The Thirty Five Dollar Piece of Cheese

I recently returned to a small town near where I grew up in Fauquier County, Virginia and found that some profound changes had occurred. For nearly 40 years this town had consisted of little more than a single traffic light, a gas station and a 7-11 convenience store. There was also a modest church, and some small side streets with houses. Now however there were signs of real growth in the form of some “up-scale” retail stores and restaurants, and a lot more housing subdivisions. In the building that had housed the only bank for many miles around for decades, was now a brightly lit gourmet “farm to table” restaurant and retail store. Perusing some of the items in this store I casually picked up a small piece of cheese weighing maybe six to eight ounces, sniffed it, and then turned it over and looked at the price. I wish I could tell you the name of the cheese, but I dropped it so fast I did not have a chance to read it. I only know it was imported from France. The price was a little over thirty five dollars.

It is difficult to convey how startling this was to me, after seeing such little change in this simple town over a long period of time. It was like you were in a diner in rural Virginia where you pay $3.50 for breakfast and they suddenly jacked up the prices to New York City levels and now you’re paying $35.00 for the same meal. It started me thinking about why we buy something from across the globe that is also produced locally. Do we really want to eat “local”? Or do we wish to fetishize and commodify a simple staple resource, such as milk, that was once delivered daily to our doorsteps?

Through its travels the milk is transformed, in both its physical form as well as in our imagination. Physically it is transformed, separated through the addition of rennet and heat into curds and whey, and then amalgamated through processes such as “Cheddaring”. Some of these processes are secret, and have been handed down through generations. Some are astoundingly simple and not so secret, check YouTube.

On the surface is a product we all know and most of us eat, called cheese. But this product can symbolize many things, and mean many different things to various groups of people. Ask any British citizen about their country’s Stilton, and you are as likely to learn about history as you are to learn about blue cheese. Feta cheese is central to the Greek diet and their culture, as is another milk product they love to consume, yogurt. Generations of making and eating these products have transformed them from food to instruments of symbolic ritualized interactions that impart more than just sustenance. In turn we are shaped physically as well as mentally by what we ingest on a regular basis, our bodies and psyche being simultaneously modified by the influence of our diet. Over time and through repetition our foods attain meanings that are sometimes central to our ontology, they delineate us and remain as markers in our mind reminding of great events that speak to who we are.

This addition of mystique¸ a layering of symbolic and subliminal reassurances and suggestions meant to confirm our self-believed core values, and send the message that the magic in the product will be infused in us through its consumption. A natural occurrence over time which has been seized upon and exploited by large-scale manufacturers and marketing companies.

To understand why a piece of cheese came to Fauquier County all the way from France to be priced at an absurd amount, to perhaps be purchased and consumed by a local resident, you have to look way beyond a piece of cheese, you first have to understand our relationship to Europe.

Northern Virginia is one of the most expensive areas in the United States, and you could certainly expect to see exorbitant prices being charged for luxury imported items across the area in such towns as Tysons Corner, Middleburg or Mclean, and on and on. Fauquier County on the other hand always seemed to resist such changes, and had remained a rural farming community based on very traditional agrarian practices.

Fauquier County is of course named after Francis Fauquier, a gentleman born in England, who acted as “Royal Governor”. Fauquier County is located the heart of the “Piedmont”, a region in Virginia known for horse breeding, fox hunting, and steeplechase races. These activities were imported from England, and have become entrenched in the social fabric of the region. As it takes a great deal of capital investment to endeavor to raise and race horses, it has naturally become primarily a pastime of the very rich, and consequently is considered a positive or desirable status symbol. This is not only because it shows one to be wealthy, but moreover it implies a relationship with Europe, a lineage, that symbolizes class structures formed by blood.

That such structures provide no class mobility is exactly why the implication is preferred. It says that, “we are in a club that you can never get in” The fact that such an inference is not usually based in fact is irrelevant, the perception alone is sufficient.

For a long time particularly around the turn of the century in Virginia, and other southern states as well, there was a feeling that to find sophistication, you had to look to Europe. Paris was known as the global epicenter of Art, Fashion, and Haute Cuisine. Such notions still hold some sway today. If you wish to give your subdivision some added allure you call it “Westminster Gardens” or use words that invoke old world style such as “Carrington” or “Chelsea”. The cheese I picked up was no doubt delicious, and yet there are cheeses just as high in quality produced in the US and some terrific cheese made right in Fauquier County, yet they are still “green”, they lack cultural maturity, and they lack the history, the “panache” of a French cheese. The great French Chef Brillat-Savarin had a cheese named after him. It is sophisticated and expensive, and, therefore, when people see us eat it they think we must be sophisticated and expensive as well. Such embedded metadata may not be intended to be absorbed consciously, but rather their encoder wishes us to carry in our mind a symbol or idea without being aware that we do so, in the hopes that we will be subliminally enculturated.

Cheeses can send many messages, messages of luxury and indulgences such as a slightly warm overripe brie, or messages of restriction and discipline such as non-fat skim mozzarella. The more obscure the brand of cheese, the more it is desirable, as it implies the worldliness and intelligence of those that procured it. The regional quality of European cheeses, like their wines, further act as synaptic neurotransmitters, firing signals of class and stratification towards consumers who may or may not appreciate such nuances, or may not realize that they do.

The reason that the thirty five dollar piece of cheese found its way onto a shelf in a small grocery store in rural Fauquier County is because people had created a demand for it. They have a demand for products that can legitimize and reassure their Western European roots or that can provide solace from an ever culturally diversifying society, and at the same time express their wealth and sophistication.

And what better way to achieve this than by consuming spoiled milk?