A cheese cave at Murray’s CheesePhoto: VIPNYC

Which is why I was surprised to read about people who think of affinage, the process of carefully aging cheese, as a joke, or worse, a scam. The New York Times published a great article recently called “Cheese: A Coming-of-Age Story.” It featured many big names in the American cheese scene, including Rob Kaufelt, the owner, and Brian Ralph, the cave manager at Murray’s Cheese, a bastion of great cheese. They talked about why it matters to pay attention to temperature, humidity, ambient microorganisms , and storage when aging cheese. Doing it well, they said, produces that perfect bloomy-rinded Valençay, or that glossy, amber-hued Epoisses, while doing it carelessly (or not doing it at all) can lead to disaster, or at the very least some pretty underwhelming curd.

In the same article Steven Jenkins, the cheesemonger at Fairway, a local supermarket chain, calls affinage “a total crock.” He added: “if my humidity is 35 percent different from yours, my cheese is going to taste just as good as yours. It may have a different color of mold on it, but it’ll taste just as good. And yours is going to be twice as expensive, and you’re a highway robber. And you’re contributing to the preciousness and folly of Americans trying to emulate something in France that has nothing to do with quality.”

As anyone who has kept a bit of chèvre in the fridge for too long can attest, Jenkins is blatantly wrong. Obviously the environment and method of storage are crucial to the quality of the cheese. What’s more, affinage is hardly just trendy French fluff – it has been practiced for countries across Europe for generations. In most cases, it is the difference between a mere lump of milk curds and a character-filled gastronomic delight.

Don’t get me wrong, affinage can definitely go wrong. Though like any process of fine-tuned experimentation (cheese itself is the result of accident), there will always be failures, indeed many more of them than successes. But this is hardly a reason to write off the whole endeavor as a hoax to ruthlessly relieve us of our food budget.

What I find most intriguing about this alleged ‘controversy’, however, is the underlying cultural attitude that gives rise to such tendentious opinions. The suspicion of anything French, for example; that anything French is necessarily “fussy”, and therefore bad, not to be trusted. It also presupposes – like so much of the recent backlash against foodie-ism — that any food crafted with a high attention to detail should not be trusted.

The thing is: all cheeses, except for those eaten fresh, undergo aging.  That is what brings them to maturity. I can’t help but question a position to the contrary, in the same way it makes no sense to say all wines are created equal, or all vegetables, or any food product at all, regardless of the knowledge, care, and effort of the producer.

Ultimately, the cheese speaks for itself. The New York Times tasting panel preferred aged cheeses from Murray’s hands down over those from Fairway. Meanwhile, in a Diner’s Journal follow-up to the original article, Mr. Jenkins criticises the “foodie” who spends “$14 for [unaged goat's cheese] that Fairway’s got for $4.49″, and still doesn’t seem to understand what affinage actually is. If a chèvre is $14, it’s going to be because of factors other than affinage. After all, the cheese is fresh.

But affinage is still only one stretch of the road from milk to cheese and, like most foods, can only be as good as its ingredients. An aged cheese can only be as good as the land and environment it comes from. While the affineur manages closed systems to achieve a specific result, the producer navigates a network of open systems and must be in touch with forces largely uncontrollable, like seasonality: virtually all cheeses change over the course of the year as the diets of the animals shift between fresh pasture, mature plants, hay, and other feed sources. And that’s not even getting into breed type, lactation and milking patterns, or terroir. Good affinage, I would argue, is not only about careful attention to the cheese when its in the cave, but also a keen understanding of where it comes from. Affinage can enhance the subtleties of the production stage and bring them to the forefront of the tasting experience. A good affineur should be able to give you a summer version and a winter version of the same cheese and floor you by both their similarities and their marked contrast.

So production and refinement are very much bound up in each other. But I wanted to test affinage, or the lack of it, for myself. To settle the matter once and for all, I bought a small round of fresh goat’s cheese from Vermont Butter and Cheese, for an experiment. Left in each of the five caves at Murray’s (each is kept at different temperature and humidity conditions, and contains different molds), this small disc would form into five very different cheeses — some of them revelatory, some less so. After a week of careful aging in my refrigerator, I am proud to report, the best I could do was some yellow slime, a chalky texture, and a brisk sour reek.

Photo: Josh EvansTo the right is a tomato hornworm — a common pest of tomato plants throughout much of North America. While gardeners and farmers will comb their rows, picking them off stems and leaves, sometimes a more efficient predator gets to them first. The brachonid wasp found this particular specimen ripe for the taking. The wasp lays its eggs inside the hornworm, and when the larvae hatch, they eat their way out while the worm is still alive, form cocoons on its surface, and use it as a stable vehicle while they mature into adult wasps.

I have been working with the Yale Sustainable Food Project for over two years now, mostly planning events and working on the cooking and hosting side of things. This year, I wanted to  delve into the growing side — the soil-level cycles that bring produce to the table and ultimately become, say, pizza from the oven. I know that sustainable, biodynamic agriculture is based on reconnecting with the complex systems that regulate the natural world, and I had already felt the intense gratification that these connections bring. What I hadn’t expected is nature’s brutal side.

During a recent workday, Daniel, the head farm manager, showed me this hornworm, which he had found on a tomato plant. The larvae writhed in all directions, sprouting out of the worm’s green flesh like disembodied finger puppets. I was fascinated but also horrified. I have caught, killed, and gutted my own fish, as well as wrenched sheaves of weeds from the ground in my time, so I knew it wasn’t simply a matter of an inability to face suffering. I looked to Daniel, one of the gentlest people I know, for a cue, an explanation. He was quietly absorbed, not a whit of revulsion, confusion, or remorse on his face.

I kept the hornworm close by in a plastic container as I processed salad greens and radishes, studying it over the course of the afternoon. It twisted less and less each time I nudged the container, dying slowly as the parasitic larvae grew and spun their small cocoons.

I already knew that nature doesn’t follow our rules; it doesn’t respond to concepts of “nice” or “fair” or “kind” (lessons learned in childhood). But here was a reminder of something greater, a response to what we mean when we say “sustainable agriculture.” There are no opposing teams in this process; there can be no “us” versus “them,” really. There are players interacting in a system, through cycles of production and consumption. A system is healthy when these forces are in balance, and it is the farmer’s vocation to understand these incredibly many forces and their complex interactions, and to use them to provide for himself and others while maintaining the health of the system that sustains us. Not a simple task, but definitely an immensely gratifying one.

My initial response to the sight of the brachonid larvae feeding on the live hornworm — visceral disgust and horror — was understandable. But as I pulled radishes out of the ground and cut leaves from living plants, I couldn’t help but wonder how my enjoyment of freshly harvested butter lettuce or eggs from our lovely laying hens compared to the larvae roiling out of the hornworm. Self-interest dominates consumption — but does that also make it inherently wrong?

Sustainable agriculture has taught me many things, not least of which is that health is best measured systemically. We do not mind a couple eggplants succumbing to pests after heavy rain, or a handful of hornworms trolling our tomato vines (though we will pick them off if we see them). There will always be other creatures and forces undoing our work, other living beings that we call “pests.” We are concerned less with the acute than the chronic — an entire crop of eggplant rotting from the inside, or a swarm of hornworms ruining a field of tomatoes. These are signs that the system is out of balance, and it is our job, with our intellect and agency, to figure out how these phenomena are linked and then to shift them back into a more desirable balance.

Eventually, I realized that the parasite-colonized hornworm was also a sign — but a sign of a healthy system, where one consumer also provides for other consumers, and where these relationships enhance the system as a whole. The entire endeavor of farming is certainly rooted in human self-interest, but at its best, it can enrich and diversify the land and its systems in a way it might not even have been had we left it alone.

Farming is one of the most devastating ways we have changed the planet for the worse. I believe it is also the most significant way we can change it for the better. The hornworm and the brachonids have a place in that system just as much as the tomato I coax from the soil to sustain me.

Happily, I am able to mull these questions over at the end of a workday with a slice of pizza in hand. This particular specimen features ricotta cheese, homemade blueberry syrup, and crisped sage. No hornworms were harmed in the making.

A meal at Dirt Candy

Food Studies features the voices of 11 volunteer student bloggers from a variety of different food- and agriculture-related programs at universities around the world. You can explore the full series here.

I am a lucky guy. It’s an exciting time to be studying food — public interest in food issues is burgeoning, farmers’ markets are proliferating like never before (or, at least, since the introduction of the supermarket), and more people are engaging in conversations about why good food matters. And here at school, where my main job is to study, I not only get to engage with these ideas and issues every day, I am required to. It’s a tough life.

I’ve been interested in food issues since high school, but my passion has really blossomed since coming to college. As an intern with the Yale Sustainable Food Project for the past two yearsMurray’s Cheese, I have learned a great deal about sustainable agriculture, planned and hosted all sorts of community events, and cooked, eaten, and shared a lot of good food (life still won’t give me a break!). I’ve learned about food history, culture, politics, and science in the classroom, whether through analysing the oldest cookbook in the world or assessing the newest research on the psychology of obesity. Over the summer, I got to work with Edible Schoolyard NYC, reconnecting kids and their families with where their food comes from and why it matters; learn about specialty food products and their stories by volunteering in the classroom at Murray’s Cheese Shop; and cook up some creative vegetable cuisine at a great little restaurant called Dirt Candy.

Now I am back at school, starting my final year, and the question prodding at me and my peers is ‘What will I write about for my Senior Essay?’ The Senior Essay is a chance for us to explore in detail a specific topic relevant to our course of study, and as a Humanities major, I realise my prospects, being interdisciplinarily rich, need rigour and focus to be viable. I have been toying with various different ideas over the past year or so, and they’ve all had to do with food in some way, from the psychological and aesthetic significance of modernist cuisine to the role of urban public space in fostering healthy community foodways. But I think I’ve finally settled on something that has captivated my interest for the last year and never let go. I’m fascinated by the narrative and cultural significance of food products with Protected Designations of Origin — the history of how such institutions arose, the social and economic problems they sought to solve, and in particular, the unintended and complex implications these instutitions are having now in a largely free market economy and a rapidly globalising world. The Edible Schoolyard NYCI am planning to use food as a case study for the crisis of the local product in global context, and explore how it relates to similar products such as the book, through questions of reproduction, mythologization and ‘authenticity,’ the connection between physical and mental transportation, and the paradox of consumption — by which I mean the idea that for certain products (like food, books, and perhaps a very few others), consumption is what maintains their life cycle in a culture, as oppose to ending it.

Maybe I’ve set myself too large an agenda; only time — and more reading — will tell. But for now, I’m off to a meeting wth my advisor, and I can’t wait to crack open the books!