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Ian Ray

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Adrian Dantley

Adrian Dantley (5/123)

  1. I went off on a tangent in the previous post. I missed the point. My apologies for responding to myself. If a person equates artisan cheese by the way artisan is applied to furniture, then any cheese made by hand is artisan. Where the line is drawn on batch size or equipement is subjective and changes as culture does. If a person equates artisan cheese with the newish "artisanal cheese" buzzword, the definition becomes very subjective. There are artisanal recipes crafted by constant tweaking. There are artisanal methods as opposed to industrial production. There is a stress for some on local production where the artisanal quality diminishes with distance. The emergence of artisanal cheese is a good thing that has been driven by consumers and simultaneously abused as a marketing gimmick. A cheese can technically be considered artisan as long as humans handle the cheese while making it. There are steps cheese companies can and do take to mechanize cheesemaking such as cheese turning robots (which may someday be marketed as artisanal if a robot doesn't command the other robot). I think the appreciation for creation by the cheesemaking company defines artisanal more than the word itself. When cheese companies are creative enough to appreciate the good accidents and tweak the process, the consumer benefits. When a cheese company considers uniformity and gross revenues first in the cheesemaking process, the consumer doesn't get the same product as they would from a so-called artisanal producer.
  2. There is always the New Yorker artisanal definition… Artisanal Everything Inc. Cartoon
  3. It is a bit strange that some people assume Cypress Grove sold out like Nancy Silverton and her unfortunate ponzi scheme investments, but I understand how people jump to this conclusion (not saying that you do/did, zoramargolis). I am of the opinion that ownership does not necessarily make something more or less artisan. I would go as far to say that the cheese copycats of the world who call their products artisan might want to examine what that word artisan really means to them. Did they put professional artistic work into the design of the cheese? If they completely copied someone else, I would consider them small producers, not original artists. It is true that the methods used to make a cheese can stray from the original design and make the product less than artisan. Some people consider a personal touch to a copy makes an artisan product, but I question if that can really apply to cheese. There seems to be a good number of people who make unoriginal products that they would like the rest of the world to call artisan just because they make small batches of copies. Again, these are just my opinions. I'm sure there are perspectives which make more sense than mine.
  4. Disclaimer: My name is Ian, I work at Cypress Grove Chevre. My comments are not endorsed by Cypress Grove, so bear with me if I don't have all the details or say some things you've never heard before. Katie expresses some of the same feelings that have been directed at Cypress since the sale to Emmi. As the Internet is a discussion, it is impossible to use the business-as-usual, one-way PR releases to dispel any controversy, so I have taken it upon myself to try to set some of the facts straight. Midnight Moon and Lamb Chopper were never meant to be deceptively marketed as American-made cheeses. Rachel pointed out that the label, literature, and Web site all state the origin of this cheese. Cypress Grove works with the cheesemakers in Holland to produce these cheeses exclusively for Cypress Grove, they are not just your average imported cheese with a new label. Any customer who reads labels has surely realized that it is made in the Netherlands. Soft-ripened cheeses are still made by hand and hand wrapped. Emmi has not shipped any cheese robots here to take the place of workers. The financial support Emmi has brought to Cypress Grove has so far been invested in a new goat dairy 8 miles from the creamery. The goats are being raised according to humane guidelines. Giant, sunny, airy hoop houses are being built for the goats' comfort. The goats are being raised by hand by people, not with goat keeper robots. Admittedly, milk machines are a modern time saver, but I don't know of any commercial milking operation that still hand milks. Cypress Grove's cheeses are not uniform. Samples are regularly placed on the front counter from different batches to test if they are good enough to sell, not if they fit some exact specification. Cheese is sold all the time that is more or less salty, has too much or too little texture, is made different blends of milk, or is ripened more or less ideally. The quality assurance team makes sure that the cheese is safe and tasty, not that it is perfect. I was worried when the Emmi sale went through that being owned by a foreign corporation would harm the way cheese was produced. Mary told us stories about the representatives from Emmi being good people, buying meals for homeless people, using environmentally-friendly methods, and how some of the companies they owned in Switzerland still produced cheese as if it were the 16th Century. I had my doubts, but after interacting with the corporate management, I see that this is a corporation whose bread and butter is craft production and only has mainstream products (such as the apparently-fabulous Emmi grapefruit yogurt) to satisfy the needs of their stockholders of which a majority are dairy farmers. That is, the Swiss dairy farmers need somewhere to sell their milk even if the products don't turn huge profits for the company. Not much has changed here in California. A lot more angry comments come in from people who think we have turned into the cheese version of Halliburton. Cypress Grove's plans for a humane dairy farm has been accused of being a "factory farm" based on Emmi's ownership and we were kicked off of our original site (on property 1000 feet from the creamery) by a small group of people who protested on the sidewalk. None of the controversy is actually true except for profits are indeed being sent to Emmi instead of being sent to the bank to pay off interest on loans. One of Emmi's main impacts on Cypress Grove was to pay off outstanding debt which has allowed the company to spend money on more productive things such as cheese research and goat milk. P.S. I also can't stand the pronunciation Americans use for "artisanal" as if it was water as well as the word artisanal itself however it is pronounced. Making cheese is a craft, an art... artisanal makes it sound "art-like", "sort of artisan" or some other strange thing to me. I also am skeptical of "terroir" or any of the other marketing nonsense that detaches people from the real issues: tastes and textures reflecting a cheesemaker's skill, formulas and methods. (I also can't stand when people use "in regard to", "utilize" and other flowery words which just mean simple things like "about" and "use", so I might not be the best person to comment on this.)
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