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So...perhaps the author of this marginalia is questioning whether cheese thinks (or is alive in some sense), rather than whether making cheese is a rational pur

So...perhaps the author of this marginalia is questioning whether cheese thinks (or is alive in some sense), rather than whether making cheese is a rational pursuit? The next one "Is cheese animal, and do we eat it alive?" makes me think it's much more likely the former than the latter. That would be an interesting question, and maybe illuminating of the general knowledge about microscopic processes back then. Some cheese, of course, has bacterial cultures involved in the making of, and so some cheese is alive, by some definition. In the usual case, though, I guess it is adding acid to milk/cream and letting it coagulate into curds and then pressing it; so the answer is probably mostly no, if we assume a relatively clean environment for making and storing the cheese. But, perhaps the writer of the marginalia is wondering if it is a process like making beer, or other fermentation that is actually using live cultures (I don't know how well the "liveness" of yeast and other cultures was understood back then; though I suspect they understood it better than the average modern non-baker/non-brewer, since so many people made their own bread and beer).

dmoo 10y ago
Reminds me of the debate over the liveness of a strawberry on the BBC podcast The Infinite Monkey Cage http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00snr0w/episodes/downloads http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00snr0w/episodes/downloads
barrkel 10y ago
"Some cheese"? All cheeses worth savouring are cultured. All cheddar (probably the most popular cheese globally) is cultured. The only cheeses that aren't cultured are things like uncultured mozzarella or queso fresco.
- SwellJoe 10y ago
  "All cheeses worth savouring are cultured." I'm rather fond of a wide variety of fresh cheeses. Paneer, and other sorts of "farmers cheese" and cottage cheese are all made with just acid curdling and aren't cultured. Most mozzarella, and many other soft cheeses, can and are made without cultures. I'm not an expert on the subject, by any means, but there's a huge variety of things we call "cheese" and they're made in a pretty wide variety of ways. More importantly might be what kinds of cheeses people were aware of and making back when this note-taker was thinking these thoughts and asking these questions about cheese. Were cultured cheeses common in his region and time? I dunno and the article doesn't reveal it. There have been times and places where "cheese" meant a fresh cheese like paneer or cottage cheese, but probably other times and places when bacterial cultures were involved in all or most cheese production. I suspect the further back we go, the more likely we are to find fresh cheeses being more common than the cultured cheeses since they were simpler to make, but I dunno. The ability to store a hard cheese without refrigeration would have been pretty valuable to pre-industrial society.
  - barrkel 10y ago
    I like mozzarella, but I don't savour it. Some dishes call for cottage cheese as an ingredient, but I don't nibble on cottage cheese at a wine tasting. To me, these are two very different things.
masklinn 10y ago
> Some cheese, of course, has bacterial cultures involved in the making of Many (most?) matured unprocessed soft cheeses of the old world involve molds, usually on the rind though blue cheeses are struck through with mold veins (the fuzzy blue-green): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Types_of_cheese#Mold https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Types_of_cheese#Mold

dmoo 10y ago

Reminds me of the debate over the liveness of a strawberry on the BBC podcast The Infinite Monkey Cage http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00snr0w/episodes/downloads http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00snr0w/episodes/downloads

barrkel 10y ago

"Some cheese"? All cheeses worth savouring are cultured. All cheddar (probably the most popular cheese globally) is cultured. The only cheeses that aren't cultured are things like uncultured mozzarella or queso fresco.

SwellJoe 10y ago
"All cheeses worth savouring are cultured." I'm rather fond of a wide variety of fresh cheeses. Paneer, and other sorts of "farmers cheese" and cottage cheese are all made with just acid curdling and aren't cultured. Most mozzarella, and many other soft cheeses, can and are made without cultures. I'm not an expert on the subject, by any means, but there's a huge variety of things we call "cheese" and they're made in a pretty wide variety of ways. More importantly might be what kinds of cheeses people were aware of and making back when this note-taker was thinking these thoughts and asking these questions about cheese. Were cultured cheeses common in his region and time? I dunno and the article doesn't reveal it. There have been times and places where "cheese" meant a fresh cheese like paneer or cottage cheese, but probably other times and places when bacterial cultures were involved in all or most cheese production. I suspect the further back we go, the more likely we are to find fresh cheeses being more common than the cultured cheeses since they were simpler to make, but I dunno. The ability to store a hard cheese without refrigeration would have been pretty valuable to pre-industrial society.
- barrkel 10y ago
  I like mozzarella, but I don't savour it. Some dishes call for cottage cheese as an ingredient, but I don't nibble on cottage cheese at a wine tasting. To me, these are two very different things.

masklinn 10y ago

> Some cheese, of course, has bacterial cultures involved in the making of Many (most?) matured unprocessed soft cheeses of the old world involve molds, usually on the rind though blue cheeses are struck through with mold veins (the fuzzy blue-green): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Types_of_cheese#Mold https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Types_of_cheese#Mold