cheese: ShortFormBlog

18:26 • 10 months ago

Tags: cheese daphne zepos daphne zepos dead daphne zepos obituary 15 • Permalink

She wanted people to support small makers of cheese and to understand all the work and the love that went into it. She told people how to appreciate the full range of scents and taste and how to look at and how to feel cheese — literally: touch it, crumble it, understand the texture.

Corby Kummer, senior editor and food writer for The Atlantic, in a New York Times obituary for Daphne Zepos, a veritable queen of cheese who died last Tuesday. Zepos was a maven of all things cheese, a teacher, author, and instructor, and business owner. In 2006 she founded the Essex Street Cheese Company in New York City, which stocked an array of cheeses somewhat more esoteric and exciting than typically available at an average supermarkets, and her writings for The Atlantic were significant contributions to the cause of artisanal cheese adoration. She passed away at her home in San Francisco, age 52, reportedly from lung cancer.

(Source: The New York Times)

11:53 • 2 years ago

Tags: agriculture agriculture department big dairy big food cheese cheesy dairy management food unhealthy 3 • Permalink

Healthy? Yeah, right. The government’s pro-cheese efforts

As a culture, our cheese-eating is way higher than it should be. Yeah, it’s tasty, and we know how tough of a habit it is to break (looks down at stomach), but we’ve gotten hooked on it as a culture at large. But the thing you should be really scared about? That, with the help of the government, the dairy industry is pushing us to eat even more of it. Dairy Management, Inc., a government-created industry marketing group, has been pushing for more cheese in foods, even as our culture has slowly been switching to low-fat or even plant-based forms of milk. Some more details:

33 number of pounds of cheese the average American eats yearly source

bad That 33 pounds number is triple what the average American ate back in the 1970s, when the culture was cheesier in general.
worse Cheese is a key source of saturated fat, that kind of really safe fat that’s linked to heart disease and high calories.
worser Dairy Management has been promoting eating more cheese as a form of weight-loss, even though that’s not true.

The government feeds big dairy… Dairy Management is a very powerful group, and has been closely tied to both the Bush and Obama administrations. They have a budget of around $140 million, mostly from fees the government forces on the dairy industry, along with some money directly from the Agriculture Department. This is despite the public get-healthy face that folks like Michelle Obama have pushed in recent years. Not so much.
… And we just eat it up In recent years, Dairy Management’s efforts have led to new products such as Domino’s pizza relaunch (which had way more cheese), Taco Bell’s quesadillas (which have eight times more cheese than any other item on their menu), and cheesy burgers from Wendy’s and Burger King. In 2007 alone, their efforts led to an increase in cheese sales of 30 million pounds. You feel guilty now, don’t you?

» Are you a cheese-snacking fanatic? All of this underlines the big problem: The Agriculture Department is both the regulator and the government group that pushes the economic engine of the farming and dairy industries. This is very problematic for a lot of reasons. By the way, one group that Dairy Management is specifically focusing on: Families who eat lots of cheese and don’t really worry about the health qualms. That’s who these crap food products are marketed towards. Perhaps you should consider ordering your next sandwich without cheese.

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