2004 Annual Meeting - Abstract


Sustainable Food System or Elite Treat:
The Cultural Economy of Artisanal Cheese in New England

Dr. Heather Paxson
paxson@mit.edu
Lecturer in Anthropology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Anthropology Program, Room 16-267
77 Massachusetts Ave.
Cambridge, MA 02139

Since Sidney Mintz' influential Sweetness and Power (1985), anthropological research has examined the national and global political economies that are behind putting foods on tables. In the last decade, new American cheeses with names like Vermont Shepherd and Humboldt Fog have cropped up in restaurants, specialty shops and farmers' markets, evidence of producers and consumers interested in cultivating novel tastes and social distinctions. But who are these producers and consumers? What sorts of distinctions and identities are they after?

This paper will consider the viability of artisinal cheese as a small-scale localized, sustainable food system that may successfully tap into the wealthy urban elite gourmandism represented by Slow Food, an Italian-based "eco-gastronomic" movement to preserve the pleasures of the table. Is the new American market for artisan cheeses what Slow Food promises: a socially conscious as well as indulgent means of protecting the cultures of family farming and artisan craft from the "deluge of standardization" posed by "hyper-hygenist" food safety regulation and agribusiness? Slow Food USA held its annual conference this year at Shelburne Farms, home of one of Vermont’s most celebrated artisan cheesemakers, and several of Vermont's artisan cheesemakers are Slow Food members. Or alternatively, is artisanal cheese (priced significantly higher than mass produced supermarket varieties) better viewed as an indication of elitism or mechanism of growing economic disparities in this country? I will explore the cultural economy of American artisinal cheese drawing on multisited fieldwork conducted in Vermont and Massachusetts with cheesemakers, cheesemongers, and consumers, as well as on prior ethnographic research as a member of Slow Food’s New York City convivium.

If American cheesemaking is flourishing in part because urban wealth has been transplanted to such rural areas as New York's Hudson River Valley (Coach Farm goat cheese is the retirement project of the founder of Coach Leather), it is also because in places like Vermont, farmers have thus found a way to make less land generate more money. Drawing on anthropological literature on family businesses (Yanagisako 2002) and artisan craft production (Terrio 2000; Herzfeld 2003) in Europe, and considering both processes of production and consumption, I examine what artisan cheese might tell us about class and capital in the contemporary United States, when urban dwellers pay premium for farmstead products and rural producers drive hours to set up stalls in urban Greenmarkets, blurring urban/rural divides that have organized much of the work on class in the US.