From 17 to 20 September the great theater of natural cheesesi reopens its doors in Bra. With a novelty: this year Cheese, the great international event dedicated to raw milk cheeses and forms of milk, will focus its spotlight on the animals that supply the raw material.
«Without animals we would not have milk and cheese. And there would be no Cheese either! Precisely for this reason we have decided to put animals at the center of our programme, so that the public also becomes aware of the urgency of reviewing our relationship with nature and with the animal world», says Serena Milano, general secretary of the Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity Onlus, and specifies that the claim will be: Consider animals.
An Israeli study on distribution of biomass at the terrestrial level published in the journal Nature with reference to mammals revealed that 36% of the total is represented by humans, the 60% from farmed animals and just 4% from wild ones, such as elephants, bats, pandas and whales. “It is a frightening proportion – comments Serena Milano – and of which we are often not aware: where are all these farmed mammals found? We never see them, because mostly they remain locked up in industrial warehouses». What does all this have to do with cheeses? It has something to do with it: just think that "in the last 30 years Italy has lost 90% of its shepherds", wiped out by an increasingly strong dairy industry.
But considering animals implies not only thinking about cows, sheep or goats: we need to go further and ask ourselves what are the living elements, belonging to the animal world, which influence the process that allows us to have milk and consequently cheese: not only dairy cows, but also pollinating insects (to which we owe the blooms) and the microorganisms that inhabit the soil and make it alive: fungi, bacteria and yeasts, to name a few. Protagonists of Cheese next to a thousand cheeses.
Since its first edition Cheese, in addition to the gastronomic aspects, has proposed to safeguard a heritage too often threatened by a short-sighted policy and by overbearing interests of the dairy industry. "In 1997, when we started, there wasn't even a discussion of raw milk in Italy," recalls Barbara Nappini, the newly elected president of Slow Food Italy. «At that time, the shepherds and cheesemakers who worked with raw milk did so almost clandestinely, because pasteurized milk cheeses were the most popular. We, supporters of raw milk, however, won that battle, to the point that today the cheeses produced in this way stand out for their quality and excellence».
Over the years, then, Cheese has repeatedly been the stage where to assert the reasons of those who believe that the biodiversity of pastures should be preserved and valued, avoiding the risk of homologation of industrially produced cheeses. «In 2015, for example, the battle was against the use of powdered milk for the production of cheese – continued Nappini -, but in this case too we won».
Today we need to take sides against industrial unrest. «At Cheese 2021, the vast majority of cheeses will be natural, with the exception of rare exceptions that are inevitable for regulation, such as gorgonzola which is in any case an extraordinary cheese – assured Piero Sardo, president of the Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity Onlus -. Also this year we insist on the theme of raw milk and natural products, which represent an invisible but fundamental biodiversity for life».
At Cheese 2021 they will participate Italian and international producers and refiners from Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, the United Kingdom, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. Cheeses will be the absolute protagonists, but they won't be missing honeys, jams, mustards and a selection of Slow Food Presidia of nitrite and nitrate-free cured meats – already present in the 2019 edition. And then the usual Appointments at the Table, scheduled at the Pollenzo Agency, and the unmissable Taste Workshops, which this year will put producers and chefs in an even closer relationship, explains Alessandra Turco, Slow Food events manager. to demonstrate that extraordinary dishes can be born from properly made products. Finally, there will be moments of reflection on the theme of the 2021 edition: the conferences that will still take place online, in part, and again, fortunately live, at the Biodiversity House".
