IS HYGIENE RUINING OUR TRADITIONAL FOODS? PART ONE
A two-part introductory essay looking at our suppressed food potential, misplaced trust, the undermining of artisans and why I think illegal food is the most legit.
I've been meaning to broach this for a while. It is an omnipresent thread that weaves its way throughout my work; a kind of insidious insecurity that I have encountered amongst established and potential food producers which is hindering our ability to exist in a natural way. It fuels the disconnection from the food we produce which has perhaps arisen by the recent and continual placing of authority in the hands of the wrong people.
Currently, the proper way of producing food securely under the legitimate conditions of modern safety standards holds a broken mirror to a much older, established food heritage, resulting in a number of ancient methods to be considered illegal and distorting the sense of self that many fringe artisans hold. From my research I have seen an underhand damage we don’t often think about. The maker’s pride morphs into shame through a confused sense that by maintaining the bio-culturally specific methods of making food that has been established and held by the generations before them, they are somehow in the wrong.
This makes no sense to me, and I believe we should be listening to the artisans.
Paid subscribers get the film I made on Salers de Buron back in 2015 and a link to how to actually get your hands on some Salers in the post with a discount!
IS HYGIENE RUINING OUR TRADITIONAL FOODS? // part one
Max Jones
For a good number of years I was an affineur (maturer) and cheesemonger with Mons in London, in the arches beneath a Bermondsey railway, working with some of the finest farmhouse cheeses from France and Switzerland. Mongering cheeses similar to those I had grown up with in the mountains of Piedmont in Italy was familiar, yet I remember finding them a little out of place amongst our clean whites and cheese-contact knives and tools that we washed down religiously with Topax-19, a corrosive liquid that made your eyes water and your throat sore as you inhaled it while you scrubbed.
As unnatural as it felt at the time, I suppressed these feelings as a rite of passage to learning, trusting and respecting the high standard of professionalism the company held towards hygiene, which at the time was the industry standard. I became conditioned in a way that only a cheesemonger knows, developing an irrationally visceral aversion to anything (slate, knife or cheese-wire, pen, coat etc) that may have touched something which may have had contact with the filthy, filthy floor. This then rendered them “food-safe” through their nuclear sterilisation.
If you could see me writing this right now after a decade of research, I have my eyebrow raised VERY high indeed.
I felt most connected to cheeses made by real people who still worked to ancient recipes in remote chalets in the same clothes with which they worked the land. Where food was often made only from the milk of a handful of animals tied up in the traditions of transforming the landscape into food, where the presence of coloured plastic chemical tubs was anachronism. They have no place in the timeless, natural context of human, animal, water, stone, flax, wool and wood.
It was a connection to an old world still held by their human production, and this contrast, made clear in the pristine maturing rooms in London, away from their earthy cellars and mountain backdrops, highlighted to me a disconnection from these foods that eventually made me leave the capital. I wanted to explore the human stories and skills that were congruent with the production of food in a given landscape, drawn to time-honoured authenticity and excited to observe lived wisdom that was connected to the past, and I have found hope in these inspirations ever since.
Let’s look at the time I spent with the producers of Salers de Buron, an enormous cheese made in the mountains of Auvergne whose size reflects its cultural clout. The recipe is likely to be over a thousand years old, and is made in the same wooden barrel that is taken into the field and into which the milk is poured after hand-milking the native Salers cows. Stout Marcel Taille´ and his two other herders have no need or concept of having to add starter cultures to their milk for cheesemaking, as the wood of the ancient gerle is home to a unique family of completely natural microbes, that inform the specific behaviour of the Salers milk in the make as it is never washed in anything other than whey and mountain spring water.
Salers de Buron is one of the most extraordinary cheeses I have eaten, unique in its complexity and inimitably savoury and “wild” character, that predates any notions of health and safety as it is currently known, yet represents the apex of ancient and established knowledge in making food safe in the first place. It is done through positive microbial nurture, acidification, and the removal of free water with salt, gravity and pressure. It is one of those “singing” cheeses that I sometimes speak of. No chemicals, no fridges, no HACCP. Above the stone door to the small maturing room where the cheeses ripen during their summer spent in the buron was the shape of a catholic cross, absolutely covered in mould. A good luck blessing the size of a playing card that Marcel made with the first butter of the season, ridged from his fingers that squidged it into place, there was something profound about this religious symbol turned velvety-green talisman of mould that sat above everything.
I remember asking Marcel if anyone was ever sick from eating Salers in his memory.
“Non”
When sitting down to lunch in the stone buron (booley, bothy) after milking, Marcel pulled out a large loaf of bread from the bench he sat on, and casually brushed off the penicillium into a cloud of Atlantic-green spores that billowed through the small room and over the red gingham tablecloth as he began to slice with a rust-tinged Opinel 8. On the table was a clip-top glass jar and inside, saucisson sec and a mysterious, brownish clump of something furry. An unlucky mouse maybe?
When Marcel unclipped the jar, it opened with a pop and we ate perfect sausisson-sec that was home-made from the pig killed earlier in the year, the sourness from its fermentation was beautifully balanced with the salt used to eliminate water, making it unbelievably tasty by virtue of its natural preservation method- one of the earliest lessons in balance of flavour we learn growing up on naturally preserved foods. When finished, he picked out the dirty little tuft with his large sausage-fingers and lit it with a match, dropping it back in the jar and closed the lid. I realised that it was a cotton-wool ball that burned until all oxygen was consumed as the flame died, and it had created a vacuum in the jar. This extends the longevity of the meat by inhibiting the negative effects of oxidation. They had it figured out in so many natural ways.
Seeing these methods effortlessly enacted in a way that was harmonious with our remote surroundings made me think on how the concepts of refrigeration, stainless steel, DVI starters and chemical sterilisation are all incredibly recent, shaking the foundations of what I had been taught back in London. I was emotionally taken with the overwhelming sense of lived human knowledge and expert heritage that these men were casually propagating on their remote mountaintop. Seeing food transformed in this natural setting brought to mind the fact that in its natural existence, milk is never meant to be refrigerated and is certainly never sterilised, where ultimately its destiny is to become cheese. It doesn’t even see light, remaining hidden in its natural context as it travels from mother to infant. The sweetness of milk isn’t just for the infant to grow- it is to feed the bacteria that will turn it into cheese.
I left feeling that were I to begin natural cheesemaking back home in Ireland without a cultural totem like the gerle to back me up, the struggle would be immense. I wish it felt easier.
It is here where we are faced with our main challenge. We are looking on one hand at the magnificent, human heritage of producing food harmoniously within specific geographical contexts that span millennia but on the other, are happy to yield to a set of systems and protocols that only began to take shape in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, prioritising industry-centric food systems with a negative knock on effect through their regulation. To me, it doesn’t feel right. It never did.
COMING UP IN PART TWO NEXT WEEK: Struggles I faced as a producer of smoked wild Atlantic salmon in Ireland, and WHAT IT ALL MEANS
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