You don’t need another cheese gift guide
A rant about cheese media
A longtime complaint of mine—and one of my reasons for starting this newsletter—is that what I’ll call cheese media, and food media in general, focuses too narrowly on the product. Buying it, eating it, using it, presenting it. Where to get it and how to cut and serve it. What to eat it with, pairing recommendations treated as hyper-specific gospel.
It makes sense that much of what’s written about food, which humans require multiple times per day to survive, a source of pleasure and connection and creativity, has a lot to do with how it’s consumed, from gift guides and buying guides to recipes and tasting notes. It’s also true that the cheese mediasphere—magazines, websites, content created by makers and retailers, “influencers”—is populated largely, with some notable exceptions, by people who were or are directly involved in selling specialty food, or who benefit some other way by promoting it (ad dollars, sponsored content, events).
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, because it means that (many of) these people know their stuff. But it tends to limit the scope of how we talk about, think about, and engage with cheese to topics related to consumption.
This focus on preparing the audience to purchase, store, and use the product keeps the level of our discourse in perpetual 101 mode, particularly in the US, where a lack of cultural traditions around artisan cheese, its relative newness in the marketplace, and higher price points than commodity product mean makers and retailers face an uphill battle. Cheese media loves to profile styles, share “fun facts,” dispel annoyingly persistent myths, and generally hand-hold the public in an attempt to get them interested in and willing to pay a premium for wheels crafted more thoughtfully than what can be found in your average supermarket.
It does appear that consumers have been slower to mainstream artisan cheese than they did craft beer 15 years ago or natural wine in the mid-2010s. We seem to be perpetually on the cusp of leveling up our collective palates, though growth may finally be taking off.
A 2019 report commissioned by the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets noted that in 2018, “specialty” cheese accounted for $4.2 billion of $18 billion in US cheese sales overall. More pre-pandemic data show that US specialty cheese sales grew more than three times faster than non-specialty cheeses in 2016.
(There’s more recent data, but accessing it costs . If you have solid market research on specialty cheese, please drop the PDF! You will be rewarded with a future newsletter about what “specialty” and “artisan” even mean and why it’s so hard to nail down how much of these different subcategories is actually sold amid vast seas of commodity cheddar and pizza cheese.)
Combine a steadily growing interest in craft food with the early pandemic explosion in “charcuterie” and color-coded cheese boards on social media and we get an eating public with a strong desire for cheese—in an information ecosystem where one of the genre’s most prominent cheesefluencers only seems to mention the actual makers on their boards in #sponsored #content. No wonder it’s tough for independent shops and small-scale makers just trying to keep the lights on. With inflation and the current economic and political climate, that goal is becoming even more difficult to achieve.
The other reason it feels like a struggle to inject more nuance into cheese media is that when we look beyond the cycle of buy, eat, repeat, cheese—like any other food—gets complicated. Not always in a bad way, but in ways that aren’t necessarily easy to explain or understand, that don’t lend themselves well to a 30-second video or neatly resolve in a call-to-action to consume. Which brings me to the reason for the season.
You do not need another cheese gift guide. You don’t need another article about how to buy cheese for the holidays or build the perfect board for your holiday party or pair Christmas cookies with cheese according to your zodiac sign. This information has been done to death, cannibalized and SEOed and turned into Canva graphics and reshared over and over again, an annual cycle whose grip seems to tighten each year. (I admit I’ve written my fair share of content in this vein—the overall media landscape for journalists is even more depressing.)
If you want information about cheese, ask an IRL cheesemonger or maker. Read a book by an actual expert (if you’re ready for some of that sweet sweet sociohistorical context, I can’t recommend Cheese and Culture enough, and it’s even on sale!). Follow people online who, at least at some point in their careers, did time behind a counter or repping a distributor or stirring curd.
Hell, ask me. Actually, you don’t have to, because as vexing as the churn of cheese media can be, I’m not above giving quote about procuring and gifting when a colleague reaches out. If you’re desperate for guidance, I shared a few cheese board tips with EatingWell and suggested some fun items for this gift guide over at The Strategist.
I feel like I should also mention that I wrote a book, although I don’t get royalties and no longer sell copies directly, so I receive no actual financial benefit (but maybe you’d like to pledge a paid sub?). It’s still nice to know something I worked very hard on is finding new readers. It’s affordable, highly readable, and small enough to fit in a stocking.
Recent Cheese
I’ll also shout out the place I got my Thanksgiving stash: C. Hesse Cheese. Born out of the ashes of Crown Finish Caves, proprietress Caroline Hesse has spent the past couple of years developing an intriguing slate of domestic and imported cheeses for wholesale.
She also serves the public via pop-ups at her East Williamsburg warehouse and an online store. I think of her as sort of a monger's monger—a curator whose selections appeal to the public, but the true heads know her approach is something special. No sponcon here, just a very timely and effective marketing email.
The goodies I impulse bought from Caroline included crowd-pleaser Jake’s Gouda (NY), boozy Shakerag Blue (TN), Ovelha Amanteigado (PO), a plush, supple thistle rennet torta that just happened to win top honors at the World Cheese Awards, and two small ruminant gems from Blakesville Creamery (WI): sheep’s milk tomme Mariana (named for breeder Mariana Marques de Almeda, who I interviewed for this Culture story on breeding for cheese last year) and Holiday Cheer, a fresh goat round flecked with orange zest and bundled in brandy-soaked cherry leaves. My friends and I loved them all, but it’s that last one that sticks in my mind as something I had really never tasted before.
I also enjoyed a complimentary box of goodies from my friends and collaborators at Collective Creamery, who I am firmly in the tank for: a savory chive-coated fromage blanc log and hunk of meaty smoked cheddar from Birchrun Hills Farm plus a wedge of a buttery, supple Alpine called Marigold and a segment of large-format Brie-style torus Thistle from Valley Milkhouse. You can subscribe to Collective Creamery if you’re in Philly/SEPA. Birchrun ships their goodies anywhere, and Valley Milkhouse’s products can be found at better indie cheese shops throughout the East Coast.