Our friends at Cypress Point Creamery have added Loblolly, a tomme-style cheese to their offerings. We feel fortunate to be among the first customers to sample the new cheese. We enjoy their gouda- and havarti-style cheeses, but this one might just become our favorite.
Made from the raw milk of their resident herd of purebred Jersey cows and aged in their modern facility, the new tomme is full of character. If you serve it to friends, try to cut it so that each portion includes a bit of the tasty rind.
Russ and I recently received a note from a friend who is 93 years old and lives in Carthage NY near the Adirondacks. She likes the weather...even though it is in the 40s today and will probably snow, again, this week.
Her note included an article from the Watertown Daily Times about Cartha E. Heath Gaebel who just turned 100 years old. Is Carthage NY a Blue Zone?
What is the connection, you ask, to cheese? It seems that Mrs. Gaebel's parents operated the Sandy Creek Valley cheese factory. That's where Mrs. Gaebel was born. Like other cheese factory products..she aged very well indeed.
From an article by Rachel Maines published by The History Cooperative, I learned that Cartha's brothers Orrin and Malcolm Heath accompanied Elsie the Cow, an exceptionally handsome and famous purebred Jersey owned by the Borden Dairy, to her interviews and photo opportunities at the New York World's Fair in 1939. Cartha would have been 29 then. I wonder if she went too?
Readers of Gem of the Adirondacks learned of the bleak fortunes of the little Adirondack community of Newton Falls. The hamlet was built around a paper mill, and the mill brought prosperity for nearly 100 years. But beginning in the eighties the mill went through a series of wrenching shutdowns, layoffs, and changes in ownership. Ultimately the mill, which once had employed 500, was shuttered. When my book went to press in 2005, the mill had been closed for five years, there was little hope it would ever reopen, the local economy was in shambles, and Newton Falls was beginning to look like a ghost town.
The story has taken a happier turn however, and it is one I could not have imagined following the former decline. In 2007 the mill reopened under visionary leadership, 100 jobs returned to the community, and theoperation has since become a model for economically and environmentally sustainable paper making. This time the story is not mine to tell, and I encourage you to visit the Newton Falls Fine Paper website to read it in the words of the people who made this remarkable rebirth possible.
After a two-month hiatus, we will be taking our cheese project back on the road with a series of presentations in the Gainesville area. At 3:00 PM on Friday, November 12 we are presenting at The Village, Gainesville’s most popular retirement community. Then on 1:30 PM on Tuesday, December 7 we will present at Oak Hammock, an upscale retirement community associated with the University of Florida. On Thursday, January 13 at 2:00 PM our audience will be Prime Time, an informal adult education program. We have also put in a proposal to offer a four-part course on the New American Cheese for the Santa Fe College community education program during the winter term.
Presenting at the Adirondack Museum in August
Each presentation is different, in keeping with the interests of the groups, and because people sometimes attend more than one of them. Developing unique talks is a challenging part of the fun of presenting. It gives us a chance to share more from the interviews we did and show more photos of cheese makers, creameries, the animals that give us the great milk for great cheese, and the amazing farms where they live. We can share more about our agonies and ecstasies while making cheese at home and more about cheeses, creameries, and stories we have discovered since The Summer of a Thousand Cheeses went to press last May.
The timing of the first two presentations may help to promote holiday sales of all our books, but we enjoy interacting with the people and we would be wanting to do this even if we didn't think everyone will want to give one of our books to those hard-to-buy-for people on the gift lists.
We had great publicity for our August presentations
Mark and I met a few days ago to talk about the series of 14 paddling guides he envisions for the Lower Suwannee and Cedar Keys National Wildlife Refuges. My role is helping to include natural history in the guides, pointing out features paddlers will be seeing as they travel along routes and providing informative stories about them. By the end of our meeting I had a set of excellent maps to work with and a better sense of how I should be proceeding.
Inspired by some other activities, I was led to speculate on how the paddling guides could not only be issued in multiple media formats, but possibly also how they might ultimately become interactive. Here’s how it might work:
The paddling guides, including maps, text, and photos are printed as laminated brochures.
Later the 14 guides could be bound together in book form, with expanded natural history information and more photos.
Or suppose the guides and the guidebook (as an e-book) were available for download. Users could print needed sections at home, or download the entire book onto a smart phone or i-Pad to be brought along on paddling ventures.
So far these materials would qualify as “multimedia,” but what about transmedia?
Suppose users could contribute observations and stories? Information posted on a live blog would report real-time observations. If connectivity were good, observations could be downloaded or uploaded onto the blog in the field. For example a post might be, “The pair of bald eagles observed last week near waypoint SAN03 are on the nest and appear to have begun incubation.” Posts might be practical: “A fallen tree makes it impossible to ascend the Gopher River beyond waypoint 07.”
Ultimately the guidebook could be a living one, with updates as events are recorded. For example a section appended to one route might include a 10-year record of bald eagle activity at a particular nesting site.
This is already a fun project, even more fun when it offers a vision of the future.
We expected biotic communities of the lower Suwannee to be influenced by water but were surprised and intrigued to learn that all is more complex and nuanced than expected.
Plants in the tidal estuary have plenty of water, but it is salty and they really need fresh water. As with the ancient mariner, finding a drop to drink is difficult. Stuck in a place regularly drenched by salt water, they need adaptations to deal with this hardship. As it turns out, the adaptations they have developed mirror those developed by plants living in deserts.
Move upstream to tidal freshwater swamps and you will find plants dealing with other problems. Drenched most of the year, their roots are encased in muck usually deficient in oxygen and they face a chemically difficult environment. They must deal with too much fresh water.
Move upstream some more and the problem of perennially saturated soils decreases as the frequency and duration of flooding decline. More kinds of plants thrive as water availability transitions from mostly stressful to nearly optimal. Water availability gradually becomes less of an issue, as in the upper floodplain forests, where the results of competition may hinge on other issues. Among these, tolerance for shade and fire are prime examples. And, of course further toward the uplands water may become unreliable and again may pose an issue for the things that live there. In sandhills in the Suwannee basin, lack of reliable fresh water may result in communities dominated by scrubby oaks and short-lived sand pines.
The adaptive mechanisms plants develop to deal with lack of water and those making them tolerant of shade are, for the most part mutually exclusive. The results of this dichotomy can be seen all around us, but this is a topic for a future blog. We’ll have one about the role of hybridization too, but we will need to do more boning up before we are ready to post that one. Stay tuned.
Glasswort, a tiny wetland plant resembling cacti in its adaptations
Cheddaring at Beecher's Handmade Cheese, Seattle, WA
We were struck by an October 23 column in the New York Times by Thomas L. Friedman. He addressed changes needed if the United States is to prosper in the new economy. He cited Harvard economist Lawrence Katz's observation that today everyone needs to think of himself as an artisan. Participants in the new economy must bring some special personal quality to their jobs, whether it is developing i-phone "apps," providing haircuts or medical care, or working in a retail shop. Simply functioning as cogs in machines that deliver routine products or services will not bring about prosperity, either for individuals or for our society.
Of course this rang true in light of our research for The Summer of a Thousand Cheeses, and in what we have heard since the book was published. Time after time cheesemakers related stories that, although details and circumstances varied, conveyed the basic message that traditional dairy farms cannot be kept afloat if they sell only milk. Too many large corporate farms are producing too much low cost milk for smaller dairies to be economically sustainable. For some, however, adding value to milk by turning it into cheese and adding still more value by artfully producing uniquely pleasing products is proving one way to keep their farms going.
We had thought cheesemakers are unique, but upon reflection we are not surprised and certainly not disappointed to realize that we and our fellow citizens are seeking, expecting, and demanding quality in many other aspects our lives.
