How A Cheese Goes Extinct
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
This seems overstated. I thought I was going to read this cheese was last made in the 19th century. He talks about having to rely on people for their "taste memory" and pictures, but what about written recipes and notes held over from dairies? Written reviews of the cheese? Interviews with people whose job it was to make it? Certainly, these records still exist today, let alone 16 years ago...
As written, this reminds me of this Simpsons Clip: https://youtu.be/viejY6UZ5Bk?t=40
As something made for hundreds of years, chances are many producers worked on oral history passed down to apprentices more than recipes. A lot of old recipes are /r/restofthefuckingowl/ territory, too.
What seems more likely is there was a cheese similar to Stilton that was formerly produced with raw milk, and chances are too that it depended on the local bacteria present wherever it was made, even down to the level of what those particular cows (or goats, or sheep, etc...) were eating. Without those conditions, it is similar, but never the same.
This is to my thinking the dirty secret of cheese... there are commercial varieties produced in enormous numbers that are consistent because they are done to scale in factory conditions. But, historically, a big part of the reason for so many variations and differences had more to do with conditions we can't created today because they would be considered unhygenic or unsanitary. It's also a reality that there really are only so many variations and many types that have distinct geographic names are substantially the same cheese.
I do not feel that the original claim is overstated. Creating any novel cheese is remarkably difficult–seriously, it's really damn hard–but recreating a cheese that no longer exists and was likely made in a different location under different circumstances is effectively impossible. There are so many hidden variables involved that, even if they had access to the model cheese, a talented cheesemaker could still take years to make a good approximation. And it would only be an approximation. Even with today's advanced cheese technology you cannot recreate terrior.
Since they don't have access to the model cheese, this difficulty is compounded many times.
Edit: I want to add that even though I was at the peak of my cheese game, I was only able to do this because I had effectively unlimited money to throw at the problem and very little oversight from my investors.
Since we did not have a national mourning day I am curious if it was indeed a worldwide competition?
... they leapfrogged back through history and secured the name Stichelton ... the Old English name for the town of Stilton ... the cheese was more itself than ever.
That is exactly the solution I'd have tried to deploy: if you want to market "ye olde worlde" make sure you know "the old world". Ye is pronounced the or thee - the Y is actually thorne which is a lost letter of the alphabet in English. The trailing "e"s are silent.
If you can't use Stilton then using Stichelton for your product implies age and is not too far from Stilton to be fairly obvious in the UK and can be spelt out in a Gothic black-letter fount. Good skills.
I live quite close to Cheddar and quite a few cheeses are made hereabouts.
mmmm cheese ...
While I'd read about the differences previously, they're understated by most sources -- I can only assume many people are passing on accounts they've heard rather than speaking from experience. The texture of the finished cheese and how the milk acts while being processed into cheese is incredibly different from even fresh low-temperature pasteurized milk with added calcium.
Even a simple cheese like mozzarella is very noticeably different -- and in my opinion, better -- when made from raw milk. So while I'm willing to believe commercially produced cheeses are closer to their raw-milk counterparts than my homemade cheeses are, I still feel we've lost a lot when it comes to the experience of eating cheese just by using pasteurized milk.
A big thing we miss out on by using pasteurized milk is Listeria.
According to the CDC[0], "Soft cheeses made with unpasteurized milk (also called raw milk) are estimated to be 50 to 160 times more likely to cause Listeria infection than when they are made with pasteurized milk."
Maybe not a big problem compared to say, coronavirus, but I’ll take my milk pasteurized, thanks.
While I'm sure my production facility (a.k.a kitchen) isn't as clean as most commercial facilities, I don't have to transport it, worry about lack of temperature control, or about the lag between when it's ready and when it gets consumed, so there is much less chance I grow a bunch of listeria. I also don't feed it to old people, children, or the immunocompromised.
We are probably unable to recreate crops from wild genetics at this point. Every variety we lose is gone forever.
Domesticated food animals are facing the same fate. I don't think we could recreate the domesticated sheep from the wild at this point. We're only a couple generations from a real crisis at this point, and in many areas, the crisis is already here.
This reminded me of some places with high boar populations, you can hunt them anytime since they're overrunning the ecosystem basically.
Yet people don't like their meat because it's "too gamey", whatever that means.
There's also the oily fish species that everyone seems to hate but they actually taste good and are nutritious.
Point is, the reason for the lack genetic diversity in food supply is people - they simply don't want diversity. We've found the best tasting or more versatile food and everyone's going with that.
I have no doubt that diets will adapt if some crops or animals completely disappear somehow.
Diversity of overall flora and Fauna is indeed screwed. So many species are near extinct already and few care.
Unless the wild forebear is extinct it is exceedingly unlikely we’d be unable to recreate crops from wild genetics. It wouldn’t be worthwhile; even pre selective breeding domesticates are very different from wild stock and we’d be better off starting from literally any domesticate than wild stock for almost all crops but we could. Selective breeding is very well understood technology. For most purposes if you wanted to recreate a particular strain that existed in the past you’d cross multiple wild types with multiple domesticates so you start off with all the traits you want in say 32 plants, the second generation 16, and so on until they’re all in 1 plant. This both overstates and understates the difficultly; overstates because you’re not going to start with 32 traits, understates because traits aren’t on/off, they’re on a continuum.
But fundamentally this is a problem of money and time, an engineering one, not a basic science one. If you look at the Wikipedia page for aurochs there are currently seven projects attempting to back breed them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurochs
Or look at the effort to bring back the American Chestnut. It’ll happen within my lifetime.
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