I recently had the fortune to write with Soleil Ho, chef and culture critic, about class, conversation, and cheese over at Munchies. Cheese is a major element of the American diet, and as a result, it’s also a big part of our conversations… and one of the major roles cheese plays in day-to-day discourse is signaling our aspirations and our social status. The original vision was a touch ambitious for the article’s planned length. The upshot is that we now have all these scraps of a much larger story — or stories, because it’s rare that anything has only one tale to tell — and these scraps itch for elaboration.
Ideas we explored but couldn’t include ranged from how modernization turned cheese from a woman’s art to a man’s job; how the embrace of processed cheese by trend-setters denies class privilege while expressing status insecurity; the relationship between haute cuisine and belonging; the experience of cultural reclamation through cheese; disgust at processed or perceived inferior cheeses as a means of framing in and out-groups; international and immigrant experiences with cheese… We were able to offer some crumbs here and there, but ultimately, our narrow scope excluded many details and nuances.
And there’s so much reading out there. If, like me, you hunger to know more about food — not just how to make and eat it, but the whys of it all, I hope you’ll appreciate the following suggestions.
Heather Paxson’s The Life of Cheese and Sherrie Inness’s Secret Ingredients were two of our go-to sources for “What Cheese Can Tell Us About Class in America.”
ANYWAY, for more on all of this, because it’s way more complex than a simple tweet thread can be, check out Bread, Wine, & Chocolate https://t.co/i0ZKoCJg2j; Cheddar https://t.co/DMRGPQxbTG; The Life of Cheese https://t.co/g7DDNYI0jb; & this @NPRFood story https://t.co/fxWainVz1M
— Soleil Ho (@hooleil) April 8, 2018
Indeed. I highly recommend @gordonzola's book Cheddar for more on this. And, of course, women are very much present in artisan cheesemaking https://t.co/gt1G5rO2Ze
— Simran Sethi (@simransethi) April 8, 2018
thx for this! Similar working at food market in London for years: people self-select if they 'deserve'/supposdly appreciate b4 even approaching/tasting. n how do you narrate process w/o carrying fetishes with that? an angle i attempted on cheese/politics: https://t.co/c8or7aSMkg
— Chris Fite-Wassilak (@cfitewassilak) April 9, 2018