Fair Food Fight
Barth Anderson
It must be tough writing a book about good food. Because you can’t give readers a literal taste of what you’re talking about, all you can do is try and convince people that you have a superfine palate and keep using words like “delicious” and “yummy” over and over.
This is why the book CHEESEMONGER: A LIFE ON THE WEDGE by Gordon Edgar (Chelsea Green; 2010) is a cut above most books about food. Not merely a cheese brochure with “flavor profiles” of various cheeses (though it does offer great info about various cheeses at the end of each chapter), CHEESEMONGER is like having beer with a smart friend who knows cheese so well that you want to keep buying drinks to hear everything he knows.
Gordon Edgar is the eponymous “cheesemonger,” the head buyer and seller of cheese at San Francisco’s famous Rainbow Co-op grocery store. If you know this worker-owned co-op, you won’t be surprised that the author brings a classic punk ethic to the topic and that CHEESEMONGER houses no sacred cows. From the book’s first chapter, Edgar unapologetically slaps cheese out of the hands of bloodless aesthetes who are more concerned with status and prestige of cheese, with a description of his annual nightmare about coolers full of rotten, moldy cheese in the midst of a busy holiday at the store. “All the beautiful cheese is going concave — hardening and disintegrating — and I am helpless.” No, food porn this is not.
After all, retailing cheese isn’t a dainty job. It’s loaded with bare-knuckled politics between producers and global sellers, and the daily race against decay is always a ticking clock — but Edgar seems to relish the “true grit” involved with cheesemongery. Indeed, his idea of what defines a real cheesemonger might shock the brie-and-water-cracker set, involving as it does kicking a sales rep out of the grocery store (“you need to defend your turf if you’re going to be a cheesemonger”) and shedding one’s own blood in the glorious cause of selling fine cheese. Edgar’s accoount of having a cheese toothpick driven into his finger under the force and weight of a giant, falling wheel of hard Reggiano made me wince and laugh in can’t-look-away sympathy. Let’s hear it for blood-and-guts retailers!
Having been a grocery guy myself, I love what Edgar is doing in CHEESEMONGER. It’s obviously a book born from a desire to have longer conversations with his customers than social appropriateness will allow. As a reader, you can appreciate how thoroughly and intelligently Edgar addresses, say, the various issues swirling around raw milk cheeses — the health risk to pregnant women, the fact that French cheeses are often pasteurized for American market — and laugh, too, at the image of shoppers who just wanted to zip into the co-op for some Coby Jack. (“Time out, dude, time out! I gotta get home and actually eat this cheese, ok?”)
One of the great strengths of this book is that Edgar is a master at popping holes in long-standing myths — for example, what Edgar might call the “know your farmer” or “tell their story” chestnuts. This is a marketing strategy and little more, when you think about it, one that really does nothing but make customers feel good about buying whatever. From CHEESEMONGER:
“After all, things happen. One longtime cheesemaker I know has an incredible amount of integrity. I would never doubt his word. He would never engage in shady activities. But he also had no idea that workers at his cheese plant were using cheesemaking vats weekly for drunken Jacuzzi parties with women they picked up at the local bars. If they hadn’t gotten a little too drunk one night and been discovered passed out when the morning milk arrived I would never have heard this story. Of course, there’s little actual danger to the cheese in this scenario since the first thing any reputable cheesemaker does before making cheese is clean and sanitize everything. But I believe my point is clear.”
CHEESEMONGER is the rare food book that doesn’t mythologize any aspect of food production.
By the end of the book, however, I believe I had a slightly different idea of what a “cheesemonger” was than the author did. Cheesemongers are more than just tough-guy retailers, because Edgar is a cheese lover, too, after all, and this shines through the pages. His life was changed by an Antique Gruyere, he says, but he also loves visiting the small local farmers who produce milk for his beloved local cheeses. Being a proper cheesemonger (or a produce monger, or wine monger, for that matter) means simultaneously zooming out and zooming in on your love. This double-vision allows CHEESEMONGER to be equally concerned with all constituencies in the “cheese chain,” from small dairy farmers and historic cheeses, to bullying sales reps, to how cheese is best sold in a grocery store. By the end of the book, your cheese acumen isn’t limited to taste profiles, but nor are you so zoomed far out into the socio-political or nutritional stratosphere that you lose the flavor, that “oniony undertone,” of Edgar’s life-changing Gruyere.
CHEESEMONGER is a chewy book for the foodie whose appetite isn’t easily sated.
