Meet Alexandra Jones, Author of Stuff Every Cheese Lover Should Know

Alexandra Jones photo courtesy of Alexandra Jones

Editor’s note: Alexandra Jones is a frequent contributor to The Cheese Professor. We got a sneak peek at her first book (available October 6, 2020) Stuff Every Cheese Lover Should Know. It’s the perfect pocket guide to cheese. In 144 pages it covers so many things—cheese geography, a cheese timeline, discussions of many kinds of cheese, a cheese glossary, how cheese is made, how to build a cheeseboard, how to use leftover cheese and so much more. Purchase a signed copy directly from Alexandra Jones.

What’s the story behind your first book, Stuff Every Cheese Lover Should Know? 

Quirk Books, a really fun and unique Philly-based imprint, reached out to me about contributing to their Stuff You Should Know series late last summer. The production schedule was tight, but as it’s meant to be an accessible, pocket-sized project, I was able to make it work. It was a really nice first book project in that way—I got to learn a lot about the process while working with a relatively limited scope. 

 At the same time, I was able to introduce the cheese-loving reader to the world of cultured dairy through my own perspective—one that prioritizes traditional practices, small-scale producers, and a passion for cheese that spans the spectrum of price, provenance, and accessibility, whether we’re talking Cheeto dust or wrinkle-rinded French crottins. 

Cheese discourse in the US can so often feel like insiders, be they marketers, makers, or writers, are always hand-holding and talking down to consumers about this mysterious, esoteric, Eurocentric food that we have to trick them into buying. I wanted to get beyond that so the world of cheese wouldn’t be so opaque to readers—so they’d feel educated and empowered to choose a great cheese for them, anywhere they shop. I knew the kinds of questions they have thanks to years behind cheese cases and farmers’ market stands and in front of attendees at classes and tastings. 

What’s your first memory of cheese? 

Aside from the blocks of bright-orange supermarket sharp cheddar we ate at home, my earliest cheese memories come from spending winter holidays with my mom’s family in Quebec. They’re in a very rural area between Montreal and the US border, and a Fritz Kaiser, a Swiss cheesemaker, set up a factory there. Everyone in the area, Francophone and Anglophone, buys kilos of their cheeses. So eating their bloomy rinds on Christmas cheese plates and oozy, melty raclette with my family on New Year’s Eve are my earliest cheese memories. 

 How did you get interested in cheese? 

I graduated college with a degree in tuba performance, so it was only natural that shortly thereafter, I found myself working at a grocery store—Trader Joe’s in Philadelphia, to be exact. During my time there, I realized I was really into cheese, and I was put in charge of ordering, merchandising, and setting up demos for their cheese section. 

I left that job after a few years to manage an aggregated CSA program at an urban farm, which included not only fruits and veggies from regional farms but items like eggs, yogurt, and cheese, too. Through expanding the cheese selection beyond basic Amish block cheddar, I connected with a lot of artisan cheesemakers in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. 

Later, I’d work as the product manager for the Fair Food Farmstand, which was an all-local grocer in Philly’s historic Reading Terminal Market. I really miss our cheese case, which was one-of-a-kind—we had more than 50 cheeses from something like 35 producers in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, all in one place. There’s nothing quite like it today. 

Who are your cheese heroes (cheesemakers, mongers, writers, etc)? 

Sue Miller of Birchrun Hills Farm and Stefanie Angstadt of Valley Milkhouse Creamery are two of my cheese icons (and two good friends with whom I run Collective Creamery, an artisan cheese subscription in our area). I’ve learned so much from both of them and they’ve been so supportive of me first as a young cheese buyer and then as a collaborator and cheese educator. Rynn Caputo of Caputo Brothers Creamery—amazing mozzarella makers in Central PA—is an absolute dynamo. Honestly, any small-scale cheesemaker using sustainable practices and traditional methods in the US is a hero to me. They work so, so hard in a market that’s designed for commodity cheeses and big industrial farms, especially those of them that are farmstead.

As for non-cheesemaker cheese heroes, Madame Fromage is another trailblazer who I’ve learned a ton from over the past 10 years—she’s another amazing advocate for local and domestic makers in Philly. Carlos Yescas of Oldways Cheese Coalition also does great work promoting traditional foodways and raw milk cheeses. And I’ve never met Agela Abdullah, who’s a Chicago-based cheese buyer, but her American Cheese Society Fireside Chat about the experiences of BIPOC cheese professionals back in June (Part 1 and Part 2) was such an important moment of advocacy and education in an incredibly white industry that’s rife with exclusions, discrimination, and microaggressions towards Black and Brown people. I’ve been working in cheese for 12 years and never heard these issues talked about on this scale. Anyone working in the cheese industry should watch it. 

Like so many writers, you seem to wear many hats, what keeps you busy these days? 

I feel really lucky that I’ve been busy during the pandemic after going full-time freelance last year, around the time that I started working on the book. In addition to freelance reporting about food, farming, and restaurants, I handle operations—basically anything that isn’t making or moving cheese—for Collective Creamery, and I’m working on a grant-funded PA Cheese Month project for the Pennsylvania Cheese Guild (now slated to debut in October 2021 because of the pandemic). I also do content strategy for small farms and food businesses—holler at me if you need some email marketing, website content, or copywriting for your promotional materials or packaging, folks!

What are some of your favorite cheese destinations in the US and abroad? 

Vermont is my happy place. I grew up coming here with my Quebec family, and my husband has family there, so we’re lucky that we get to come up here and be in this beautiful stronghold for cheese and dairy and agriculture. And of course, the area around Philly is Pennsylvania’s cheese headquarters—there are some great creameries to visit or seek out in Berks and Chester Counties. Honestly, anywhere I visit in the US, I try to find a farmers’ market or food co-op that sells local cheese from the nearest farm to get some cheesy souvenirs. 

Once we get out of lockdown, what’s your dream cheese trip? 

Aside from Canada, I’ve never been anywhere outside the US, so the list is long! If it’s possible, Slow Food’s Cheese in Bra, Italy in 2021 would be an amazing trip. I’d love to do a cheese tour of Mexico—even just the chance to go to Lactography, Carlos’s shop in Mexico City, to taste traditional cheeses made there that we can’t get in the States. Or a British Isles cheese tour.

But probably at the top of my list would be a cheese tour of Eastern Europe and the Balkans. I have Polish and Lithuanian ancestry that I’d like to explore, plus it feels like that part of Europe is really inaccessible in terms of cheeses to us here in the US.

How will the cheese world look when we come out of this pandemic, any predictions? 

I wrote about this for The Counter in the first few weeks of restaurant shutdowns across the country, and at the time, the outlook was very bleak, very uncertain. And what I’ve heard talking to cheesemakers since then has really varied. 

Those that were dependent on chefs and restaurants for the bulk of their orders lost almost all of their business overnight, and pivoting to retail, when possible, involved so much more labor—cutting and wrapping all those little pieces of cheese and selling them one by one instead of shipping off whole wheels every week really takes a toll. The folks I know here in Pennsylvania have been surprised by how strong demand at their farmers’ markets, farmstands, and new online stores have been—in fact, Collective Creamery had 120 members during our summer season, almost a 50% increase over last winter. 

But other cheesemakers have struggled, especially some of those in more rural or lower-population areas like Vermont, who were really dependent on restaurants or cheese shops across the country for the bulk of their business. Couet Farm, for example, has already shut down. I haven’t heard about others but there must be. It’s a tough business in the best of times. 

A lot of cheese shops and distributors struggled, too—not only with loss of sales during the pandemic, but with the tariffs that have been affecting European imports. Even though my focus is domestic producers, their fate is tied to that of cheese shops that get by on selling European varieties, and it’s a troubling time for a lot of them. 

My hope, though, is that the pandemic has revealed how twisted our food system really is, and how much consumers need to support not only local farms but create a new and equitable food system in which everyone has enough to eat of what they want to eat—one that doesn’t rely on capitalist exploitation of labor, land, animals, and resources, but a regenerative system in which we can brace ourselves against climate change, give producers the breathing room to practice their craft, and empower marginalized communities and eaters everywhere to eat well.