Carlo Petrini of Slow Food waxes lyrical over the growth in American artisanal cheeses.
To celebrate these cheeses, I’d like to quote the great Italian writer Italo Calvino who, in his book Palomar, poetically described the value of the diversity of artisan cheeses:
Behind every cheese there is a pasture of a different green under a different sky: meadows caked with salt that the tides of Normandy deposit every evening; meadows scented with aromas in the windy sunlight of Provence; there are different flocks, with their stablings and their transhumances; there are secret processes handed down over the centuries.
From now on we can ideally add to these images the vast expanses of America with their “different greens and different skies”.
Petrini wrote the foreword to “Atlas of American Artisan Cheese”.