BIG CHEESE.(The Talk of the Town)

While touring Wisconsin last month, George W. Bush made an unscheduled stop at the Cady Cheese Factory, in Wilson, which turns out torpedoes of Colby and pepper Jack for machine-slicing at the deli counter. The candidate's swing-state snack made Fox News, and the Times ran a wire photo showing Bush holding a platter of curds surrounded by half a dozen locals in hairnets.

"I'm sure it was bad cheese," Jonathan White said the other day, at Bobolink Dairy, the two-hundred-acre farm on the New York-New Jersey border that he runs with his wife, Nina. The Whites are artisanal cheesemakers who believe that cows should live outside and eat grass. "We don't buy them food, we don't buy them medicine," White said.

White, who is forty-eight and wears a beard, gets a twitch in his right cheek when he becomes agitated about the "microbiological destiny" of milk or the No Child Left Behind Act. "We felt that we had a big stake in the upcoming election," he said. "But we're not in a position to donate a lot of money. Then a light bulb flashed, and I remembered about Annie Proulx."

Most fans of "The Shipping News" have not read "The Complete Dairy Foods Cookbook." But it was this 1982 work, co-written by Proulx, that taught White about Thomas Jefferson's inaugural cheese. On a July morning in 1801, the citizens of Cheshire, Massachusetts, pooled their cows' milk in the town's cider press, producing a four-foot-wide, 1,235-pound wheel of cheese celebrating the Federalist defeat. That winter, as the cheese made a three-week journey by sleigh to the capital, crowds turned out to see it. The White House served the mammoth cheese, as it came to be known, on New Year's Day, and for the next couple of years.

It wasn't the last time a big cheese entered the White House. In 1835, a farmer in Oswego County, New York, honored Andrew Jackson with a fourteen-hundred-pound Cheddar. It sat, aging, in the White House lobby for two years before Jackson scheduled a levee, or public reception, on Washington's birthday. Guests polished off the cheese in two hours. Friends of Jackson's successor, Martin Van Buren, hoped to make mammoth cheeses an annual tradition, but ...