this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2024
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Cheese from protected origins aside, it's actually pretty common for cheeses to be made in a fashion where the specific origin doesn't matter in the modern world. For repeatability the bacteria involved for a certain style will often be isolated and artificially introduced into the dairy to ensure different batches have uniform characteristics. This also ensures the changing conditions don't result in the cheese suddenly being different.
As a result it's perfectly possible to use bacterial cultures from anywhere to make cheese somewhere else.
When it comes to Swiss cheese specifically, not even Switzerland claims that Swiss cheese needs to come from Switzerland. It's usually accepted that it refers to Swiss-style cheeses. Switzerland would like the terms Emmentaler or Gruyère to be specific to Switzerland.
That very few countries agree with that request is a different matter.
In any case, "real Swiss cheese" makes about as much sense as "real Italian cheese" in reference to mozzarella.
Its funny right because I agree with everything that you say, but its also just patently wrong. There is a kind of reductionist in modern technocratic thinking that we can just atomize things to their parts, and so long as we reconstitute them correctly, the thing we make is the same as the thing we destroyed.
Take Belgian beer as the example. I can and have bought Belgian yeasts and made beer with them. I've bought "New Belgian" beer, and bought Belgian style ales and beers from breweries all over the planet. There is one decent one coming out of the hitochino brewery in Japan and a few of the better breweries on the west coast of the US that are close, but still, no cigaro.
Drink these beers and compare them with a Belgian from Belgium. They simply don't. Its like a childs 5th grade attempt at art compared to a master work. Comparison? There is none.
The idea that we can atomize things and reconstitute them and that they'll be the same because we made it from the sum of its parts is a kind of toxic consumerism that disconnects people from being able to hold real identity to places and people; that its all transferable. You own nothing, not your identity or geography or anything. We can just chop it up into pieces and remake it if we know its constituent parts.
But its not true. Only a proper Belgian is a Belgian.
Lot of things there.
First, your preference in beer isn't scientific or particularly relevant to cheese names. Would your opinion be counted by someone who preferred a new Belgian beer as opposed to one from Belgium?
Personal preference isn't a measure of quality.
Second, the notion that we can isolate the important parts and use them to make it again is literally how they make a cheese like emmentaler in Switzerland in a factory setting. Not all Swiss cheese makers are using ancient traditional techniques. The big makers are using the same modern techniques as anyone else, and they don't leave the bacterial culture up to chance environmental factors because modern food production facilities are kept close to sterile.
Third, protected origins are a thing. Switzerland doesn't care about "Swiss cheese", it's literally the name for the technique of preparing cheese. It could have trivially ended up being called "alpine cheese", or "mountain cheese". It's defined by it's bacterial cultures, preparation style, and aging conditions. That's where there are multiple "Swiss cheeses" from Switzerland. The names of the proper cheese is what Switzerland wants to be protected, not the technique.
Fourth, food isn't magic. Being possessive of a term for something from a place is fine, it's fine for things to be associated with a location, but to say that the location itself imbues the product with an intangible property you can detect is magical thinking.