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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
If it's all the same to you, Mother Noella Marcellino would rather you didn't call her the cheese nun. It's true that she makes cheese--a New England variation on the unctuous Saint-Nectaire of Auvergne. And, yes, she lives in a Benedictine cloister, the Abbey of Regina Laudis, in Bethlehem, Connecticut. Were you to point out that she just finished filming a documentary in France called "The Cheese Nun," you would not be incorrect. Yet when Noella thinks of herself, which seems to happen only rarely, she does so in terms both more scientific and more spiritual: as an authority on cheese molds, or as a singer of gospel and Gregorian chant. One of her best friends was a blues musician, but that can give rise to its own misconceptions. She was a little miffed, a few years ago, when a French newspaper ran a story headlined "SHE DOES RESEARCH BY DAY AND SINGS BLUES IN THE CHURCHES OF THE JURA BY NIGHT."
Mother Noella has spent twenty-nine of her fifty-one years in the abbey. Although she has occasionally been given permission to travel, she must spend all other nights and many hours of daily prayer behind the wooden scrims and walls of the cloister. In 1985, she took her final vows to remain at Regina Laudis for the rest of her life, earning the title of Mother. Yet her secular interests have only widened and deepened over the years. This winter she is completing a Ph.D. in microbiology, even as she helps shepherd the country through a culture war of an unusual sort: a war of cheese.
The United States has long produced more cheese than any other country: eight and a half billion pounds in 2001 alone, enough to stuff the Sears Tower, like an enormous celery stick, four times over. But for nearly a century that tower of curd has been a purely industrial product--formulated, manufactured, extruded, and dispensed with the kind of machinery usually reserved for making plastic. Only in the past fifteen years has a generation of former lawyers and first-time farmers, dot-com dropouts and back-to-the-landers begun to develop true artisanal cheeses. "American cheesemaking is where winemaking was in the late nineteen-seventies," the food writer Clark Wolf says. "Every time you taste something new, you're shocked at how much better it is." Cheesemakers like Willow Smart, in Milton, Vermont, are creating their own rural traditions--Smart treats her sheep homeopathically and uses llamas to protect them from coyotes--and rivalling Europeans for the first time. Outside Louisville, Kentucky, Judy Schad, of Capriole Farms, makes some of the finest goat cheeses in the world. "The French have seven hundred years of experience, they've got experimental cheese stations, and their milk supply is subsidized," Schad says. "But my Mont St. Francis can kick a French Muenster all the way across the Atlantic."
One essential ingredient in this success is easy to isolate: the raw milk in many artisanal cheeses, unlike the pasteurized milk used by Kraft or Borden, is alive with billions of bacteria. These cultures transform the cheese as it ages, breaking down fats and proteins and giving off esters and other compounds that are the building blocks of flavor and aroma. Of course, bacteria can have less salubrious effects, too: well into the last century, raw milk was a prime breeding ground for tuberculosis and typhoid. Consequently, the Food and Drug Administration has required that all store-bought milk be pasteurized (heated to a hundred and forty-five degrees for thirty minutes, or to a hundred and sixty-one degrees for fifteen seconds), and, since 1947, that all raw-milk cheeses be aged for at least sixty days. The assumption has been that pathogens can't survive in the dry, acid environment of an aged cheese. But six years ago a small study in South Dakota found that Escherichia coli could survive the sixty-day limit in Cheddar, and the F.D.A. took part in a study to verify the results. Raw-milk cheese, the study warned, might have to be aged for more than sixty days to be safe--if it can be made safely at all.
The news was even more upsetting to Europeans than it was to Americans. Unaged raw-milk cheese is considered a birthright in France and Italy, yet even before the F.D.A.'s research was complete the United States began pushing for an international ban on raw-milk cheese. Cheesemakers responded by circulating petitions and forming advocacy groups, including a European raw-milk alliance and the International Coalition to Preserve the Right to Choose Your Cheese (now called the Cheese of Choice Coalition). They argued that raw milk is often healthier than pasteurized milk, and that cheese-borne illnesses are extremely rare. But it was hard to sway regulators with talk of tradition and "good bacteria." What was needed was an ally of impeccable character and scientific standing, someone to whom cheesemakers could bring their microbial troubles and ask for guidance. What was needed was a cheese nun.
On a gusty morning in April, Mother Noella strode across the University of Connecticut campus at Storrs, her habit flapping and billowing behind her, her gait both stiff-backed and rollicking. Beneath her white wimple, her plump cheeks were flushed and she peered out with a kind of cockeyed...
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