CHEESE-WHIFF

 

Maybe you saw the headline, "Discharge from Davidstow Cathedral City Cheese Factory Poisoned Fish.”  It’s a headline you don’t want to see regardless of whether you’re a cheese eater or a fish lover, or a fish.

 

Cathedral City has always struck me as a solid but unexciting brand of English cheese, ultimately (I discover) owned by Saputo, a Canadian company.

Last week they admitted 21 “pollution incidents and permit breaches” that had occurred since 2016 at the Davidstow Creamery near Camelford in Cornwall, see above. 

 

Charges refer to "biological sludge" as well as "suspended solids" and "partially treated creamery effluent."  Two offences relate to contravening permits on odour between June 2016 and June 2020.  Locals had been complaining about the stink for years.  Sentencing will be in May.

 

Those that that respect the law and love cheese should watch neither being made.

 

Then coincidentally, a couple of days later Atlas Obscura put up a post with the headline, “13 Places Every Cheese Lover Should Visit Before They Die.”

 

Some of these are events rather than places, including the Stilton Cheese Rolling Race and the Cooper’s Hill Cheese Rolling in Gloucestershire, which I’m sure are very entertaining, but can they compare with the Imsil Cheese Theme Park in Imsil-gun, South Korea, described as a “32-acre fun park dedicated to all things cheese?”  Note the Swiss cheese holes in the bench supports below.

 

Apparently cheese was introduced to the Korean diet in 1958 when a Belgian priest (unnamed on Atlas Obscura) went to Imsil as a missionary, raised a few goats and started making cheese.  The governor of Imsil then asked him to teach cheese making to the locals, and so, as Atlas Obscura has it, “Imsil became the mecca of cheese in Korea.”  Who doesn’t love a cheese mecca?

 

         A few years back I went to a Bompas and Parr exhibition titled Scoop that featured ice cream memorabilia,vintage equipment, and advertising art drawn from the Robin and Caroline Weir collection which runs to 14,000 items, assembled over 40 years.  

 

And even at the time I thought I might do the same for cheese – labels, cheese boards, cheese knives, cheese graters etc.  I haven’t really put my heart and soul into it and my own collection is growing very slowly indeed, but it does have this as a centerpiece: the cheese knife gnome. (Thanks, young Caroline).