Some 150 cheese makers, distributors and retailers, meeting in San Francisco late last month for the eighth annual conference of the ACS, eyed the slice and nodded. This small army of cheese lovers has embarked on one of the most daunting missions in the food world: to convince the rest of us that American cheeses are worthy of respect. No, not Cheez Whiz. They’re thinking about the rich, delicate Camembert-style cheese made at Hollow Road Farms in Stuyvesant, N.Y. Or West Virginia’s creamy Brier Run Farm goat cheese. Or dry Monterey Jack, which many consider the country’s best indigenous cheese. Hard, nutty and mellow, the aged dry Jack made by the Vella Cheese Co. in Sonoma, Calif., bears no relation to the bland Monterey Jack found in supermarkets.
Many of these cheeses come from small dairies where cheese makers work by hand. “Care and handling are what craft is all about,” says Gerd Stem, a cheese importer. “I mean craft with a c, not a K.” Craft with a c boosts the price of cheese considerably. “People will spend $150 on a shirt, but it’s hard to sell them cheese that costs $3 a quarter pound,” says Weinzweig, who owns Zingerman’s Delicatessen in Ann Arbor, Mich. “We have to educate consumers. Nobody’s out there saying,‘Gee, I wish I could spend more money on cheese’.”
Despite the challenges, the mood at the conference was jubilant. This year’s crowd was more than twice the size of last year’s, and Weinzweig spoke for many specialty retailers when he announced with just a touch of amazement, “People are eating cheese.” He’s right: we ate 25 pounds per person last year, up from 17.5 a decade earlier. Of course, such products as Sea Stars goat cheese, which Nancy Gaffney makes by hand in Santa Cruz, Calif., account for only a tiny proportion of the total-she sells about 150 pounds a week. For the most part Americans consume processed cheese, mass-produced cheddars and the cheese that comes on their pizzas. But the smaller dairies are making headway. Laura Chenel, whose California goat cheese appeared 12 years ago and is widely credited with inspiring a culinary equivalent to the Dutch tulip mania, sold about 120,000 pounds of it last year; this year she expects to sell about 200,000 pounds.
Nearly three quarters of Chenel’s business is with restaurants, where goat cheese can now be found in everything from salads to cheesecakes. Nancy Oakes, owner of L’Avenue restaurant in San Francisco, tried for a year to interest customers in a cheese course and finally gave up. Americans simply won’t eat cheese the way Europeans do-after the entree. “But I can sell a Gorgonzola and fig salad till the cows come home,” she says.
The only shadow cast over the conference came from the F word. Cheese is a high-fat product, and these artisans are coming of age in a low-fat world. Despite the current health of the industry, nothing made the crowd more jittery about the future than talk about fat. True, low-fat cheeses are on the market-even some ACS members make them-but most taste like wax paper. One suggestion was to develop a good offense. “We’ve taken the wrong approach to the hysteria,” says Dan Strongin, deli manager for Andronico’s in Albany, Calif. “I think it’s time we stood up and said, ‘Hey, there is fat in cheese. Fat tastes good. What about moderation?”’
Moderation has never made much of an inroad in the country that embraced the all-you-can-eat fish fry, but right now it’s all that stands between cheese lovers and a bleak new world. Fortunately, the best cheeses are high in what cheese experts call the “satiety factor.” Half a pound of cheap mozzarella means nothing to the palate or the soul. But eat just a little Hubbardston Blue, from Westfield Farm in Massachusetts. Intense and lively, it will be utterly satisfying.
