News & Events
Artisanal and farmhouse cheese through history and culture
We are very pleased to invite you to a very special seminar at UCC, to celebrate and discuss the culture and history of farmhouse and artisanal cheeses in Ireland and beyond. We will have a number of short talks by Regina Sexton, Ned Palmer, Siobhán Ní Gháirbhith, and Professor Harry West, followed by a panel discussion on challenges and opportunities facing the sector today and a reception, featuring cheese sampling. This event is being held in partnership with Cáis, the Irish farmhouse cheese-makers association.
Counter Culture
Ned Palmer
In America, the UK and Ireland, countries that had seen a particularly thorough decimation of traditional cheesemaking, the 1970s saw a resurgence of interest in artisan and farmhouse cheese often referred to as the Cheese Renaissance. This movement had roots in the counter-culture of the 1960s and in earlier manifestations in the 1930s, the nineteenth century and even as far back as the seventeenth. Sometimes these political movements were somewhat unsettling - there was a connection, in Britain at least, between the nascent ecological movement of the 1930s, the valorisation of raw milk and the British fascist movement, though thankfully tenuous and short-lived. Ned will explore these influences on the Renaissance and ask how the connection between counter-culture and traditional cheesemaking may speak to current concerns about the effect of dairy farming on the climate and biodiversity crises.
Can Terroir Travel?
Prof Harry West
Artisan producers have long used the idea of terroir to challenge the globalisation and standardisation of foods and foodways. In response to the notion that anything can be made anywhere by anyone, the terroir concept suggests that some things express the natural and social environments in which they are made, and that for such things to be made properly, they must be produced by particular people in specific places. But is there room within such celebrations of distinctiveness for historical change and for the movement of people and their productive traditions? In this talk, Harry will share examples from elsewhere that complicate the idea of terroir, and ask what the history of cheesemaking in Ireland—and its artisan landscape today—have to contribute to this conversation.
Some lesser-known histories of cheese in Ireland: elite practice and local pockets of production in eighteenth and early nineteenth-centuries Ireland.
Regina Sexton
Narratives of cheese in Irish history tend to focus on a ‘glory’ period of production in early and late medieval Ireland before the ‘disappearance’ of practice in the early modern period. More recent developments in small-scale cheese production are often perceived as the ‘re-emergence’ and ‘renaissance’ of lost traditions. Simplistic and sketchy, this ‘pick-and-mix’ representation of cheese history distracts from the more layered and complicated life of cheese in Ireland through time and especially through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This presentation will detail some lesser-known histories of cheese in this period and in doing so, it will elucidate aspects of colonisation, commerce, and collective identities.
Staying true to one’s ideals in a fast-changing world.
Siobhán Ní Gháirbhith
Over the last 24 years since the creation of the range of St. Tola cheeses much has changed in our local national and international environment. This presentation will consider a number of issues: challenges to stay viable, up-to-date and feel relevant in this fast-moving world within a small artisanal community, while at the same time, staying connected with fellow artisan producers and like-minded people as key to succeeding and thriving.
This seminar will be held as follows:
Friday 10th November, 6.30 p.m., Block A Level 1, Food Science Building, UCC
Anyone who wishes to attend is asked to RSVP at the following link:
RSVP for A celebration of artisanal and farmhouse cheese through history and culture event
Speaker profiles
Ned Palmer is the author of A Cheesemonger’s History of the British Isles published in 2019. His second book A Cheesemonger’s Compendium of British and Irish Cheese came out in 2021, and he is now working on a third – A Cheesemonger’s Tour of France. His interests focus mainly around the historical and contemporary culture of cheesemaking. Ned’s cheese career began at Borough Market in December 2000 when he ate a piece of Trethowan’s Gorwydd Caerphilly. He joined Neal’s Yard Dairy in 2002 and worked behind the counter, in the cellars looking after cheese and travelling around the UK visiting cheesemakers. In 2014 Ned made a career shift to hosting cheese tastings, through his company The Cheese Tasting Co. When he is not talking or writing about cheese he still travels around the UK and Europe visiting farms and trying new cheeses. There are no plans for a career change.
Harry G. West is a socio-cultural anthropologist with expertise in agrarian history and political economy, and food and cultural heritage. He began his research career in northern Mozambique during the civil war, studying how the conflict, and the earlier war for independence, reconfigured rural social institutions. Books arising from this work include Kupilikula: Governance and the Invisible Realm in Mozambique (2005), and Ethnographic Sorcery (2007), both published by the University of Chicago Press. Over the past twenty years, his research has explored artisan cheesemaking and the cultural economy, with a focus on how cheesemakers have embraced and transformed the idea of terroir, as well as how they have adopted innovative methods while reproducing cheesemaking traditions in changing historical contexts. He has published this work in numerous journal articles and book chapters, as well as in a volume co-edited with Nuno Domingos and José Manuel Sobral entitled Food Between the Country and the City: Ethnographies of a Changing Global Foodscape (Bloomsbury, 2014).
Regina Sexton is a food and culinary historian, food writer, broadcaster and cook. She lectures at University College Cork where she is the Programme Manager of the MA in Food Studies and Irish Foodways. She has published widely at academic and popular levels. Her interest in cheese in Irish history began with her postgraduate research work in food in early medieval Ireland, and this interest endures as she views cheese, its history, historiography, and its place in folklife as a very accessible means of exploring both the grand and the little narratives of people and their relationship with food.
Siobhán Ní Gháirbhith is Director of Sales and Marketing at St Tola Farmhouse Cheese. A former schoolteacher, she took over St Tola after the original owners were selling in 1999. Siobhan is the former Chairperson of Cáis, she is a member of Slow Food Ireland and a member of the Taste Council. She is a fervent believer in organic farming practises, a fluent Irish speaker and a passionate advocate of Irish food, culture and music.