The Whole Fromage

Kathe Lison explores the world of French cheese. ‘Cheese is more than mere food. Androuet (author of one of the most highly esteemed books about French cheese) famously called cheese “the soul of the soil,” and you can hold it crumbling in your hands, solid and real, like earth.” Further, Lison says, “Cheese...(is) a way of seeing, a way of knowing not only who the French are, but where they came from.” Big statements about a dairy product.

Lison shows us where all cheeses come from (maybe more than we want to know) and takes us to the places where the the French cheeses we love—Camemberts, Beauforts, Comtes, Gruyeres, Roqueforts. We learn that cheese, like all milk-products, is full of casein, a protein that breaks down in the digestive system as an opioid, what one doctor calls, “dairy crack.” Lison tells the stories about cheese that make us cringe, about mites that chew on cheeses during the months they are stored in caves...using pieces of calf stomach to start the cheese-making process...how eating cheese “evokes other emissions, both male and female”...and these are the things we love about a good nonfiction book, I think.