The Encyclopedia of Cheese

The first time Jeffrey Roberts ’68 went to the Montpelier, Vt., farmers market, he asked a woman working at a cheese stand who had made her wares.

“I did. What’s it to you?” she said.

Quite a lot, as it happens. Roberts is author of The Atlas of American Artisan Cheese (Chelsea Greenwood, 2007), an illustrated reference that highlights 345 United States cheese makers. In her review, New York Times food writer Marian Burros calls Roberts “a walking encyclopedia of American cheeses.”

“Cheese making is a bellwether for what has changed in American agriculture,” Roberts says. The creameries that fill his book are mostly small, family-owned enterprises. In 2000, almost half of them did not exist. He attributes their arrival to a “food revolution.”

How Americans eat is changing, Roberts says. There’s a growing demand for organic food, a greater interest in how food is produced and how animals are treated, and a heightened curiosity about different tastes and ethnic foods that he credits to increased travel and more disposable income.

“Very cheap food costs in other ways—in environmental effects and in the lives of people producing it,” Roberts says, adding that consumers are increasingly attuned to those trade-offs.

In what he cites as a significant marker of change, college students are demanding more sustainable food.

“Colleges and universities are advertising what you can get on their campuses to eat. That’s amazing,” he laughs, recalling the pallid institutional dining that used to prevail at American schools.

Roberts, a cofounder and principal consultant to the Vermont Institute for Artisan Cheese at the University of Vermont, is also involved in Slow Food USA, a nonprofit organization that addresses how food choices affect the world. He found his way to issues of food and sustainable agriculture along what he calls “an interesting path, none of which was really planned.”

After earning a bachelor’s degree in English and history at Rochester, Roberts went to Temple University in Philadelphia for graduate work in history. But history itself intervened: Roberts received a draft notice for the Vietnam War. He joined the Navy as a meteorologist, then returned to graduate school in 1972 to study the history and geography of Philadelphia’s downtown.

“It was my first introduction to how people saw and used land,” he says.

Roberts became a curator and historian at the Atwater Kent Museum in Philadelphia and later, a fundraiser for the University of Pennsylvania. He moved to Vermont in the mid-1990s to serve as vice president of external affairs for the Vermont Land Trust.

Land trusts work to ensure that open spaces stay open, and in his work there Roberts found continuity with his earlier efforts to raise funds in support of Penn’s arboretum and veterinary schools. “Food in Vermont was a way for me, again, to teach about place,” he says.

Roberts’s book is grounded in that idea of place. It’s organized according to region and state—Burros recommends using it as a travel guide the way people do with books about wineries—and he includes contact information for the creameries to make it easy for wholesalers, retailers, and ordinary readers to place orders.

“There are many reasons to be optimistic” about moves toward sustainable agriculture and support for small-scale producers, “but this doesn’t mean this is going to be turned around tomorrow,” Roberts says. He also takes a tempered view of the changes most consumers can and will make.

“It’s never going to be the case that we just eat local foods,” he says. “That’s just not realistic for most people. There are gradations of what it means to ‘eat local.’ ”

But Roberts is impressed by what he sees on offer.

“In my opinion, American artisan cheese can stand on the same stage as most European cheeses, although it’s still a young project in America and American cheese makers are constantly exploring.”

So is Roberts.

“Food is a way to understand culture, history, geography, meteorology, economics, and emotional and psychological preferences,” he says. “And those are powerful.”

—Kathleen McGarvey