slowing its aging, and extending its edible
lifetime.
The Sources
of Cheese Diversity
So these are the ingredients that have
generated the great diversity of our traditional
cheeses: hundreds of plants, from scrubland
herbs to alpine flowers; dozens of animal
breeds that fed on those plants and
transformed them into milk; protein-cutting
enzymes from young animals and thistles;
microbes recruited from meadow and cave,
from the oceans, from animal insides and
skins; and the careful observation, ingenuity,
and good taste of generations of cheesemakers
and cheese lovers. This remarkable heritage
underlies even today’s simplified industrial
cheeses.
The usual way of organizing the diversity of
cheeses into a comprehensible system is to