I’m a big fan of cheese. With a vegetarian husband who doesn’t get his umami hit from mushrooms (which he hates) and who can’t abide tofu, a lot of cheese is consumed in our lives.
Mature Cheddar, melted on toasted pappy white bread, or sliced and slapped onto a crumpet oozing with salted butter and Marmite, or poked on top of a veggie burger to warm and soften at the very last minute. Paneer, cubed and fried and added to a curry with chickpeas and spinach, or swathed in ferocious chilli sauce at Zindiya, our favourite restaurant in the whole of Birmingham. Halloumi, blasted and tiger-striped in the air-fryer and drizzled with hot honey, or chunked up and skewered with watermelon for the barbecue. Camembert, baked ready for little roast potatoes and wedges of apple to be dunked in. Red Fox and spring onion mash. Cauliflower cheese. Blankets of Parmesan grated onto pasta. Brie on a sliced baguette or a Hovis cracker with globs of chutney or homemade cranberry sauce.
Cheese and pineapple on a stick is my desert island food, something I would never never never get bored of. I could eat them forever.
So one of the most affronting and baffling things, to my mind, is cheese that has had all flavour industrially removed from it. Those sad packs of pre-sliced mild Cheddar or the pre-grated stuff in damp pillowy bags. Worst of all is the processed cheese slice, of which it is often said that there’d be more point in eating the plastic and throwing away the livid Donald Trump-coloured square of waxy awfulness inside. These are cheeses which should not even be allowed to call themselves such a thing, which have forfeited all right to the nobility of that name through a wilful and deliberate aim to be bland, a renunciation of strong tastes or smells, a betrayal of the pleasure in cheese’s very cheese-ness.
But the blandness is these products’ very point, for this is cheese crafted (pun only slightly intended) with the express purpose of appealing to — and therefore, being purchased by — as many people as possible. To do that, this kind of cheese has had all character, all personality, all distinguishing qualities, all individuating difference engineered out of it. Its identity has been manufactured to leave no identity and therefore to make it relevant to everyone.
Oh, how I loathe that word — relevant! — and the noun that accompanies it — relevance!
I encounter them both a lot in the cultural sector, and they give me the ick, not least because their current application represents a sinister politicisation of a term which long ago stood for something so positive. The words’ origins, in Latin and French, revolve around notions of lifting up, lightening, removing burden, comforting, consoling. It’s only after around 1500 (but I don’t know why) that a different inflection crept in — “related, connected or pertinent to a particular topic”. I can see the logic of the shift, sort of — there’s something to be said about the comfort and consolation that comes from removing burdens, from making life simple by taking extraneous things out of the equation.
But there’s a subtle tipping point, where so much gets stripped away in order to enable an individual to focus on their own experience that the individual ends up excluding, rejecting, shutting out anything that does not resonate with them — with who they perceive themselves to be, or, perhaps more accurately, how they would like other people to perceive them. It gets even worse when someone else decides what is relevant for them, and so exercises a discreet (or not so discreet) control over what funnels down the pipeline in the first place.
Nowadays, the relevance of something is measured by its importance or significance to a particular situation or, more often, a particular person. If something is deemed irrelevant, it will usually be summarily dismissed. And we’re not just talking about books or films or art in general now. We could easily be talking about the experience of people in other countries, other cities. We could just as easily be talking about what goes on with our neighbours on the other side of the wall. But anyway, I digress.
“Relevance” in culture sector terms is a codified way of packaging things by defining their target audience in outrageously reductive terms. The urge to simplify has veered into becoming dangerously simplistic. There’s a major overlap with the language of identity politics — potential audiences are routinely segmented according to brutally diminishing criteria, often rooted in protected characteristics.
The logic goes that all people who share one characteristic (being gay, let’s say, to use an example no one can tell me I’m unqualified to use) will automatically find something relevant if it connects with gayness in some way. The logic further assumes that those people will therefore be more likely to “engage” with that thing as a result. And by “engage”, we really mean two behaviours that the still deeply conservative (big C and little c) values of our culture sector prize very highly: spending money, and contributing to data gathering. If someone manages to do BOTH, then they’ve really hit the jackpot.
It’s of no real consequence that this logic is so obviously, so manifestly flawed. Does every gay person automatically like the same things? Of course not. The same could be said of every working class person, every person with a disability, every person of East Asian heritage, and so on, and so forth. But the system persists in believing this logic to be true, or at least in upholding the fiction of that truth. So, money and opportunity find their way most readily to the makers of “relevant” things, and so other makers start making more “relevant” things in order to try and compete for that money and opportunity more successfully.
The outcome of this? A lot of the time, all the machine churns out is the cultural equivalent of plastic cheese, masquerading as a counter laden with every kind of regional and international specialist cheese you could imagine. It might give off the appearance of rich variety, of a buffet of flavours and a bouquet of scents — but take even a little nibble, and you’ll soon find there’s really nothing to get your teeth into.
So what should our response as makers be? I think it’s fairly straightforward. Keep producing your own distinctive artisan cheeses, and trust that there are still people out there with an appetite for something with real flavour. We can’t control what kind of cheese other people make, or what other people consume, or what those who run the market will pay for. But unless someone keeps producing something tangy, punchy, salty, and occasionally, even a little bit blue, then the only option available to anyone will be those tacky slices of presidential orange rubbish.
That’s a diet I wouldn’t wish on anyone.
