Because it created an entire culture around it, our people's history. Parmigiano Reggiano was loved by Boccaccio already. Homer's Odyssey talks of what we would

Because it created an entire culture around it, our people's history. Parmigiano Reggiano was loved by Boccaccio already. Homer's Odyssey talks of what we would call Feta today. Egyptian murals detail cheesemaking. Today, too, dairy is an important aspect of many cultures. > Sandra Ott’s fascinating ethnography of Basque shepherds (Ott 1981) reveals much about the central role cheese can have in everyday life. In the remote French Basque Pyrenean village of Sainte-Engrâce, the cheeses that local syndicates of shepherds produce from their mountain huts takes so much care and attention that the resulting product is treated both metaphorically and ritually as their “children”. The formation of both babies and mountain cheeses alike are seen as analogous processes in the local worldview: “men’s generative creativity in procreation as in cheesemaking is believed to convey not only form but also identity. Basque cheeses, no less than children, have paternity and come from patrilineages (Paxson 2013: 52)”. https://hraf.yale.edu/the-social-life-of-cheese/ https://hraf.yale.edu/the-social-life-of-cheese/ Dairy products aren't just food. They're millenia old culture and identity.