When I started this job, I sat in a meeting with a senior executive from a large supermarket, and a group of consultants and advisers, all offering ideas about how the supermarket could help with food insecurity. Most of what was said there isn’t worth repeating. But when they asked for my opinion, coming from the cheese industry and now working in the third sector (charities and voluntary organisations), I talked about the deskilling of supermarket workers, and how that process has reshaped not just our supply chains but what gets produced and sold, and even what we expect to find on the shelf. The food we buy is mostly food that is pre-packed, easy to stack, easy to move. That gets sold to us as convenience, but it is really about paying low wages and running an almost empty store with a couple of workers and a security guard. It maximises profit. The checkout is the other place this has happened. We have been sold convenience there too, and it has turned all of us into tellers who know how to scan an item, search for a barcode, bag without setting off the alarm, and run a card machine ourselves. Most supermarkets now need only one person running between tills to approve age-restricted purchases, and a security guard to make sure nobody steals. I won’t even start on how many of those security guards come from minoritised communities, and how that move by corporations adds to pitting groups against each other.

Deskilling is happening in the cheese industry too, but it’s less visible, and mostly welcomed. There are milking robots, affinage robots (the machines and systems now used to wash and turn cheese), and cheesemaking systems programmed to run with almost no human interaction or supervision. If you are worried about AI, you should be worried about these machines too. Closed-vat systems are becoming more common, because although they are expensive to buy, they could be cheaper to maintain than paying people living wages. In rural regions where workers are moving to cities and migrant labour is treated as undesirable, these systems are a way of keeping production going. In Post 4, I wrote about consultants selling their expertise; for now, most of that expertise still belongs to people who know how to make cheese, but it won’t be long before most of the expertise for sale belongs to people who know how to programme a system, if that isn’t already happening and I just haven’t come across it yet.

All of this leads to standardisation. Add the loss of native microbes, the discouragement of raw milk use, and the loss of these skills, and I wonder what terroir we are protecting any more. Standardisation also calls for bigger capital investment, which is why it isn’t surprising that so many large companies are buying up medium-sized ones and remaking them completely. Most of that capital comes from Europe, moving into the US and Latin America, and it brings its own expertise along with it, an expertise that tends to get prioritised and imposed on the local system. So it isn’t only knowledge at farm level that gets lost; it’s knowledge in management, and even in the executive offices.

This is the old argument about labour versus capital. I know which side of it I’m on, and I hope this post has left you thinking about these questions too, and about where you, as a worker, actually end up in it.

To read along

1. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, translated by Ben Fowkes (Penguin Classics, 1990 [1867]), chapter 15, “Machinery and Large-Scale Industry.” ← Yes, I am recommending you to read some Marx, it is a heavy read, but still useful.

2. Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (Monthly Review Press, 1974).

3. “Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism.” Past & Present, no. 38, December 1967, pp. 56–97.

Questions in my mind:

• Whose skill counts as skill, once the vat doesn’t need a person watching it?

• If convenience at the till and convenience at the vat are part of the same move, why does one get called convenience and the other deskilling?

• Who decides that a security guard, rather than a fairer wage or a better train workforce, is the answer to a store that runs on fewer workers?

• If most cheesemaking expertise for sale will soon belong to people who know how to programme a system rather than make cheese, what happens to the producers who can’t afford either the system or the programmer?

• When capital investment comes with its own expertise attached, what would it take for a local system to adopt the machine without also adopting the priorities of whoever sold it?

I was arriving in the town of Ocosingo in Chiapas to join the festivities to celebrate the most iconic product from the region, the delicious and often times enigmatic Queso Bola. A singer in the main plaza of the town sang a corrido Chiapaneco, which recounted the history of the town and the social issues of the day. The song is part of a genre of folklore of this region of Mexico and it is normally sang to mark moments in history, new verses are added to include new historical important moments in the town’s story. This day, the singer had re-framed an old corrido to recount the history of the cheese.

The song included the story of the Lactic ranch and Mrs. Hermelinda Roble de Balboa, the mythical woman who shared the recipe of a Dutch cheese with her neighbour, Fidelino Solórzano Trujillo, who first made the cheese in 1927. The song also spoke of the beauty of the region. Ocosingo is an interesting place because it is one of the municipios that was for a long time controlled by the EZLN and has always had a history of revolution. In some ways, the Zapatista demands are mirrored in the Queso Bola makers’ request, both demand recognition for their culture and issues, question the system in place to claim and defend what is theirs, who owns the knowledge of their culture and customs, the land, and, ultimately, a place in the world. My fav Zapatista slogan is: “queremos un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos” - (we want a world where many worlds can exist).

In a book gifted to me by Catarino Ramón Trujillo Trujillo, the town chronicler of Ocosingo, I read of when the cows arrived in town, anecdotes of producers and the work done by my friend Charito Lopez Bassoul to get a denomination of origin for this cheese. This took a long time to be achieved. Here you can see a picture of her holding the plaque marking the official recognition. This cheese had a “marca colectiva”, which was given in 2005, by the IMPI - Instituto Mexicano de la Propiedad Intelectual, as they refused to recognise products that were not primary ingredients, but a push from the new government delivered this win. Twenty years later, in December 2025, that marca colectiva was upgraded, finally the IMPI granted Queso de Bola de Ocosingo a full Indicación Geográfica, the newer top-tier protection Mexican law created for cases exactly like this one, and the one Charito and the rest of the producers had been chasing the whole time.

I am happy for the producers of this cheese, and also for Chiapas and Mexico, but I still question the need for a Geographical Indication or a Denomination of Origin, the same way that I question the ones in Europe. It is not that I don’t see a legal value on them and understand they have a way to benefit producers to maintain some of their traditions, what I am always so worried about is the framework that was used to establish the GI regime and how it continues to be used to provide European products a preeminence in the marketplace. I do hope that a GI for this Mexican cheese means that with time we can also start recognising the value of products from other places more widely.

Think about it, of the hundreds of non-European products protected by a GI or a DO, how many do you know and how many do you consume often or because of this designation. It doesn’t matter if you are in the US or France, in Japan or Argentina, I am sure the GI/DO protections are the last thing in your mind for products that are not made in Europe and that is the real problem of that system. Yes, tequila is amazing and you may enjoy it on a drink, but would you really care if it didn’t have a Denomination of Origin? Bola de Ocosingo’s producers have waited twenty years to find out whether it will, whether recognition finally delivers the market they have long wanted.

In my Spanish-language book Quesos Mexicanos, I wrote: “estas recetas fueron modificadas por queseros mexicanos, adaptándose al terruño de cada zona geográfica y a las gastronomías mexicanas.” An academic term I keep returning to when thinking about this is transculturation: the idea that knowledge rarely belongs to one person, but is made in the back and forth between people and groups, in this case, cheesemakers. This cheese is exactly that, its story is what happens between the one who remembers the original (Hermelinda) and the one who remakes it (Fidelino), and everyone who later carried that knowledge forward.

This is the recognition that cheese in the Americas have been made local. Bola de Ocosingo is probably the best example. Not because it is a good cheese, but because as Mr. Trujillo Trujillo writes, the type of animals (cows coming via Cuba, new genetics brought from Brazil), the feed (lush jungle diets full of protein-rich foods), and the local cuisine made what was presented as a Dutch cheese into a staple of Chiapas gastronomy.

Queso Bola de Ocosingo at first look is closer to a caciocavallo than an Edam (presumably the Dutch cheese always referred to in accounts of the creation of the cheese). The cheese has a crumbly inner paste that is fundamentally the cheese itself, made by long fermentation and acidification of the milk and then the curd, to lower the pH and prevent pathogenic microbes from developing. The curd is then salted and milled and made into balls of cheese, which can be sold in corn husk packages. To become Queso Bola in the picture, the cheesemaker covers the crumbly ball of curd with two skin-thin layers of stretched curd. The cheese inside gets “cooked” again and develops a distinct mineral flavour. The cheese is left to dry and the outer skin develops a shine before it is sold.

This cheese has nothing to do with a Dutch cheese, nor an Italian cheese, not even with a Spanish cheese, it is truly a Mexican original developed by entrepreneurial cheesemakers who needed a way to preserve milk and, using the techniques they had learned, created something completely new. Original enough, it turns out, to need ninety-eight years — nearly a century — and a change in the law before it was finally recognised by the State as worthy of protection.

To read along

1. Catarino Ramón Trujillo Trujillo. Queso Bola de Ocosingo, Historia y Tradición. De Aquí a la Luna, 2021.

2. Fernando Ortiz. Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar. Jesús Montero, 1940. English translation: Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar. Translated by Harriet de Onís, introduction by Fernando Coronil. Duke University Press, 1995.

3. Sarah Bowen. Divided Spirits: Tequila, Mezcal, and the Politics of Production. University of California Press, 2015.

Questions in my mind:

If transculturation produces something genuinely new, why does recognising it still require proving descent from a European original?

Hermelinda knew the recipe; Fidelino made the cheese. Whose knowledge does the law count, when it finally counts any of it?

Ocosingo fought for land and autonomy long before anyone filed paperwork for a cheese. Are those the same fight, or two fights that happen to share a place?

Twenty years between a marca colectiva and an Indicación Geográfica, is that delay a flaw in the system, or the system working exactly as designed?

Before the Europeans arrived, there was no dairy livestock in the Americas. No cows, no goats, no ewes, no buffalo, not even mares or camels to milk. The few milk-giving animals in the Andes, the llama and its relatives, mattered far more for their fibre than for their milk, and were barely milked at all.

When the European animals arrived, they disrupted the native ecosystems, with their own microbes and, more drastically, with everything needed to feed them. That was made easy by a decision the colonisers had already taken: that Indigenous agriculture was unproductive, or simply illegible by their standards. The land could therefore be cleared for European crops and for pasture. The milpa gave way to the grazing herd.

Almost every adult Indigenous American was lactose intolerant, as almost every human is weaned, unless their ancestors were long-time dairying people. So the milk and cheese made in the colonies were, at first, for the Europeans who could digest them and wanted them. Some accounts say the settlers guarded their cheesemaking as a secret. I doubt it. That reads like a story told by someone who loves cheese and assumes everyone else wanted in.

Indigenous people did learn to make cheese, mostly because they were forced to labour in the haciendas and produce food for the people who held them. And cheese, unlike milk, is something you can eat without tolerating much lactose: ageing and fermentation strip most of it away. Over generations, and later through mixing with European populations, dairy became ordinary across Mexico. It is worth noting that people did not rapidly evolve to digest milk, it took decades and other demographic factors. Amerindians probably ate some cheese and some coagulated dairy, managing diet and discomfort, eventually the genetics that do allow milk-drinking arrived largely with European ancestry.

While researching my first book, I found that some of the first cheeses made in Mexico were mature sheep’s cheeses, in what is now Nuevo León (the state home to the city of Monterrey in northern Mexico). A history of the tables of New Spain’s viceroys records that in 1585 Diego Montemayor acquired land near Monterrey, where sheep were kept for their milk to make cheese. The first ewes were the Churra breed, from Zamora. A cheese deliberately made “in the style of La Mancha” (presumably Manchego-style) shows up later, at a hacienda in what is now Puebla in central Mexico. So from very early on the point of reference was Spain, even when the sheep, the land, and the hands were not. Those hard sheep’s cheeses faded, and it is only in the last thirty years that Mexican producers have taken them up again. They will tell you they are not making Manchego. Some look to other Iberian cheeses, some to Italian ones.

I keep coming back to that first cheese, because it was made to imitate something European. If the story ended there, Mexican cheese would only ever be a copy. But it does not end there. What happened over the next four hundred years is the subject of my post next week.

Note: This post is kept short, as attention spans are shorter and I want to pique your interest in this topic, but also because the format of these “provocations” include the references below and the questions. In my wild dreams, I wish people were reading along these posts and the references, and then thinking with me on the questions. Thank you to those of your commenting.

To read along

1. Alexandra Jones, “History, Part 2: Colonization, Industrialization, and American Cheese.” Milkfed, 10 Feb. 2026.

milkfed.substack.com — Free, and on Substack!

2. Elinor G. K. Melville, A Plague of Sheep: Environmental Consequences of the Conquest of Mexico. Cambridge University Press, 1994.

3. Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900. Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Questions in my mind:

• If the animals, the techniques, and the farm structure all arrived with colonisation, what does it mean to “honour” Indigenous people by naming the cheese in their language?

• The first cheese in Mexico was made to imitate a Spanish one. Does a thing that begins as a copy have to stay one?

• The milpa gave way to pasture so the herds could eat. What was lost from the land when the cows arrived, and can a cheese carry that history?

• We know the date a European-style cheese first appeared. Why is that the moment we call the beginning, and what beginnings does that erase?

It was developed at the Paraná Biopark, in Toledo in the south-west of the country, by a team of dairy researchers led by Kennidy de Bortoli, through a programme called Projeto de Queijos Finos, and it is made and sold by the Flor da Terra dairy. It was the first Brazilian cheese ever to reach the final. I tasted it after the competition and later spoke with the researchers while I was working on One Cheese to Rule Them All book. I was fascinated by how the cheese came to be, because the team used a familiar technique, washing the curd to bring out caramel notes, the way it is done for Gouda, but instead of plain water they washed it with a passion fruit solution, giving the cheese hints of the fruit.

They finish it by covering the wheel in calendula flowers and passion fruit seeds. It looks more like a fruit than a cheese, and if you are used only to rustic wheels made in the mountains or delicate soft cheeses made in valleys of Europe, it truly looks alien. But that is the point. Cheesemakers in other parts of the world innovate in their own ways, drawing on their own cultural references, on fruits and plants that mean something to them. Over-focusing on how unique is Brazilian innovation without also speaking about the challenges and issues can slide into exoticising the process. Exoticising of “different foods” is a real problem in the foodie circuit and the food industry and I do not want to feed that discourse. What I want to talk about is the experience of creating a new cheese. In an earlier post I wrote that innovation in Brazil too often meant becoming “more French.” Passionata to me is the answer to that worry. This is a cheese that genuinely owes nothing to a European recipe, built around a Brazilian fruit and a Brazilian idea.

Until recently, Brazilian producers were under the impression that they had to name the European style their cheese resembled. I could not find a law that said so, but whether it was ever written down, it was enforced in practice. The producers I have met told me the authorities expected that reference to appear on their labels. Many consumer wanted it too. It is not unusual to find cheeses there called Gruyère, or Gruyère-style, or Parmesan-style (Parmesão), meaning Parmigiano Reggiano. However, every one of them said they did not want to use the European name but felt they had no choice. Presumably, the enforcement came from Latin American technocrats during the neoliberal period to appeal to foreign markets. The problem was that it made products feel generic, and led consumers to expect the same cheese no matter who made it.

There is an argument for Standards of Identity, like the ones the US uses to define what a cheddar or a fontina is. They can reduce fraud by big conglomerates and prevent the use of ingredients that do not belong in each cheese. But as food evolves, and the market drives innovation, some producers find these standards hold them back, forcing their cheeses to fit rules that no longer serve everyone.

When I spoke with Bortoli, he was reluctant to say his cheese followed a “Gouda” recipe. I understood the pushback, he didn’t set to make a gouda, instead he wanted to make a flavoured cheese and figure out the best way was to introduce the taste in the wash of the curd. The comparison was useful for me, to grasp the process, but it is not needed to explain the cheese to an ordinary customer, who may have never tried Gouda, so there is no reason to call it a gouda-style.

This cheese is unlikely to be seen outside Brazil any time soon. The quantities are small, and there are huge barriers for non-European cheeses to enter the US, Canada, the UK, or Europe. I will write about the problems with that legislation in another post, but it is worth keeping in mind that this innovation was made for a market at home, not for some foreign customer who might one day “discover” it.

Jason recognised the cheese on the tables at the World Cheese Awards because he had already seen it at a competition in Brazil. He did not discover it, and he never claimed to. He instead acknowledged it and decided to champion it because it was delicious.

The producers did everything they could to reach the world stage, not to win a market abroad, but to validate the work they are already doing at home. There is more and more engagement between cheesemakers across the global south. Recently an Indian cheese won a major award in Brazil, and the prize was celebrated in India on a grand scale. Similarly, Chilean cheeses have taken the Copa América del Queso, most recently Caprinos Villaseca, a goat dairy from Ovalle, whose blue cheese won gold in Ecuador. And little by little, Spanish, Swiss, and American cheeses are starting to enter competitions in the global south, to appeal to those local markets.

To read along

1. Ana L. Barretto Penna, Mirna L. Gigante, and Svetoslav D. Todorov. “Artisanal Brazilian Cheeses—History, Marketing, Technological and Microbiological Aspects.” Foods, vol. 10, no. 7, 2021, article 1562. - https://www.mdpi.com/2304-8158/10/7/1562

2. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, editors. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge University Press, 1983.

3. bell hooks. “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance.” Black Looks: Race and Representation, South End Press, 1992.

Questions in my mind:

• If a cheese is made to be validated abroad but sold at home, whose approval is it really seeking, and why does the foreign stage still confer it?

• Standards of Identity can stop fraud and slow innovation at the same time. Who should get to decide when a rule has stopped serving the product it was meant to protect?

• Where is the line between recognising an innovation or a difference and exoticising it? How do we prevent the exoticising of food cultures, and cheeses included?

• South-to-south circuits are growing, Indian cheese judged in Brazil, Chilean cheese in Ecuador. What changes when the global south stops routing its recognition through Europe?

The main thing that has changed is the market. Bigger players bought mid-sized companies and cut many raw milk cheese lines. Specialty cheeses have got better at mimicking the complexity of raw milk cheese flavour. Economic pressures, from feed to land ownership and management to tariffs and transport, have pushed the price of cheese up, and consumers have not always followed. And many cheese shops never recovered from the shocks of the pandemic and have closed. In my view this means that raw milk cheeses, which tend to be more expensive, are being made less and have fewer places to be sold and championed. This is not only true of the US and the UK; I have seen the same moves in France, Brazil, and Australia.

If you work in cheese, none of this diagnosis is new. But to people who do not work in the industry and are still devoted to high-quality food, it must seem counterintuitive against the rise of the wellness market. In my view it is precisely the wellness influencers, aligned with marketers, who gave raw milk cheese the shove. The current wellness and health trends are closely aligned with technofeudalism, which does not prioritise good food but functional food.

This is why the wellness world can embrace raw milk while turning its back on raw milk cheese. Milk reads as pure input, primal and trackable, a source of protein and probiotics. Cheese is presented as an indulgence, complex and fatty and made for pleasure. It may be the same milk, but it is not judged by whether it is nutritious but by whether it can easily be counted. The irony is that drinking raw milk is linked to far more illness than eating a piece of raw milk cheese, and yet wellness reaches for the milk pint and refuses the wedge. Maximising protein, not pleasure.

Cheese, a wonderful source of healthy fats, is treated as a treat, and often as an indulgence. The current wellness and fitness culture only permits such indulgences if you have earned them, by burning the calories and hitting that ephemeral PB. I have spent the past year also tracking protein and building strength at the gym myself. Alcohol was my indulgence, so that is mostly gone; cheese is not. I eat as much cheese as I ever did, partly because it is an easy way to sneak protein into my diet, and partly because I love it, and would rather lose the burpees than give up on Camembert.

The wellness industry gave us the marketing of foods as “functional,” to appeal to people seeking more protein, and small producers are pushed to follow the trends the big conglomerates set. But those same parameters are mostly used to sell heavily processed foods. Useful as the trend may be for some, I think it pushes us further from understanding food as something that does more than feed us. Food should nurture and sustain, not just deliver nutrients.

The war on raw milk cheese that Prof. Donnelly describes is no longer waged only by the FDA, which by now ought to be friendlier to our industry. It has become more insidious, because the US government now seems more interested in bio-hacking, in GLP-1 and other peptides delivered by injection from labs, than in finding solutions in the food supply. Recently, the White House announced its Medicare Bridge programme, putting those very drugs within reach of millions, while the food supply is in jeopardy from yet another outbreak, the most recent one from iceberg lettuce grown in Mexico contaminated with Cyclospora, and the agencies and media again reached for the same blame-the-foreigner reflex that runs through immigration politics.

And yet many cheeses are already “functional,” through their naturally occurring peptides. In the readings below I include an article on how Cotija cheese, the one Lactography calls Mountain Cotija, releases bioactive peptides during ripening that make it a strong candidate to be promoted as a functional food.

Cotija, like so many wonderful cheeses, is made with raw milk. And yet our interest in raw milk cheese seems to be fading. But as Patrick and I wrote in the conclusion of our book, there is still something to be said for raw milk cheeses.

To read along

1. Catherine Donnelly, Ending the War on Artisan Cheese: The Inside Story of Government Overreach and the Struggle to Save Traditional Raw Milk Cheesemakers. Chelsea Green, 2019.

2. Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. Melville House, 2023.

3. Hernández-Galán, L., et al. “ACEI and Antioxidant Peptides Release during Ripening of Mexican Cotija Hard Cheese.” Journal of Food Research, vol. 5, no. 6, 2016, pp. 85–91.

Questions in my mind:

• If raw milk cheese is disappearing during a wellness boom, what does that tell us about what the wellness market actually values?

• When a cheese has to justify itself as “functional,” as protein or antioxidant, what happens to the older reason for eating it, which was that it is delicious?

• The wellness world will drink raw milk but refuse raw milk cheese. Why is the input embraced and the food refused?

• Is turning Cotija into a “functional food” a way to save it, or a way of surrendering to the same logic that pushed raw milk aside?

• If the market keeps closing the independent shops, is protecting raw milk cheese still a consumer question, or has it become a larger macro-economic political one?

Tom Perry knows far more about this than I do. You can read more of his original research here. His presentation at the American Cheese Society conference in 2016, made me aware of how much of the world’s lactic cultures have been consolidated into a handful of companies. Later conversations with the so-called Natural Cheesemakers (while at Bra in 2022 and online over the years, I will introduce you to them soon) drove the point home. We need to make sure the cultures used to make cheese do not become the property of a few companies.

I raise it here because many of the consultants I wrote about in the previous post insist that cheesemakers in Latin America and elsewhere must choose standardised cultures to achieve standardised results. This leads, almost by definition, to the disuse of local and native cultures, and to a narrowing of flavour.

It is not uncommon to taste a Gouda-style cheese made in Latin America, or Japan, or the Netherlands, and find they all taste the same. Nor is it uncommon to find cheeses in US and UK supermarkets with near-identical flavour profiles despite being sold as different styles. I would call it a “gruyerization” of flavour in hard cheeses. Cheeses made by a lab, with similar strains of lactic cultures, deployed everywhere in the same way, producing the profile that market analysis (and many judges) says consumers prefer.

This is a worrying development, because what we are losing is not only diversity but agency, the ability of a cheesemaker to compete and thrive on the strength of something distinct. If innovation is only a matter of using standardised cultures in inert (pasteurized? thermalized?) milk, then it does not really matter where the cheese is made. I suspect we are already living with the endpoint of that logic, in the form of vegan cheeses engineered to mimic the flavours of animal-milk cheese without any milk at all.

To read along

1. Heather Paxson, “Post-Pasteurian Cultures: The Microbiopolitics of Raw-Milk Cheese in the United States,” Cultural Anthropology, vol. 23, no. 1, 2008, pp. 15–47.

anthropology.mit.edu (free PDF)

2. Benjamin E. Wolfe et al., “Cheese Rind Communities Provide Tractable Systems for In Situ and In Vitro Studies of Microbial Diversity,” Cell, vol. 158, no. 2, 2014, pp. 422–433.

3. Jack Ralph Kloppenburg Jr., First the Seed: The Political Economy of Plant Biotechnology. 2nd ed., University of Wisconsin Press, 2004.

Questions in my mind:

• If the microbes come from two or three companies, what “origin” is actually in the cheese?

• Is terroir protecting the substance of a place, or only its story, while the biological substance is quietly centralised? Is it just a convenient narrative?

• The lab found that cheese rinds organise the same way regardless of geography. Does that sink microbial terroir, or just move it, from the rind to the milk’s native flora and the maker’s hand?

• Cultures are to cheese what seeds are to a crops. We built seed-saving and seed-sovereignty movements. What would cheese culture sovereignty look like?

• When innovation means standard cultures in inert milk, what is left of the cheesemaker’s agency, and is the vegan, milk-less cheese simply the honest endpoint of that logic?

I am paraphrasing, but I feel like I have heard this comment a dozen times. In Brazil, in Colombia, in Mexico, and in Japan.

In business school back in the 1990s, in a marketing class, I learned about the “tropicalization” of strategies, the idea that a plan built in one market could be adapted for another to account for differences in audiences, work cultures, and communication styles. Even in marketing, that idea is no longer the norm. Global companies have largely stopped “tropicalising” a central strategy outward, and now build campaigns with local teams, using broad frameworks to guide a brand while trusting local knowledge, culture, and judgement to do the real work. The lesson the marketers eventually learned is that expertise embedded in a place tends to beat expertise imported into it.

It would seem that this paternalistic approach was never considered in the European technical schools where many of the consultants come from. For the most part, dairy consultants sell their solutions and their expertise without a real understanding of the conditions in the places where they are hired. Many of them charge astronomical prices for very little in the way of real solutions or strategy.

European, and increasingly American, consultants arrive at the farms and factories that hired them and find a completely different set of realities, ones that do not match the textbook knowledge they carry, or that differ because of the ecology, the work conditions, the animal husbandry practices, the health regimes, or the legal parameters. None of them then spends enough time to engage with those differences meaningfully. Instead, they teach their techniques, impose their parameters, and leave. The results are usually costly for the farms and dairies, and often technicians are accused for not having paid enough attention or done enough work to apply the imported parameters. So many of these local producers then must innovate, adapt, and often improve on the information they were given. Some do so successfully. Some leave all the teachings behind and return to their own ways.

I could name here a couple of consultants working in cheesemaking, in affinage, even in packaging, who have been “helping” producers in LatAm or Asia. I would rather not. Not for fear of retaliation, since some of them are not even in the cheese industry anymore, but because I do not want to give the impression that these are just a few bad apples. I would rather make the point that Spanish, French, Dutch, Italian, Swiss, and increasingly American consultants are finding lucrative contracts to advise producers outside of Europe and the US, with mix results.

There is another side to this sale of expertise. There are agronomy schools, dairy research centres, and scientific institutes in Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, and Mexico that are trying to build innovation programmes, projects to professionalise producers, and channels for information to be shared freely. My hope is that these efforts soon become the norm when producers go looking for new expertise, and that we come to treat the knowledge of European and American consultants as one voice among many, useful for finding nuance in a process rather than a set of instructions to be taken as gospel.

And I hope the exchange runs both ways. I encourage European makers to go see the value in knowledge developed elsewhere, and that the traffic in expertise stops being a one-way road. That is not a small thing, because some of what moves along that road is not advice at all but standardisation itself, starting with the very cultures we use to make cheese. That is where I will go next in my following post.

To read along

1. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Yale University Press, 1998).

2. James Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine: Development, Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho (University of Minnesota Press, 1994).

3. Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton University Press, 1995).

Questions in my mind:

• Why is expertise assumed to travel from “The West” outward, when the milk, the climate, and the practice are all local?

• What would a consultant have to do to earn the fee honestly? How much time on the ground before advice becomes worth its price?

• When the imposed technique fails, why is the producer blamed rather than the parameters?

• If the local research centres already exist, in Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Mexico, what keeps producers reaching for the foreign consultant instead?

• What is the difference between taking expertise as gospel and using it to find nuance?

The producer was making a cheese based on a traditional recipe for Queijo Minas, but he wanted to do something different, something to set him apart. I believe the original recipe was that of a Canastra cheese, an almost generic term for many of the cheeses in the state of Minas Gerais in Brazil. It is a style commonly made by all producers, though there is enough variation between makers from the different regions where the cheese is made for various profiles to be available. But because of the saturation of the market, all Queijo Minas ends up competing in the same space, and often consumers end up buying the cheapest version, or the one produced most locally. This is why some producers want to experiment with new styles.

This desire for innovation is not unique to Brazil. I have heard Swiss producers keen to make “something not traditional” too, and one of the most distinctive new cheeses from the Basque Country came from the same place of wanting to try something new. Ondare, made by Iker Izeta from the milk of latxa sheep, is a soft lactic cheese with a bloomy rind, which is to say a Basque milk given a French shape. It was conceived as a tribute, recovering the recipes of the late Ramón Lizeaga, a friend of mine.

What worried me in Brazil was not the desire to innovate, or even the wish to be differentiated. What worried me was that the avenue to do both was to become “more French,” and therefore more sophisticated. Cheese is fundamentally a technology to save milk, a peasant product, and in economies like the one in Minas Gerais a real way to feed people. Creating products that are more expensive has the benefit of better supporting agriculture, maybe. But it can also contribute to a cost-of-living crisis, where prices go up and people with lower incomes are disenfranchised.

In a future post I will talk more about the ways some Brazilian producers are innovating, and about their engagement with French dairy and cheese technologists. But I wanted to write this part separately, to start thinking about innovation, pricing, specialty cheese, and the desire to be “European.”

To read along

1. Heather Paxson, The Life of Cheese: Crafting Food and Value in America (University of California Press, 2012).

2. Sarah Bowen, Divided Spirits: Tequila, Mezcal, and the Politics of Production (University of California Press, 2015).

3. “Queijo Minas: Brazil’s humble but iconic cheese,” Explore Parts Unknown. Online here: explorepartsunknown.com

Questions in my mind:

• Why is “more French” the default direction for “more sophisticated”? What would it mean for a producer to move up-market without moving toward Europeanness?

• If cheese began as a way to save milk and feed people, what do we lose when its most celebrated versions are the ones most people cannot afford?

• Does making an expensive cheese actually support a farm, or mainly becomes just another brand?

• Pingo is a living culture, handed from yesterday’s batch to today’s. What happens to that inheritance when a producer reaches for French methods and cultures instead?

• Is the problem the innovation, or the direction of the aspiration?

A couple of years ago, I asked people in the industry to de-prioritize the term pasta filata when talking about cheeses made by letting the curd acidify, scalding it in hot water until the paste turns plastic, and then kneading and stretching it until the proteins align into fibres. The process is commonly used to describe mozzarella, provolone, and other Italian cheeses. But cheeses made this way are not only Italian.

Cheeses made in the style are made across the Caucasus, Anatolia, the Balkans, and Greece, and every one of those places has its own word for them, and its own terminology for the process. Those words do not even agree on which part of the make is the part worth naming. Italian filatura comes from filare, to spin, and names the stretching. English spun curd and stretched curd name the same gesture, as do Spanish pasta hilada and French pâte filée. Others name the heat instead. Slovak parenica comes from parenie, steaming. Polish ser parzony means scalded cheese. German goes furthest in that direction, by using Brühkäse for scalded cheese, Knetkäse is kneaded cheese, and both put the hot water and the hands ahead of the stretch. German is interesting, because in their taxonomy pasta filata is filed as a variety of Brühkäse. The Italian term sits inside the larger category of scalded cheeses rather than above it.

In Armenia the braided version of the cheese is chechil, and the tradition of making it in Shirak is part of the country’s intangible cultural heritage list. There the name describes the result rather than the action, carrying the sense of that which separates into threads, and the fine-spun version is tel panir, thread cheese. In Georgia it is sulguni, which appears in Sulkhan-Saba Orbeliani’s dictionary in the seventeenth century. In the Balkans it is kashkaval. None of those cheese names, or the process terms behind them, has ever been asked to carry the whole style. In the English-speaking world, we do not call mozzarella a queso Oaxaca, nor do we assert that burrata is a fromage à pâte filée when describing it to customers in the US. Nobody asks an Italian producer to describe their caciocavallo as chechil. My point is that only one language gets to name the category, and every other tradition gets to be an example inside it.

That is the asymmetry I am questioning. Not that Italy makes these cheeses, but that the Italian terminology is the only one that was ever promoted from a process to a category.

Some of that vocabulary is already shifting, and not for political reasons. David Asher, in Milk Into Cheese, writes of a “pasta filata, or spun-curd, cheese.” Others say stretched curd. What the alternatives have in common is that they describe what the maker is doing, rather than the supposed origin of the process. They are more specific about the technique, which is the opposite of what the borrowed term does.

It is rare in Latin America to hear the Italian term used at all, and in the French-speaking world pâte filée is preferred, though people do understand the Italian terminology. Where pasta filata is most prevalent is in the English-speaking world. In fact, most of the negative reactions to my questioning of it came from producers based in the US and the UK, who accused me of wanting to erase the history of Italy and the contribution of Italian-Americans to the gastronomy of the US. After all, mozzarella is the most eaten cheese in the US.

My worry with pasta filata being adopted as the default term is that it gives Italian cheeses a primacy over others in this style. That primacy is seldom claimed by producers in Italy, and far more often by US-based conglomerates that produce low-quality mozzarella and benefit from the association with Italian gastronomy.

When I was doing the research for my first book, Quesos Mexicanos, I found the story of Leobarda Castellanos García, and of how she “discovered” the technique to make quesillo. The story, probably fictional, goes like this. Leobarda was fourteen years old and lived in the town of Reyes Etla in Oaxaca. In 1885 she was left in charge of making cheese. The curd for an unnamed cheese was being heated during the make. Leobarda got distracted, some say by a boy who came calling, and left the curd unattended. When she returned, she tried to save the make by adding hot water to the curd and so created the conditions for a stretched curd cheese. Presumably the family ate the cheese, and it became a staple in the state. There is no documentary record that Leobarda existed, which is why I say the story is probably fictional. But the Museo del Ferrocarril Mexicano del Sur holds shipping receipts from the 1890s showing quesillo travelling out of Oaxaca to Puebla and Mexico City.

This cheese is now known as quesillo in Oaxaca. It is also known as queso de hebra, string cheese. Outside the region of origin it is known as Queso Oaxaca, a name it was given from outside rather than the one given by the producers, and one that was then adopted widely in Mexico and the US with the migration of people from the state.

Quesillo is made using a spun curd technique, and in Mexico it is described as queso de hebra. In the US, however, cheeses of this style made in Mexico, or made in the US by companies started by Mexican migrants or by larger corporations, are called pasta filata. Here is where the language matters, because while some consumers in the US may associate the style with mozzarella, not everyone knows this. Cheesemongers are using the term to promote a Mexican cheese by appealing to the allure of a European product. This is why the language matters, because it assumes that only foods from Europe have value, and others are approximations.

Most recently, when I was in Japan, I judged over 10 samples of cheeses made in this style. Some were excellent, some needed work. What struck me was that my fellow judges, when tasting and describing them, judged the cheeses made in Japan as inferior to the Italian original, and called them not mozzarella-style or burrata-style but pasta filata, as in “this cheese is Pasta Filata,” as a proper name, almost like saying this is a Camembert, not camembert-style nor bloomy-rind or sufrance ripened. Pasta Filata is not a brand, nor a name of a cheese, but in this instance the cheeses were identified by the name. Maybe part of it was lost in the translation between Japanese, English, French, and some Italian. But there I felt like the term was obscuring something useful to know, which was the actual cheese make process.

If you know about stretched curd cheeses, you know that a lot of the process depends on the acidity of the curd when it is exposed to the water. You can arrive at the desired acidity either by a slow fermentation of the curd, or by a quick set using added acid. Each technique will yield different flavours and is used for different products. Artisanal producers prefer the slow fermentation, while more commercial producers prefer a quick set and stretch to save time and money.

The difference is measurable, and it is not small. Curd that has been fermented by its cultures is usually stretched at a pH of about 5.1 to 5.3. Curd that has been set with added acid stretches higher, around 5.5 to 5.7, because the calcium is stripped out earlier in the process. The cheese that comes out of the second route is softer and melts more readily but carries fewer of the volatile compounds that we taste as aroma. Two different cheeses, two different chemistries, one term.

By describing both processes as pasta filata, this differentiation is lost. This is why I think we are doing a disservice to everyone in adopting a term that is more socio-political than technical, to describe a variety of cheeses that are very different and should be understood as part of the diversity of cheesemaking around the world.

To read along

Three pieces on where the technique comes from, what the process actually involves, and why some cuisines get to be a standard while others get to be a comparison.

1. Paul Kindstedt, Cheese and Culture: A History of Cheese and Its Place in Western Civilization (Chelsea Green, 2012).

2. “Invited review: Fresh pasta filata cheeses: Composition, role, and evolution of the microbiota in their quality and safety,” Journal of Dairy Science (2022). Available here: journalofdairyscience.org

3. Krishnendu Ray, The Ethnic Restaurateur (Bloomsbury, 2016).

Questions in my mind:

• Every tradition that makes this cheese has a word for it. Why was only one of those words promoted from a name into a category?

• Some languages name the stretch, others name the scald. If the traditions do not agree on which step defines the cheese, what exactly is the category holding together?

• Who actually benefits from that promotion? Producers in Italy, or the conglomerates that borrow the association?

• When a cheesemonger calls quesillo a pasta filata cheese, is that misunderstanding, translation or promotion?

• The term covers both a slow fermentation and a quick acid set, two processes that do not even stretch at the same pH. What else does a term hide when it names a category instead of a process?

• What would we call these cheeses if we named them for what the maker does, rather than for where the word came from?

The blog was followed by a very active Twitter account, then Facebook posts, and eventually Instagram. Long-form writing was replaced by sentences, then by captions on pictures, and then by just photos and videos. But my desire to write never stopped, and it yielded two books: Quesos Mexicanos and One Cheese To Rule Them All.

These books, co-authored with great people, hold some of the ideas I have been working on around cheese politics. Alongside the books there have been magazine articles, encyclopedia entries, and book chapters.

Cheese writing has always run parallel to my trips to cheesemaking regions, my conversations with makers and mongers, and my reading of an evolving literature on gastronomy, political theory, and peer-reviewed science. At some point cheese writing was also going to be the topic of my PhD dissertation, but that stopped abruptly when the world got too complicated.

More recently, after finishing the last book, I was asked about my new project. I shared that I am co-authoring a book chapter on Mexican cheeses for the upcoming second edition of Cheese and Microbes, a book considered seminal in the development of knowledge in our industry. That chapter is in revision right now, and you will be able to read it soon.

But researching it, after years of research on cheeses from many other parts of the world, made me start questioning a lot of my assumptions about cheese. Perhaps what is needed is a new framework for thinking about it.

In June 2026, I travelled to Japan to judge the Japanese Cheese Awards and to visit a couple of producers in Nagano prefecture. There, the desire for a new framing became even more pressing. It felt strange to use terminology that reflects such a narrow view of the world.

There is perhaps a larger project here. For now, I am going to put down some ideas across three to five posts, to lay out some of the questions I have. No answers yet, rather “provocations,” an invitation for others to think alongside me about how to engage with questions of categories and terminologies.

I will be honest: most of the writing here will be done by me, but I will use AI for research, copy-editing, and formatting. Not because I do not value that work, but because I want to get this project done in a timely manner, and not have to wait until I am in the right headspace to draft, research, edit, format, and post. The reality is that this work is unpaid. I can only do it because I have a salary from formal employment, supplemented by my many entrepreneurial projects. I wish I could just research and write for a living, but that is not possible anymore.

For now, I leave you with my framing question: Whose terroir?

To read along

Three pieces that lay out a basic vocabulary: what terroir is supposed to mean, and how it became law.

1. Amy Trubek, Kolleen Guy & Sarah Bowen, “Terroir: A French Conversation with a Transnational Future,” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 14, no. 2 (2010).

2. Kal Raustiala & Stephen Munzer, “The Global Struggle over Geographic Indications,” European Journal of International Law 18, no. 2 (2007): 337–365. ejil.org/pdfs/18/2/227.pdf — free PDF

3. Laurence Bérard & Philippe Marchenay, “Local Products and Geographical Indications: Taking Account of Local Knowledge and Biodiversity,” International Social Science Journal 58, no. 187 (2006): 109–116.

Questions in my mind:

• Terroir claims to describe the relationship between a place and a taste. Why has it needed a French vocabulary to be legible?

• When a Mexican or a Japanese cheese is described as “like a Mozzarella” or “in the style of a Camembert,” what work is that comparison doing, and for whom?

• Geographical Indications protect origin. Who gets to draw the boundaries of an origin, and what kind of evidence counts as proof?

• If a technique arrives by colonisation and is then remade over four centuries by different animals, grasses, microbes, and kitchens — whose cheese is it?

The talk in the academic world is on the importance to create collectives of people who are in different fields and disciplines and try to learn from each other. This may sound really obvious, but it has taken a very long time for scholars to get here. Academic endeavor is defined by the strict boundaries set up in the study of the physical and social sciences. The humanities are less strict about this, but they also have their fair share of border patrolling. The idea is to create expertise that can then be utilize to produce wealth, if interested you should read Max Weber.

It is with this in mind, that I have tried to expand my horizons and move away from the self-centered view that my work and my craft is most important and significant alone. I have tried to enter, establish and seek collaborations with people doing amazing food projects. Here I present to you four new collaborations. More information will be coming up, but this is a little taste of things to follow.

Educating Young Minds

Along with the HSMSE Gastronomy class run by a good friend of mine, we are taking 18 high school students to Flying Pigs Farm in upstate New York to participate in the Farm CampThis school group learns about food production through readings and films but also experiences like taste workshops, visits to farms, markets shops around NYC. Part gastronomy class – part cultural sensitization, the aim of the program is to introduce students to good food and “to expose the kids to new tastes and cultures encouraging an open-mindedness, which in theory would extend to all aspects of the students' lives.” experience.

We are going to Farm Camp to learn about the realities of food production and to gain an understanding of the importance of knowing the source of what we eat. We will be in the farm on 5/6 June and you will be able to follow us on twitter by tracking the #GastroCamp or the #FarmCamp tags.

Other twitter feeds to follow are: @FarmCampNY @FlyingPigsFarm I will have a small contribution on smell and the ideas of disgusting, nasty, tasty and gourmet. I have been working on this topic for a while now and I have a piece (in Spanish) on Letras Libres.

If you would like to learn more about the HSMSE Gastronomy class or on the teacher leading the initiative you can contact her check out their facebook page at: HSMSE Gastronomy Eats NYC or email her at jboylan @ hsmse.org She has prepared lesson plans and a syllabus, which she will be happy to share with other educators.

Mexican cheeses
I designed five different vegetarian sandwiches using Mexican cheeses for Aula Chocolate in Mexico City. These sandwiches are created around a traditional Mexican cheese and paired with local ingredients. Here are three that are already for sale:

Chiapas: Queso de Cuadro, berros, aceite de oliva, balsámico y miel.
Chihuahua: Queso Menonita, mostaza de grano y cebollas caramelizadas.
Michoacán: Queso Cotija, compota de sandía y menta fresca.

They are all made with bread baked on-site. The cheeses are produced by artisanal farmers and sourced by Lactography, and information on the makers is included with every sandwich. The purpose of this collaboration is to showcase traditional cheeses and ways to pair them with food and integrated them in a lacto-vegetarian diet. All profits from the sale of the cheese go directly to the makers and affineurs that produce them and age them.

For more information visit: Aula Chocolate or follow @aulachocolate

Cheesemonger certification

The American Cheese Society has been working for the past 10 years on creating a Certification Exam for Cheese Professionals and developing a Body of Knowledge document, which includes guidelines on all the cheese knowledge that someone to be certified should have. The purpose of such certification is to create professionals that are able to speak, promote and better cheese for everyone. I have been invited to be a Subject Matter Expert and hope to bring my expertise of Latin American cheese productions as well as experience as a Cheese Judge in North America to the effort. The first exam is scheduled to take place in early 2012 and you will be hearing more during the annual meeting of the ACS in August.

At this moment, I don’t envision traveling to Canada for the annual meeting, mostly because being a Mexican citizen I am requested by the Canadian government to obtain a visa to enter the country (this was not the case two years ago) and the price of application plus my situation as a full-time student makes the expense to apply for a visa, plus travel, plus enrolling in the conference prohibitive. If you would like to sponsor my participation or know someone that would, I will be forever grateful. I have budget the trip to cost US$1,000 dollars only on fees and travel expenses. I have friends in the Montreal to stay with.

For more information on the annual meeting and other events about the ACS you can follow them at @CheeseSociety

The other event that is taking place that may impact the certification process and which I have been doing some PR is the 2^nd Annual Cheesemonger Invitational, it will be hosted by Adam Moskowitz of Larkin on Friday, 8 July 2011, from 7 to 10 PM in Long Island City, New York. For more info visit Cheese Monger Invitational or follow him at @CMI_2011

Tea and Cheese

Harney and Sons will be hosting a small tasting in its newish SoHo store in New York City, we will be offering their tea-infused cheeses and other American cheeses paired with teas. I will be around to explain cheese tasting and pairings, while Emeric Harney will be explaining teaching people about tea. Cheese is a great gateway for this and should be a fun experience to have the cheesemaker there to explain us on the making of flavored cheeses.

Our tentative date is Thursday, 21 July 2011, from 5 to 8 PM, details to come. You can also find more information following @HarneySoHo and buy tea here.

Other (older) ongoing food collaborations:

Camel milk and cheese project – I am part of the Advisory Board of the What Took You So Long Foundation film project “Respect the Camel” for more info on the film being produced and many camel cheese related events follow them at @wtysl or at WTYSL Foundation.

Judging guidelines – We are looking to develop guidelines for cheese judges. This project is in conjunction with the Guild of Fine Food organizers of the World Cheese Awards and it will involve all the current Supreme International Judges. Follow them at @guildoffinefood and visit them at Fine Food World and for info on the 2011 Awards.

Denomination of Origin – I am continuously helping the Rancho San Josemaria, producers of one of the finest sheep’s milk cheeses in Queretaro, Mexico, to apply for a certificate of trademark in a first step on the long process to have this cheese awarded a DO. Follow them at @QuesosOvejaSJM or visit their site.

Finally, I call them collaborations because I have not been economically remunerated for any work under this scheme. I write this not to brag about my philanthropic spirit, but to differentiate these collectives from the work that I do commercially which includes classes, tastings, trainings, and consultancies. If you have an idea in mind that could impact the way we think about the food that we eat or how we consume it, email it to me and we can set up a collaborative. If you are interested in any of these projects and have an idea also email me or any of the people involved. All inquiries welcome to cheeseconsulting @ gmail.com

In honor of the country that first trained me in cheese and to their cheesemakers who are hurting from an economic downturn, I will feature one Irish cheese every day during this week to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day.

Let me start with a little bit of Irish cheese history. Cheese in Ireland, like in many other colonial lands was brought by missionaries and was deeply linked to religious life. Monks made most cheeses for subsistence markets and remained localize to villages near big monasteries. Much like in England, industrial revolution brought pasteurization and consolidation of cheese making to large dairy companies.

It was only in the early 80’s that cheese production returned to farms, and with it the use of raw milk. Most cheeses during that time where made in County Cork and slowly other parts of the country have started to produce excellent cheese as well. There are a high number of cow’s milk cheeses, even if sheep are so familiar in the Irish landscape. In the Americas, the most common Irish cheese is commercial cheddar (think Dubliner), but increasingly in cheese stores you can find Cashel and Crozier Blue, Ardrahan and Coolea. They are all great, but Crozier around this time is just amazing!

My favorite Irish cheese is Durrus, however as of late it is very difficult to find a good round outside of Ireland. This raw cow’s milk cheese does not travel well in refrigerated containers and without proper washing. It also cannot wait to be eaten the 60 days required by the FDA to be brought to the US. I had one in London that was nutty and stinky and reminded me of cold rainy days working at Sheridan’s Cheesemongers sharing a cup of tea and a bite of creamy Durrus on fresh baked bread.

If you have the opportunity to travel to Ireland, check Durrus out and if you find Milleens, Desmond, Cooleney or Smoked Gubbeen also make sure to buy a big chunk and have them with a pint of Smithwick's

You can find more info on Artisanal cheeses from the Emerald island at: http://www.irishcheese.ie