Digging up the Dirt
“A cheese is just one small piece of the world – one lump of microbe-riddled milk curds – but each is a point of centuries of tradition.”
This quote appears a New Yorker article entitled, “How a Cheese Goes Extinct,” in which Ruby Tandoh muses on the lifespan of a cheese and how these cheeses reflect the care and personality of those who make them.
Cheeses are not just tied to people, but to the land. In the US, that connection has been cultivated as a mirage, a false image of bucolic idealism that systematically discriminates against Black farmers. Like what Richard Rothstein proves with regard to housing segregation in The Color of Law, this discrimination and resulting disparity in agriculture is not de facto, like what many would like to believe, but de jure, meaning by law.
In the United States, Black farmers were pushed out courtesy of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), who “systematically denied and delayed loans to Black farmers” (Boyd and Faber, 2020). The number of Black farmers as a result of this fell from nearly one million in 1910 to less than 40,000 today (Boyd and Faber, 2020). The USDA even confirmed its own record of racial discrimination in 1994 (and was consequently sued). Today there still exists as significant subsidy gap between Black and white farmers because subsidies are based on the value of the crop. As 99% of famers who sell a crop for over $50,000 are white (Boyd and Faber, 2020), this gap creates a negative feedback loop for Black farmers while increasing white farmers’ profits year after year.
This racism is not only apparent on paper and in bank accounts, but was visually instituted across American farmland. For instance, let’s take the iconic red barn: a familiar image that transports us to a green pasture with an adorable black and white calf frolicking around its mother, who watches disapprovingly while engrossed in a slow chew, hay protruding from her mouth.
Winslow Homer, A Temperance Meeting (1874)
Barns were originally painted red because early New England colonists needed a cheap way to protect the wood from the elements. They mixed together skimmed milk, lime, and red iron oxide (from the red clay in the soil), creating a rusty-colored paint. Painting barns red is not just tradition; it endorses a specific ideal of the agricultural industry – one that glazes over the labor involved and reiterates the white colonial experience. It’s a pre-mechanization nostalgia, “so historically pervasive that in 1935, a Los Angeles milk inspector initiated the Dairy Roadside Appearance Program, encouraging farmers to clean up their land, paint their barns and plant flowers to perpetuate this milking myth to urban milk buyers” (Kurlansky, 2014). The dairy industry needed to be seen as “pure,” and so farmers were encouraged to evoke small-farm white colonial romanticism through strategies like painting their barns red.
These exclusionary tactics impact the cheese industry as well, which today is overwhelmingly white. While I don’t have the data to know how many Black farmers are producing cheese, as far I can tell there is only one Black-owned cheese shop in the States (Petrucci, 2020). There are a lot of incredible movements happening in the world of agriculture right now (read here about how Leah Penniman, a Black woman from New York, started Soul Fire Farm to combat food apartheid and take back control of the land from corporations), so hopefully this can be a turning point for the cheese industry as well.