Why centrist dads love fancy cheese The real robbery happened long ago

For the cheesemakers themselves, the meaning of cheese seems to be social as well as gastronomic and economic. One of the affected cheesemakers lamented the way the robbery represented a “violation of the atmosphere of good faith and respect that all of Neal’s Yard Dairy’s trading relationships have personified over the years”. Artisan cheesemaking, he said, is “a world where one’s word is one’s bond”. But considered end-to-end, it’s also true that such high social trust and lovingly craft-oriented communities as artisan cheesemakers rely, for their existence, on wealth that’s often generated by parasitising on exactly that kind of trust.

It’s not a coincidence that Neal’s Yard Dairy is in Covent Garden, the high-gloss, brand-heavy cultural epicentre of the great London economic centrifuge. London is more or less the only economic bright spot in a Britain that would, if you subtracted the capital, have a per capita income on a par with Mississippi, America’s poorest state. The capital makes the lion’s share of its money in services, especially finance, IT, management consultancy, and related professional services. It is also, according to Oliver Bullough, epicentre of our national transformation into the world’s obsequious butler and financial facilitator, in which capacity it offers a large and shady ecosystem dedicated to laundering credibility, assets, property, and dodgy money for the world’s criminals, oligarchs, and tyrants.

The sparkle on the surface of this cut-throat, financialised, and often deeply dodgy economy is the many appealing, appetising, and delicious products available for sale in its retail shops. Such products, especially the gastronomic ones, often place special emphasis on provenance and other intangible values. Meanwhile, the entrepreneurs with the mix of aesthetic, moral and commercial vision required to bring such products to the lucrative London market are often drawn from a distinctive subset of the creative class: one characterised by social researcher Louis Elton as  “Bopea” or “bohemian peasant”.

Bopeas have opted to leave London’s dog-eat-dog existence in favour of more “authentic” and usually rural lifestyles, characterised by artisan craftsmanship and a turn away from consumerism. Though the Bopeas had forerunners in the hippy generation and Good Life smallholding efforts, it’s a sensibility that began snowballing in earnest with the Britpopper generation.

Small wonder, then, that artisan cheese is Britpopper-coded. For self-consciously attending to the provenance of one’s consumer goods first became fashionable in the Cool Britannia era, in part as a byproduct of the economic changes this brought. It’s clear that we began collectively attending to the provenance and meaningfulness of our consumer products at the very moment Britain’s economy began its long slide toward the contemporary basket-case model of high finance, rentier capitalism and human quantitative easing. Accordingly, the 2000s boom years brought an efflorescence of organic veg boxes, hand-made homewares, Jamie Oliver of course, and – bringing the whole shebang together – the transmutation of Blur’s bassist Alex James into an artisan cheesemaker and (latterly) creator of a sparkling wine called (what else) Britpop.

Oliver himself is one of the most well-known individuals to have turned this kitchen-table sensibility into a commercial sensation. No wonder, then, that he was first off the blocks condemning the heist, in terms seemingly custom-tuned to the leaden humour of those centrist dads who did well under Blair, and are now approaching retirement with cash to spare for Neal’s Yard cheese: Oliver’s warning to his fans about the robbery cautioned them against taking up under-the-counter cheese deals that seemed “too gouda to be true”.

Nor is Oliver the only such Bopea success. The fashion brand Toast, for example, was started out of a Welsh farmhouse in 1997 by two pioneer Bopeas, emphasising natural fibres and small-scale artisan production. The clothes themselves (full disclosure: I’m a fan) are pricey, and — we might say — pair well with Neal’s Yard cheese. And the brand’s success in turn reveals the bigger paradox: the website celebrates craftsmanship, “slow” production and a “circle” ethos, and there are free repairs and clothes-swapping services. Meanwhile, though, 75% of the company’s shares are now owned by Bestseller, a conglomerate that also owns Vero Moda, a “fast fashion” brand whose ethos is, to say the least, the antithesis of the Toast sensibility.

None of this is a criticism of Toast per se, or any other Bopea lifestyle brand. Nor is it to be the gotcha guy in the Matt Bors webcomic, insisting you can’t critique the social order while also participating in it. It’s simply to observe that the ostentatious accretion of “ethical” credentials for real-world products tends, in Britain’s postmodern economy, to be offset by the strip-mining of those values for profit in other domains.

Everyone is familiar with the experience of returning to a familiar, trusted brand — say, a high-street pizza chain — only to discover that what used to be a great middle-class product has become rushed, overpriced, and shoddy. The usual culprit is private equity: predatory firms that will acquire a brand, cut costs ruthlessly, usually to the detriment of whatever made the products popular in the first place, and then sell the hollowed-out shell on a few years later having trousered the difference. High-end brands are often better placed to survive this phenomenon; trusted mid-tier ones are regular prey for this kind of looting. And the aggregate effect is a thinning of the middle ground, between high-end brands for the wealthy and shonky ones for everyone else.

For every Toast, there’s a Vero Moda; the cheese equivalent is hand-made small-batch Britpop cheese on the one hand, and on the other the Plasticine bricks you get in your local Londis. Those scouring the mid-range for reliable quality, meanwhile, find the field increasingly bare.

Does it matter? Well, everyone still gets cheese, of one kind or another. But what grates is the hoarding and artful aestheticisation of “meaning” itself as a consumer product. If we take “meaning” as a crude shorthand for a nexus of goodwill, effort, commitment, and interpersonal relationship that adds up to basic good-quality products and services at a reasonable price, in effect this productisation of “meaning” and “authenticity” as consumer goods comes at the cost of its draining away from the rest of the world. The real cheese robbery already happened, some way upstream of the scam that defrauded Neal’s Yard last week.

But again, perhaps this is all just revealed preference. Britain’s food chain industrialised a long time ago, and while commentators may lament the loss of localism and meaning and so on, if more of us really wanted to be involved in that kind of production we’d already be doing so. In the meantime, I’m glad someone is hand-milking rare breed herds and doing regenerative farming and organic batik and all the rest of it. The world is surely a friendlier and more interesting place for all the Bopeas doing cheese deals on trust; maybe the best we can hope for is their continued patronage by the meaning-hungry private equity class.

So perhaps the meaning of artisan cheese is simply that it exists at all, as a flavourful monument to Britain’s refusal to give in to nihilism. However ambivalent the larger economy that enables it, what it stands for is little slivers of meaning: those aspects of life that people actually care about. Qualities such as belonging, craftsmanship, skill, tradition, and trusting relationships may all have been transmuted into products, to be sold in slices or stolen by the truckle. But we don’t really need to know what the cheese means, to know it matters.

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Mary Harrington is a contributing editor at UnHerd.

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