Immortal Milk: 9,000 Years of Cheese

Cheese has been famously described as milk’s leap toward immortality.
What a wonderfully succinct way to express the magic of something as highly perishable as milk transforming into a foodstuff that can last years.

What is even more wondrous is the longevity of cheese’s presence in our human diet. Eaten for over 9,000 years, cheese has been with us since the dawn of agriculture.



My tartiflette, made with Pont L'Eveque,
a monastic cheese
Culinary Historians of New York

Helping us understand the quasi-immortal place of cheese in Western civilization is Dr. Paul Kindstedt, professor of food science in the Department of Nutrition and Food Sciences and codirector of the Vermont Institute of Artisan Cheese, both at the University of Vermont. In the spring his book, Cheese and Culture: A History of Cheese and Its Place in Western Civilization, came out with Chelsea Green Publishing. On a recent book tour, he gave a talk to the Culinary Historians of New York, a group for which I am on the program committee. Over the course of a mere hour, Dr. Kindstedt outlined cheese’s 9,000 years of nourishing the West.


Dr. Kindstedt's book, Cheese and Culture, for sale
Culinary Historians of New York

Acknowledging that it’s impossible to cover that expanse of time in a brief talk, Dr. Kindstedt touched on three themes in the story of fermented dairying: human spirituality, global climate change, and environmental degradation.

A schmear of rich and buttery Fromager D’Affinois on a baguette may feel like a divine experience, but Dr. Kindstedt was talking about something more profound vis a vis cheese’s relationship with spirituality. Taking us to the farthest reaches of cheese’s history, to ancient Sumer, Dr. Kindstedt linked the rise of agriculture with the simultaneous awareness of human spirituality. Central to the pantheon of gods in Uruk, a centrally administered Sumerian city, was Inanna, the predecessor of Aphrodite. According to the Uruk’s mythology, Inanna married a mortal shepherd, Dumuzi, because he could promise her limitless dairy products. From then on, to propitiate Innana and thereby protect the kingdom’s prosperity, Uruk’s temple elite offered her cheese and butter daily. To keep track of the offerings, writing was developed for the purpose of recordkeeping, a prototype of cuneiform. Cheese may not be the direct source of the invention of writing, but it was there at the very beginning.

Coeur a la Crème, made with fromage blanc,
one of the earliest cheese types
Culinary Historians of New York

We may currently be in an age of massive climatic change, but it’s nothing like the 13F rise in temperature 11,000 years ago that allowed agriculture and cheesemaking to occur. Within this time period, however, around 4,000 B.C.E., there was a minor fluctuation in temperature that caused tremendous change in Europe: colder winters and warmer, wetter summers that challenged long-established agricultural practices. A positive outcome of this upheaval was that trees grew more slowly in thickly forested Europe, allowing for neolithic farmers to clear their way inland, away from the river valleys and toward the mountains. This change in climate and habitat led to the tradition of transhumance, the leading of animals up into the mountains during the summer to eat the lush grasses that are inaccessible in winter. From this, hard Alpine cheeses came into being, which we still enjoy today (e.g., Scharfer Maxx, Gruyere, Emmental, Comte, Beaufort, etc.).


A timeline of cheese's history
Culinary Historians of New York

Climatic changes and population growth can also lead to environmental degradation. The famous cheeses of Holland (e.g., Gouda and Edam) are the product of this. The Dutch, almost a thousand years ago, reclaimed soggy land from the sea to create agricultural land. This innovative feat was undermined by a rise in sea levels, around 1300 C.E., which caused saltwater to flood the fields and make them unsuitable for agriculture. Another innovation, dykes, salvaged the fields, but they were still too wet to grow grains. They were suitable, however, to support dairying, and thus began, albeit late in human history, Holland’s esteemed position in dairying which resulted in the tremendous and influential wealth of this postage stamp-sized country.



Unfortunately, the threat of environmental degradation still affects cheese today. For instance, due to global warming, many varieties of grasses and wildflowers are no longer growing in the Alps, or new ones have been introduced, which negatively affect the flavor profile of those well-established mountain cheeses. Beyond the realm of flavor is the economic insecurity of developing countries like Mongolia, where climatic changes have reduced the traditional ability to dairy. On a positive note, a new spirituality has arisen around cheese, especially in the U.S. for the past thirty years, that celebrates stewardship of the land. Keeping land in small-scale agriculture can direct us to a more positive, sustainable future.
Eat cheese and enjoy history.

Diana Pittet, the curious cheesemonger