Cheese panel review

I try to hide it but my close friends know… speaking in public freaks me out. At this
Commonwealth Club event I spoke at on Monday, there were not very many friendly faces in the room. There were a few cheese professionals scattered about, and one or two folks who looked like customers, but mostly I was about to speak to a room of strangers who paid admission. Not only that, I was going to speak about raw milk cheese on a panel with a biochemist and a dairy scientist. I’m here to tell you folks, a million years ago when I was in school; science was not my best subject.

I have learned the hard way that showing that fear does not make audiences sympathetic. In fact it makes them uneasy and unresponsive. So I fake it and drink a lot of water.

I made the audience laugh by talking about my rudimentary science skills. I talked about how many raw milk cheese illnesses are a matter of cheese manufacturing, not raw milk per se*. I mentioned that we really didn’t want to kill anyone, but that food has its risks. Look, Canyonofcheese.com wrote it up so I don’t have to

All in all it was a good event and we’ve already been asked to do another one.

Better than speaking in public, after the event a few of us went out to Incanto for dinner and drinks. Evidently the chef is kinda famous. I really should get cable TV one of these days so I can know these things. Because I was with a well-regarded cheesemaker and a cheese distributor who sold to the restaurant we got the “trade” treatment. I love the “trade” treatment. I never get it from working at Rainbow but I do get it from cheese events sometimes.

The food was pretty awesome and I tried my first plate of trotters. Poor little tasty piggies.

Since the chef had hung out with our table (let me reiterate, not because of me) for a while, when the waitress came back she asked if we were “trade”. Someone responded that we were cheese people. The waitress said, “I love cheese. I just got some great Petit Basque from Rainbow.”

Awesome. Cheese for the people. That’s us. The chef wouldn’t recognize me from anyone, but the staff buys their cheese at our store. I couldn’t sum up our goals any better.




*The biggest case of listeriosis from cheese in recent history was in the mid ‘80s in LA with about 150 people documented to be ill, including a number of miscarriages. Raw milk was the culprit but the cheese had been sold as pasteurized. Either through improper pasteurization or greed, raw milk was mixed with pasteurized milk, causing the listeria in the milk to spread like Vacherin Mont D’or on a hot summer day. Before you ask, this was not “bathtub cheese” but cheese from what was thought to be a reputable factory producer of cheese sold in many Los Angeles stores.

LJ advisory board

For what it's worth, I'll be voting jette.

She's an awesome person on LJ and irl. She's raised children so she can deal with anything the LJ community can throw at her. She lives close enough to the Russian part of SF that she will know how to deal with LJ's owners. And the very first time I met her she came bearing mixed drinks!

Seriously though, she wants to be on the advisory board and she wants to do what she can. I think jette understands the positive things that online communities can do. She's been on LJ longer than me and I trust her to do as good a job as anyone possibly can on that stacked deck of a group she's running for.

Voting is here