You probably need to come from the UK to know that “tough cheese” is the exact equivalent of “so what”, or “hard luck”. You probably need to come from Lancashire to know that Mrs Kirkham’s Lancashire cheese has been exonerated from any connection with an outbreak of e.coli. The national newspapers were all over the story that Kirkhams cheese was the next best thing to a trip to the Exit Clinic in Switzerland, but they seem to have maintained a Trappist silence over the results of the long investigation by the Food Standards Agency who tested sixty batches of Mrs Kirkhams Lancashire cheese since December 2023 and failed to find a single contaminated batch. Worse still; of 31 people infected since August, only eight said they had eaten Mrs Kirkhams and seven of those had eaten the cheese as part of a mixed plate of cheeses and charcuterie assembled by third party supermarkets. I’m indebted to the Lancashire Post for this information - and of course to my absurd attachment to local online newspapers, or at least those which aren’t entirely staffed by interns who write their stories using AI, yes I’m talking about you Reach!
Anyway, why should I be so exercised by the fate of a small dairy in Lancashire? I’ve never even eaten their cheese, although I’ll be off tomorrow to buy a piece out of solidarity. The thing is, I love cheese, and unpasteurised cheeses have an almost indefinable depth of flavour that none of the big pre-packed industrial ones have. The first time I tasted Westcombe Cheddar at the Saturday Farmers’ Market here in Bath, it felt as if I was revisiting my childhood. Yes it’s expensive but I’d rather eat a pound of Westcombe over a month than the same amount of Cathedral City in a day. It has a lingering fruity depth that I hadn’t tasted for decades. Since I found it I’ve eaten my way through dozens of hand made cheeses, many of them unpasteurised, and read books about them all. It’s an absorbing obsession.
So I was thinking today after I’d read the Lancashire Post article, that the world needs good questions more than ever before, and I’m indebted to Sid Harris, a wonderful teacher and witness at our wedding who would always challenge my flights of sociological imagination with the best question ever – “It’s all very interesting Dave, but where’s the evidence?” Where, indeed, was the evidence that shut Kirkham’s dairy down and probably very nearly destroyed their business. Who fed the story to the national press? and what vested interests kept it there for weeks? What deeply rooted prejudices against unpasteurised milk greased the flight to an assumption that the cheese was the problem? Let me tell you I’m much more frightened of shop assistants, deli’s pubs and cafe’s who couldn’t tell a HACCP (Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points Plan) from a vague injunction to wash your hands now and again. I’ve just been prepping an Indian chicken dish, and I probably washed my hands a dozen times and sprayed the work surfaces twice while I was doing it – and that’s because I’ve had campylobacter twice from improperly barbecued chicken! Food safety matters, but in this instance a small business was jeopardised before the evidence was in. An immediate inspection and tests accompanied by checking all the documentation should have at least prompted a cautious response from the FSA before throwing them to the dogs.
We need to ask ourselves whether we value the work of these small artisanal producers to the local economy enough to support them or whether the authorities should always support the industrial food producers against the little people. If we’re at all serious about tackling the economic and environmental disasters that are racing up on us, then the emphasis has to be on local, low impact and low carbon (ie transport costs) with less intensive milk production.
In the US the FDA waged a war against unpasteurised artisan cheeses for years – it’s a story well told in Bronwen and Francis Percivals’ book -“Reinventing the Wheel” Over that past decade we’ve learned so much about the importance of microbes – bacteria and yeasts – in the human gut biome, that instead of being scared of so-called germs, we now embrace them and pay out exorbitant amounts of money to buy industrially produced supermarket supplements where our grandparents got them from fresh home cooked food, especially fermented preserved foods, like cheeses. Eventually the FDA backed down in the face of stolid legal persistence and now there’s a thriving artisanal cheese movement in the USA.
So Sid Harris’s question – “where’s the evidence David?” is as good as any GPS device for getting us safely to the place we need to be. Our whole culture has become infected with the deadly postmodern idea that we create our own truths and that evidence is the problem if it cuts across our prejudices. And so we trundle merrily along in a tumbril of our own making towards the cruel punishment that is waiting for us. There is time to change our ways; but not much of it!