WHEY FORWARD! WHY CHEESE IS FEMINISM'S NEW BASTION.

Last year Erin Bligh, the proprietor of Dancing Goats Dairy in the US, planned to introduce a new cheese - hard, with spicy peppers - called Madam President, in what she assumed would be a fromage homage to a historic election. After the unexpected result, she renamed the cheese General Leia Organa, after the Rebel Alliance leader in 'Star Wars', and sent chunks to fortify friends attending the women's march in Boston. "This is my small piece of the resistance", a local customer told her, brandishing a wedge. Soon thereafter she decided to name cheeses after Ruth Bader Ginsberg (Cheddary, enrobed in black) and Josephine Baker (Sardo-style, with a natural rind and slightly sweet). "We have got a Marie Curie", she said, "We are just releasing our Jane Goodall, and we had an Amelia Earhart - two wheels of it and it sold out in a second, because everyone's like, 'Yeah, that's my girl'".
Along with all the noisier revolutions of late, there is a quiet if pungent one happening in dairy cases across America. Cheese, traditionally named for a place of origin, now often broadcasts its inherently feminine constitution. "As it should be", said Seana Doughty, 46, who has created 'Fat Bottom Girl', named for both a Queen song and its variable shape, and Shepherdista, alluding to her fondness for fashion. "Last time I checked, you couldn't milk boys!" At a moment when assault and harassment revelations are creeping across male-dominated industries, independent American cheese-making stands as an obvious if unsung exemplar of the ultimate matriarchal workplace. "We are all women here", said Rhonda Gothberg, 63, a former nurse who offers a cheese called 'Woman of La Mancha' - the sharpest in her catalog, naturally. "We do have one man who cleans our pens for us, but all my milkers, all my farmers' market people - it's not a requirement that they be women, it's just worked out that way", she said, "We have tried a couple of guys, and they were not patient and kind..." Cheese was historically woman's 'indoor' work while men were outside plowing the fields, as the New York City cheese monger Anne Saxelby details in a useful '5 minute history' last spring, in which she proclaimed that "The Future (And Past!) of Cheese Is Female". Kathryn Spann, who practiced international law for a dozen years and is now an owner of a farm, sells, among other cheeses, Bearded Lady, a reference to her goats. There is also Dirty Girl: a reclaiming of sorts of an often-pornographic phrase. To Spann, 49, Dirty Girl connotes something different. "To me, it's a little farm girls in overalls", she said, "She's innocent, she's a working girl. She's not being image conscious, she's just herself". A new label for the cheese shows a girl: flanked by animals, smiling as she looks hopefully towards a boundless sky.
[Based on an article written by Alexandra Jacobs, published in The Times of India, p. 13, dated 24th November, 2017].
-Challapalli Srinivas Chakravarthy-
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