This article documents the presence of cheese in the culinary traditions of southeast China between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries through a close analysis of a single recipe collection, Mr. Song's Book of Nourishing Life. It opens by examining Mr. Song's techniques for cheesemaking, exploring his many culinary applications for cheese, and situating his interest in dairy within the broader tradition of cheesemaking of his place and time. By reconstructing the flavors of centuries past, this article recovers a forgotten tradition of cheesemaking in southern China and challenges popular stereotypes about traditional Chinese cuisine being dairy-free.

The reinvention of food is also a matter of re-localization. This means rethinking food chains in terms of their spatiality. This article deals with milk and cheese and their reinvention in Italy through two distinct, even opposing, strategies: automatization and face-to-face involvement of critical consumers with producers. Each of these strategies associates trust with different spatial arrangements. In the case of raw milk automated distributors (locally named the equivalent of “milk ATMs”), trust is associated with the short distance to the raw milk producer, with whom, however, there is no direct interaction. In the case of food activist circles, notably Italy’s Solidarity Purchase Groups or GAS, trust lies in actual interaction with the producer. This acquires a specific meaning in a culture that assigns added social significance to the act of food provisioning and cultivates plural practices of social interactions that are mediated through food.

In the global marketplace where real products are sold alongside knockoffs, how do the genuine producers and the consumer guarantee integrity? Scientists have entered the fray through microbiology. By utilizing the same, specific bacteria to create regional cheeses, scientists are collaborating with producers and government regulators to ensure that the cheese sold under its name is, in fact, the genuine product. Further, they are introducing tracer bacteria, which have no expressed characteristics in the cheese and are accessible only in the labs and to the farmers. By doing so, the scientists are ensuring that fake producers can be caught as they do not have the tracer bacteria. Despite this uniform microbiology of regional cheeses, diversity of flavor, texture, appearance, and aroma exists from each producer. Using Rolf Beeler (who is widely regarded among cheese experts as Switzerland's best Maitre Fromager ) as an example, we find evidence that while bacteria is the essential base for integrity, the craft or art of making the cheese very much depends on the artisan.

Although the history of cheesemaking in the United States tells largely a tale of industrialization, there is a submerged yet continuous history of small-batch, hands-on, artisan cheese manufacture. This tradition, carried on in artisan cheese factories across the country, although concentrated in Wisconsin, is often overlooked by a new generation of artisan cheesemakers. Continuities in fabrication methods shared by preindustrial and post-industrial artisan creameries have been obscured by changes in the organization and significance of artisan production over the last one hundred years. Making cheese by hand has morphed from chore to occupation to vocation; from economic trade to expressive endeavor; from a craft to an art. American artisan cheesemaking tradition was invented and reinvented as a tradition of innovation. Indeed, ideological commitment to innovation as modern, progressive, American——and thus a marketable value——further obscures continuities between past and present, artisan factories, and new farmstead production. The social disconnect between the current artisan movement and American's enduring cheesemaking tradition reproduces class hierarchies even as it reflects growing equity in gendered occupational opportunities.

Obsession with dessert is widely shared by the residents of Kolkata. Life's passages and religious rituals are all celebrated with sugary creations. Bengali desserts are typically made with some sort of milk product. Among these are mishti doi a custard-like dessert made by adding yogurt cultures to sweetened evaporated milk. However, Bengal is best known for desserts based on chhana. This is a fresh cheese with a consistency similar to ricotta. Some chhana is made into fritters, which include pantua, a doughnut-brown ball about the size of a lime, and kalojam, a nearly jet black sphere of dough. Both of these are soaked in syrup. Rossogolla is made from a similar dough but is boiled rather than fried. When soaked in a milk-based syrup, it is called rossomalai. In a simpler preparation, the fresh cheese is cooked down with sugar and formed into many kinds of sweets called sandesh. One of the city's best know sandesh shops is Girish Chandra Dey & Nakur Chandra Nandy, or Nakur, in the old Shyambazar district. At Nakur they begin with raw milk, process it into cheese, and then cook, form, and flavor it into many types of sandesh of often unorthodox flavors. This artisanal approach cannot be followed by smaller neighborhood confectioners, called moiras in Bengali. They often use ready-made chhana for their confections. Trying to keep up with the times, new confectioners have tried to expand their operations and offer new products some of which are artificially sweetened.

At first glance the small, round cow's milk cheese seems decidedly unexciting, one of the mild, semi-hard, ‘‘children’’ cheeses Germans apparently favor for their unobtrusiveness, the very opposite of the characterful, often pungent varieties their French neighbors like to make and eat. However, the intense orange color is unusual and the flavor special enough to find out more about it. Indeed, the Mööhrenlaibchen , literally ‘‘small carrot round‘‘, is a modern classic of the new German artisanal cheese scene. Its origin is at the Dottenfelder Hof near Frankfurt am Main, a renowned Demeter estate where the ideals of the anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner are put to practice. But Mööhrenlaibchen also taps into German history: a long tradition of coloring cheeses (for various reasons), as well as vegetarianism and the Lebensreform movement that formed as a countertrend to the heavy and rapid industrialization and urbanization at the end of the 19th century. The article explores the complex role the carrots play in this modern German artisanal cheese.