Overview

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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9780520270183

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Reviews

[The Life of Cheese] offers a unique glimpse of people who have taken food-making into their own hands. --Mit-Ejmes The Life of Cheese is one way to better understand that food is never just a thing to put in your mouth. --Scientific American Both scholarly and accessible, the book profiles people who make cheese and delves into the science, art, politics, and culture, as it were, of these artisan products. --Boston Globe Book Section A first rate read in understanding how and where our food comes from, and the artisanal life. --Gothic Epicures Writing

[The Life of Cheese] offers a unique glimpse of people who have taken food-making into their own hands. --Mit-Ejmes The Life of Cheese is one way to better understand that food is never just a thing to put in your mouth. --Scientific American

Author Information

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).

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