire on that.
In Europe and the UK there are many protected foods, including many region specific cheeses. All of them have fabulous history stories, really well written, and in public domain documents. For example, 'Orkney Cheese' is a WW1 innovation, when many ships were based there, with many sailors to feed.
If you want to avoid processed foods then it helps to know about the protected foods. For example, a 'Cornish Pasty' is available in petrol stations and other 'food deserts' where your options are limited. However, a 'Cornish Pasty' can't contain any junk in it, if it has 'Cornish Pasty' written on the packet.