Book Log 2010 #50: Cheesemonger by Gordon Edgar

When the focus of this book is on cheese or on the store where the author works, it's prety good. It gives a good sense of how he got his cheese education, and how he matured into someone whose passion for the product is tempered by the needs of running a department in a larger store. It's also a good look into a worker-owned grocery store in an urban environment (San Francisco), which is something most people never really experience, either as a worker or as a shopper.

I think the book works less well when it gets political, as the author frequently references his younger days when he was into punk music and activism. It's not that these topics have no place in the book, as those experiences led him to want to work in his particular store, and his personality clearly colors his experiences with cheese (from consumer to buyer to seller). It's just that there are some places where the political talk dominates, and even though it's attempted to tie it in using a cheese metaphor (there's one chapter where he compares his activist work to rennet, a coagulant that helps separate out curds from whey) it doesn't work for me.

There are also cheese recommendations at the end of every chapter, either cheeses discussed in the chapter or ones that are related to the subject matter, which is a nice bonus.

Overall, it's sufficiently different from other food books to be worth a look.