American Cheese by Joe Berkowitz

Author:Joe Berkowitz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Published: 2020-08-17T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

The Succulent Funhouse

SOUTH BY SOUTHWEST IN AUSTIN, TEXAS, IS THE URGENT CONVERGENCE of absolutely everything. There’s a film festival, a music exhibition, a thunderdome of interactive brand activations, and a lollapalooza of TED Talks. For ten synergistic days a year, Austin becomes the only place in the world where you might find Jordan Peele, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Billie Eilish, and the CEO of a lifestyle coworking space that offers gamified cardio, all in the same pop-up interview junket/cantina. Attention is the coin of the realm here, and you have no idea how much you have to give until you find yourself in a seller’s market, the subject of an oversaturated bidding war. Whatever project anyone is boldly launching this year, you, lucky you, can be among the first to experience it, possibly in the form of an Experience, which is when paid actors help you perform a real-time commercial, perhaps inside of a steampunk labyrinth constructed by Amazon Studios to promote its new limited series. The air is thick with ideas, desperation, and barbecue. Everywhere you turn, someone has taken great pains to place something in front of you, something to look at, something to feel, something so immersive you forget where you are but not so immersive that you forget to bleat about it on social media, where the attention you’re paying might multiply exponentially. By day, the streets are clogged with fleets of lanyard-wearing creatives on Lyft-branded scooters and electric JUMP bicycles from Uber (free to unlock; then fifteen cents per minute), which they leave on street corners in spontaneous scrap heaps. At night, it’s Diet Mardi Gras, with rogue musicians and street teams warbling and flyering, respectively, the same lanyard-wearing creatives, now medium-drunk, hightailing it to an Entertainment Weekly party where an augmented reality app sponsored by Tinder can make the reunited pop-punk band onstage appear to be whichever age you’d prefer them. It’s a chance to lose yourself and find the next big thing and the thing after that while getting thinkfluenced by global professionals.

All of this feels deeply antithetical to cheese, a food that’s been on-trend for centuries. However, to ignore that cheese is now competing for your attention in the same brave new world that spawned South by Southwest would be as naïve as purchasing gas station boner pills—and probably just as effective. Since whatever artisan cheesemakers have been doing to get their names out there had been eluding me all these years, I wanted to find out more about just what it is they do to market themselves.

Cheese has relied on the dark arts of marketing ever since it spread far enough around the world that some towns began to have more than one cheesemaker. In seventeenth-century England, for instance, a savvy producer started using annatto, the seeds of a Brazilian tree, to give their Leicester cheese an electric orange hue that made it stand out on a crowded shelf. Modern cheese, though, needs bolder ideas than a Crayola makeover to break through the clutter.

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