A lovely story - how wonderful to meet someone like that! Using clabber to culture your cheese would be like saving seeds. That’s what I do. Although I still buy rennet. I think it’s terrible that the two items crucial to cheese making are gm culture and heavily processed rennet!
The heirloom seeds of milk ... I think it's much more complicated than saving seeds or even saving clabber. Saving traditional methods of making cheese is multifaceted. We can begin by just talking about tools.
Tools for cheesemaking today are, what I have seen, mostly plastic and stainless steel. Traditionally, from my experience in Italy, they were a mixture of wood, copper, and different plant materials that acted as filters or in making baskets. As we know, wooden tools breathe and have bacteria on them that contribute to the qualities of cheese. We can talk about something simple, like the shelves that cheese is aged on, made of wood, and arguably could be viewed as a tool. Ok, good. But what kind of wood is it made of? This means we have to identify trees. (Do most modern people know how to identify many trees? I don't think so!) So we find correct trees and know the right moment and method to harvest them. Now we make the shelves and take care of the shelves. How do we take care of the shelves? Other "simple" milk seeds come to mind ... What wood is used to burn the fire under the copper caldron? What about the cheese mold? Spino? How do you make the baskets that serve as cheese molds and what are they made out of? And we haven't started talking about milk. This could be someone's dissertation topic.
In order to save these traditions, they have to remain or become legal in the US and in the EU, otherwise we will lose any remnant of cheesemaking TEK in the next 50 years, and everyone will just continue to use plastic stuff and buy cultures, which they may have to, by law. Is that even cheese?
What would happen tomorrow if the plastic companies decided they didn't want to make cheese molds anymore? Or if there was no more plastic or electricity? Who would know how to make tools out of wood/plant material and metal or how to make cheese in a cauldron over an open flame, WITHOUT a thermometer? Who would be able to make cheese?
To me, this is why preserving TEK is so important. And these are a few of the many, many, "seeds" of traditional cheesemaking.
Such vital truth. Thank you for sharing it so succinctly and eloquently! I don't think most US (or European for that matter) consumers understand the long-term consequences of the large-scale farmed produce they are purchasing. We do need a shift, but in much of the US it is hard to find local, sustainably-grown produce using the methods The Seed Mother and others are rightly advocating.
However, backyard and community gardens that practice these methods are a great place to start that change.
A lovely story - how wonderful to meet someone like that! Using clabber to culture your cheese would be like saving seeds. That’s what I do. Although I still buy rennet. I think it’s terrible that the two items crucial to cheese making are gm culture and heavily processed rennet!
The heirloom seeds of milk ... I think it's much more complicated than saving seeds or even saving clabber. Saving traditional methods of making cheese is multifaceted. We can begin by just talking about tools.
Tools for cheesemaking today are, what I have seen, mostly plastic and stainless steel. Traditionally, from my experience in Italy, they were a mixture of wood, copper, and different plant materials that acted as filters or in making baskets. As we know, wooden tools breathe and have bacteria on them that contribute to the qualities of cheese. We can talk about something simple, like the shelves that cheese is aged on, made of wood, and arguably could be viewed as a tool. Ok, good. But what kind of wood is it made of? This means we have to identify trees. (Do most modern people know how to identify many trees? I don't think so!) So we find correct trees and know the right moment and method to harvest them. Now we make the shelves and take care of the shelves. How do we take care of the shelves? Other "simple" milk seeds come to mind ... What wood is used to burn the fire under the copper caldron? What about the cheese mold? Spino? How do you make the baskets that serve as cheese molds and what are they made out of? And we haven't started talking about milk. This could be someone's dissertation topic.
In order to save these traditions, they have to remain or become legal in the US and in the EU, otherwise we will lose any remnant of cheesemaking TEK in the next 50 years, and everyone will just continue to use plastic stuff and buy cultures, which they may have to, by law. Is that even cheese?
What would happen tomorrow if the plastic companies decided they didn't want to make cheese molds anymore? Or if there was no more plastic or electricity? Who would know how to make tools out of wood/plant material and metal or how to make cheese in a cauldron over an open flame, WITHOUT a thermometer? Who would be able to make cheese?
To me, this is why preserving TEK is so important. And these are a few of the many, many, "seeds" of traditional cheesemaking.
Such vital truth. Thank you for sharing it so succinctly and eloquently! I don't think most US (or European for that matter) consumers understand the long-term consequences of the large-scale farmed produce they are purchasing. We do need a shift, but in much of the US it is hard to find local, sustainably-grown produce using the methods The Seed Mother and others are rightly advocating.
However, backyard and community gardens that practice these methods are a great place to start that change.
Native animals and plants!!