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Cheese is alive, and alive with meaning. Heather Paxson's beautifully written anthropological study of American artisanal cheesemaking tells the story of how craftwork has become a new source of cultural and economic value for producers as well as consumers. Dairy farmers and artisans inhabit a world in which their colleagues and collaborators are a wild cast of characters, including plants, animals, microorganisms, family members, employees, and customers. As "unfinished" commodities, living products whose qualities are not fully settled, handmade cheeses embody a mix of new and old ideas about taste and value. By exploring the life of cheese, Paxson helps rethink the politics of food, land, and labor today.

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CHOICE Review

In this informative ethnographic study, part of the "California Studies in Food and Culture" series, anthropologist Paxson (MIT) examines artisanal cheese making in the US. Drawing on fieldwork and informants primarily in the dairy states of Vermont, Wisconsin, and California, she addresses a number of seminal topics. These include the nature of craft and artisanship; the material, social, moral, and cultural factors involved in artisanal cheese making; the values and motivations of artisanal cheese makers; marketing of artisanal cheeses; and the technical process involved. Paxson discusses food politics, especially as it relates to food safety, and the particularly American variant of the French concept terroir, used not only as an instrument for marketing artisanal cheese, but also as a means of building rural communities. In Paxson's view, contemporary artisanal cheese makers operate in a post-pastoral and post-Pasteurian landscape in which they craft not only a material product, but also a set of moral, cultural, and social values. In contrast to the romanticized pastoral of Ovid, Virgil, and Frost, the post-pastoral, post-Pasteurian landscape valorizes science and operates within a market economy, while attempting to preserve traditional values of autonomy and self-determination, communitarianism, engaged labor, concern for the environment, and faith in the future of progress. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through professionals. D. M. Gilbert Maine Maritime Academy

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Contributor: Heather Paxson Heather Paxson , Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, author of Making Modern Mothers: Ethics and Family Planning in Urban Greece (UC Press).