A Cheese Thing: Reflections on the Vermont Cheese Festival

Today July 28th, 2010

I have always wanted to write a daily log. I did for a while, but it made my life seem utterly uneventful and repetitive. My job can either be described as a zen-like meditation on the daily tasks of a small goat dairy or a futile study on the development of carpal tunnel. I love my job, I love my boss, I get paid a decent wage, I am never expected to exert myself in a way that might make me feel used or unequal to the person who tells me what to do. But rarely do I really feel, while I am standing on a cement floor, at a stainless double sink, in my chewed-up,ground-score Dansko’s, washing 180 plastic pyramid-shaped cheese forms with a bottle brush in some Dairy-Do, that what I am doing is appreciated, admired, even romanticized by some people.

Then comes an event like the Vermont Cheese festival that was held this year on Sunday July 25th, 2010 at Shelburne Farms in Shelburne, VT. Laini Fondiller, my boss, owner and legendary cheese-maker of Lazy Lady Farm in Westfield, VT, asked me a few months ago if I could do it for her. She said, “You know how busy Sundays are around here.” Well actually I don’t because I have the leisure of weekends off, unlike Laini, but I know when I come in on Monday and there is more cheese in the curing room, or in the cave, that Sunday must be a busy day of cheese making. Of course I said I would go. In fact I was honored. I am very proud to work for Laini and proud of the cheese and meat products we make.

All I needed was a second person to help me for the day. I could think of no one more organized or sociable than my own mother and she was delighted by the idea. I figured we needed was some cheese, some flowers, a tablecloth and a good nights sleep before the day of the event that started at 9 a.m. The day before my mom and I went kayaking on Lake Champlain and then went to bed early. Little did we know…

I had never before, in my almost 7 years of living in Vermont, been to Shelburne Farms. I have heard from everyone and their cousin that it is beautiful and that is all I’ve ever heard. What is it though? A Farm? A pretty thing to look at? I am still slightly confused about this although now I know they make cheese and wine and yes,it is beautiful! It was one of those Vermont summer days that start cloudy, get sunny, get windy, make you think its going to storm, then trail off into an orgiastic Van Gogh sunset of salmon, lilac, Great Heron gray thunderheads that bleed into the humid dark night.

We set up around 8:45 a.m. Thankfully we were right next to a coffee vendor. At first it all seemed unassuming, everyone was somewhat hushed, looking confused or simply tired. I pulled out the first wheel from the cooler. Mixed Emotions was the only kind of cheese we brought thinking it would be easier, simplified, focused. It is an un-pasteurized goat and Jersey cow cream mix about 8 inches in radius, 2-3 inch tall tomme-style cheese. It is a washed curd natural rind cheese that is aged, by FDA regulation of course, for 60 days in one of our geo-thermal caves. Natural rind means simply that instead of adding a mold to the cheese at the point of culture, the cheese forms its rind using whatever molds present in the cave. This process is one of the highlights of the aging process. Watching that bright whitish-yellow virgin cheese gather to it all these crazy-colored (brown, red, blue, beige, white), various textured(dusty, puffy, wet) and always changing molds is like watching a mini ecosystem drama. One mold will start to take over until the humidity changes and then another will battle its way to the top.

All of the batches made so far of the Mixed emotions look entirely different. The first ones of the year, the ones we brought to the festival, looked to me like the surface of a strange celestial body. Maybe an undiscovered moon of Jupiter?

Now, someone who is not a fan of farmstead cheese, or goat cheese, or cheese at all might look at this thing and think, ‘there is no way in hell I am putting that in my mouth,’ but thankfully, when you are at a cheese festival in Vermont, nobody has any inhibitions when it comes to funky looking cheese, in fact I think some people sought out the weirdest looking ones thinking they might be the tastiest. And this cheese is tasty.
Some paraphrased quotes about the cheese are due:
“This cheese is unbelievable.” Ten-year old boy.
“This cheese makes the whole trip worth it.” Guy from outta state.
“This is the best cheese at the whole festival.” More than one person.
“I’ll take a whole wheel.” Guy who really liked it.

I came to the event totally unprepared to sell cheese; no paper, no tape, no change. By the time the third person asked if they could buy some I decided to run around and barter a piece of cheese for some paper. The nice lady at Cobb Hill farm helped out and we got a volunteer to get us some tape. I sold ¼ lbs for 5 dollars, probably a steal, but it was better than nothing. By the end of the day, 5 wheels later, it was gone, I was totally pooped, dehydrated, full of cheese and ready to pass out. There were a few hectic moments where I regrettably yelled at my mom, but she realized I was just stressed. So many questions to answer. I was particularly excited when a nice gal from NPR interviewed me for the program Living on Earth. (If anyone knows Laini, they well know that NPR/VPR is on all day at the farm.)

Still, 4 days later, I don’t have my voice back but I do have a lot of cheese in my fridge.
It was so great to gab with other cheese-makers from the state, people who I can really understand and who can really understand me! All of the compliments surprised me, then overwhelmed me then I think I let it go to my head a little but from the beginning I think Laini has tried to keep it real, keep it humble and to never allow the mentality of “bigger, faster, better” get in the way of taste and authenticity and I always have felt the same.

Yes, we could make more cheese, we could get a bigger vat, expand the cheese room, build even more caves. We could actually produce the amount of cheese that is demanded by the many distributors and mongers I met with at the festival but, why? What would it prove? There would just be more work, more employees, more fuss and less fine-tuning of the thing that really matters: the art and science that is farmstead goat cheese.

A good thing is good until it isn’t and usually when it isn’t it is because there is a glut, a surplus, a corporate logo or even a mascot meandering the streets of NYC. You will not find me dressed up as a milk-maid, with a wedge of fake yellow cheese on my head, or sporting a goat costume to sell this product. I will be in the cheese room doing the best marketing ploy I know of: working diligently to perfect the ongoing slow food process of cheese making the old fashioned way.

Take Me Down Little Suzie

I do not write the rivers nightly
And I have heard the wind in the wild rice
that once grew here.
When I was younger wild rice meant brown, long, unhusked
Wild, brown, unhusked…
Now, wild brown men run longly through my dreams
Uncircumcised, unflinching, callous feet on hard packed earth
Claiming this is not a nightmare!

I have yet to see the devils face
Though I have read its description on the blue plastic wall
Of a port-o-potty on the side of the highway in Jersey;
Black will be the color
Mange and ruddy the skin
Like a burnt slice of bologna
Cancerous mouth in the shape of
Angel-Of-Death mushroom caps.

I thought the last line was particularly striking and
a rash on the skin of a childhood meat?
That is the devil’s face?

The devil no longer wakes at the gasps of lovers,
entrenched, steaming, branded
Only the cringing futile whimpers of the lied-to, shit-on, the amorphous
creatures of sadness.

Dacryorrhea: n. excessive flow of tears.

Why is it that we are shapeless when we are sad?
Why are there strings sewn to each finger-end,
a noose hovering like a mosquito over the nightshapes, the lampshade?

The crucifix doesn’t help,
Nor that it is Bloomsday,
Nor that I am drinking.

Write something happy.
I think I was technically…I am already avoiding the truth…
I was ruined when I was 14. Back then we called it…
Well we never actually named the beast, we didn’t want it to
come back for more
scraps and bones, offal and ripped muslin.


Nowadays someone misspeaks broccoli rabe,
and the animals, incestuous, ancestral
Come loping back through the breezeless spaces
to haunt the poor-houses of memory.

Old me, listen: I wont forget to put roses on your grave.
New me, listen: when will you forget the old me?

Mary Oliver might say something here like;
I wrote a poem in the river, NO, I wrote a poem the shape of a river,
NO simply,I write the river and nightly it repays me with static song.

I wanted to tell you that I am the woman in the painting,
That I too have perfectly round breasts when laying on red
cotton-weave sheets embroidered with endless gilded patterns,
the semen of ten-thousand barbaric haberdasher lovers!
The glow of candlelight in pin-strewn-rooms.

One day I will set myself on fire
And the end credits will go on forever.