![]() The Marin French Cheese Company, in Petaluma, claims to be the oldest continuously operating cheese factory in the United States. McIntyre, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, CC BY) Gold Rush Roots for New Cheese Markets San Francisco harbor at Yerba Buena Cove was so busy during the Gold Rush that ships could wait days to unload. The California dream of a century earlier saw a similar flourishing of cheese-making activity in port cities up and down the Pacific Coast. ![]() But while hippie goat ladies have been celebrated as cheese-making pioneers, they are not without precedent. Since 2000, the number of California’s artisan cheese producers has grown exponentially. But it is indicative of how food-making traditions in the United States are often animated by personal narratives of innovation rather than, as in Europe, adherence to customary tradition. Reflective of the state’s cultural diversity, the variety in California cheese-making is neither new nor unique to the state. Nationwide, the American Cheese Society counts more than 900 artisan and specialty cheese operations. Created in 2010 by a Marin County dairy farmer’s daughter on the model of wine-tasting maps, the California Cheese Trail today features 72 cheese-making operations. It leads to artisan micro-dairies as well as Kraft Foods subsidiaries. Today’s cheese lovers can drive (or internet browse) along the California Cheese Trail, stretching from Crescent City near the Oregon border south to Los Angeles. In 2010, Keehn sold the company to the Swiss corporation Emmi, although her daily involvement continues. Located in the Northern California coastal town of Arcata, Keehn grew Cypress Grove into a successful business with national distribution and name recognition that employs over 40 workers - a far cry from its modest origins. Indeed, Keehn was one of a number of Americans involved in the back-to-the-land movement who, in the early ‘80s, began making cheese by hand for commercial sale. Mary Keehn with a new wheel of Humboldt Fog. For nine years, prior to the trip to France and subsequent introduction of Humboldt Fog, Cypress Grove sold fresh chèvre and fromage blanc, cheeses more wholesome than gourmet. Overwhelmed with more goat’s milk than her human companions could or were willing to drink, she began experimenting in her kitchen and learned to make fresh cheese, or chèvre.Ī friend who was opening a restaurant told Keehn, now a divorced mother of four, “If you start a cheese factory, I’ll buy your cheese.” And in 1983 – without any official training, apprenticeship or business experience beyond selling her goats’ breed stock – Keehn launched Cypress Grove. For years, Keehn and her family lived as self-sufficiently as possible. Mary Keehn acquired her first goats in 1970, wanting to feed fresh goat’s milk to her first daughter, whom she was herself then weaning. Cypress Grove’s heroine embodies characteristics that could describe the American artisan cheese industry as a whole: scrappy, innovative and unapologetically indebted to European tastes and know-how - condensing themes that emerged through anthropological research I conducted across the United States for my book, “ The Life of Cheese.” The California dream is about moving west (or, as in Keehn’s case, farther north, to Humboldt County from Sonoma) to start anew, seeking not so much to get rich quick as to envision and inhabit a new identity. Not merely an entrepreneurial success story, it is a narrative of self-reinvention. ![]() The story of Keehn’s Cypress Grove Cheese is a quintessential telling of the California dream. Indeed, a wheel of Humboldt Fog melds elements of two iconic French cheeses, with a Morbier-like ribbon of ash running through chalky paste more reminiscent of a soft-ripened Valançay. In Keehn’s telling, the revelation occurred on a transatlantic flight home from France, where she’d gone in 1992 as a young cheese-maker looking for new inspiration by tasting traditional French cheeses and visiting their makers. ![]() And then she set out to realize her vision - in the process, she helped launch a late-20th-century American renaissance in artisan cheese-making.īut the dream didn’t come from nowhere. She fell asleep on an airplane and awoke with a vivid picture in her mind of how the cheese looked. The idea for Humboldt Fog goat’s milk cheese first came to Mary Keehn in a dream. Heather Paxson is professor of anthropology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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