Finding the Culture in Agriculture

As the Local Food Coordinator here at City Market, I often get swept into the excitement of the localvore movement. 

Nat and Kate "Cheddar" at Shelburne Farms

As we work to source product after product from local farms, and I winnow down our list of local food gaps, I start to believe that we really can and will one day have a farmer for every product in the store that can be produced locally. But once in a while something comes along that makes me doubt the whole premise of this grand experiment and our latest farm tour to Shelburne Farms last weekend was exactly that kind of experience. 

Nat Bacon is the head cheesemaker at Shelburne Farms where they make Vermont Cheddar Cheese by hand each morning with the milk from the brown swiss cows that live just down the dirt road. Fifteen City Market members got a special tour into their cheese room one snowy Sunday morning in March, pulling on hairnets and washing our hands in bleach to stand beside the vat to watch milk transform into the solid of cheese. We stood there and watched Nat and his assistant, Kate, stirring the curds, draining the whey and finally ‘cheddaring’ – the traditional use of the word where ‘to cheddar’ becomes a verb referring to the process of cutting and stacking the curds to let the whey drain out. 

The heritage of cheddar cheese comes straight from the town of Cheddar in Southwest England. Traditionally the cheese could legally only be made within 30 miles of Wells Cathedral. The town of Cheddar is especially well suited to the cheese as there are a number of caves on the outskirts of the town with the perfect humidity and temperature conditions to age the cheese. Cheddars need to be aged to develop their flavors and Shelburne Farms ages theirs between 6 months and 3 years. 

I asked Nat why we don’t see more aged cheeses like parmesan and romano coming from Vermont’s farmers – is it simply that we don’t have the infrastructure in Vermont to age the cheeses? I can’t do justice to Nat’s passionate answer, but his reply was that infrastructure is a barrier, but it’s much more about the heritage and culture of the cheese. Parmesan cheese, as it is authentically produced, is known as Parmigiano-Reggiano which is only produced in one region of Italy. European law classifies the name as a ‘protected designation of origin’ meaning only one region of Northern Italy can produce the cheese. The name parmesan is given to cheeses that imitate Parmigiano-Reggiano and the thought of imitating a cheese so deeply rooted in the culture of a place seemed not only unthinkable, but abhorrent to Nat. 

Producing the cheese is not as simple as following the recipe for time, temperature, rennet and bacterial culture as the cheese is a product of the landscape and the landscape is a product of the cheese. The breed of cows, the type of grass the cows are eating, the minerals in the soil that go into the grass the cows are eating, the season, and more all affect the flavors in the milk and thus the flavors in the cheese – conditions which are irreproducible anywhere else in the world. In other words, the ‘culture’ in the cheese is more complicated than just the species of bacterial culture used. 

Growing up in America where our food traditions are, one could argue, non-existent, I feel I can only begin to skim the surface of understanding this unshakably deep link between culture, agriculture, and place. Perhaps for us in Vermont, the most comprehendible comparison is with maple syrup: can you imagine if the Italians, on a similar local food mission, asked their farmers to start tapping trees to produce a sap they could boil down to syrup in a quest for a local product like maple syrup? The idea is laughable and perhaps that is how the Italians feel about us attempting to produce their cheeses.

I’m so grateful to Nat for reminding me of our connections between food and culture. It’s not, after all, about producing every product possible from Vermont’s soils. And yet the answers to what products are appropriate to produce here are not always straightforward. After all, even Shelburne Farms is producing a cheese that once was only made within 30 miles of a single cathedral in England. Luckily these big questions are what keep this work so unendingly interesting!