Meet Joe Berkowitz Author of American Cheese

Joe Berkowitz photo credit: Gabi O’Connor

From linguistics to tastebuds, Joe Berkowitz’s books dive into their subjects tongue-first.

Having explored the quirky subculture of semi-professional wordplay in his 2017 book Away with Words: An Irreverent Tour Through the World of Pun Competitions , Berkowitz now has his way with curds in the just-published American Cheese: An Indulgent Odyssey Through the Artisan Cheese World 

In the book, Berkowitz recounts his evolution from fromage ignoramus to veritable cheese whiz, all spurred by an epiphany-inducing sample of Rogue River Blue “This cheese is dank. It packs a dizzy drug-punch that reverberates through my body…[it] tastes like Fruity Pebbles cereal milk baked into savory fudge, with a brittle crunch in every bite. It tastes impossible.” 

Rogue River Blue 2019 photo credit: Beryl Striewski

His curiosity piqued, Berkowitz threw himself into a frenzied year of research, visiting artisan creameries across the country, studying the history of cheese, and embedding himself with teams of mongers at the world’s most intense cheese competitions. His book, which will tickle longtime cheese aficionados as well as relative novices, invites readers to tag along as Berkowitz recounts his adventures. 

We chatted with the author about what he learned in his year of living cheesily.

What are your earliest cheese memories?

As a kid, I was a little glutton. I would eat tons and I was pretty overweight. So, I had a phase when I was about nine years old where I was into making elaborate double and triple decker grilled cheese sandwiches. Nothing fancy, just Kraft singles. But I found it very comforting and I just grew up and became the guy at the party who hides out by the cheese cubes and sits at home watching TV with some block cheddar.

So how did you get from cellophaned slices to artisan cheese?

For Valentine’s Day a couple years ago, my wife and I went to a cheese tasting at Murray’s in New York where I tried that Rogue River Blue. It just set me in a reverie. I had never really thought about cheese as this living food that always changes depending on everything from the animal feed, to the weather, to how it’s aged and handle. I got this image in my head of people gathering around at a creamery and musing over the potential of different methods and what they might create. I was suddenly seeing way beyond what I’d ever seen in cheese before and I wondered, well, what’s beyond this? What’s the farthest extent I can go to in learning about cheese? And in the back of my mind, I was looking for a new book project, so I was off and running.

Photo courtesy HarperCollins Publishers

What was the most unusual cheese you tried during your research?

The wildest I had was yak cheese. Usually, people are able to come up with a way to describe what makes cheese from a specific type of animal taste different than others. Sheep’s cheese tends to taste fattier, fresh goat cheese has a lemony flavor. But I couldn’t come up with the words for what makes yak cheese different. Neither could the people who make it, by the way. They have yaks, so they make yak cheese. I tried, without success, to get ahold of some pule, which is the most expensive cheese in the world. It’s from Serbia. From donkeys.

In your book, you suggest that there’s a real interest in cheese among Millennials. Why so?

I’m forty, and I definitely see a lot of people my age and younger getting into cheese. Part of that I trace back to Adam Moskowitz [cold storage entrepreneur and creator of the Cheesemonger Invitational competition, essentially the Comic Con of fromage], who really started to build these big, fun social gatherings around cheese. There’s an ‘eventiness’ to cheese now that goes beyond people’s apartments and puts cheese on a bigger stage in the U.S.  Also, it's far less impenetrable than something like wine or whiskey; to get familiar with those, you either have to be really rich or go to a whole lot of tastings. It’s so much more accessible and affordable to go to a local cheese shop and ask for some tastes, buy a quarter pound of this and that and educate yourself over time.

You’re a vegetarian, right?

I’ve been for the past ten years and I really started because of the treatment of animals. But while I was writing the book, I had a real existential crisis about being a vegetarian who loves cheese. I was visiting the Point Reyes Farmstead Cheese Co. in Marin County and Stacey Giacomini, whose family owns the business, was telling me about their commitment to sustainability, from using solar energy, to using byproducts from nearby businesses—like brewer’s grain from the Lagunitas Brewery in feed, to converting their cows’ poop into enough methane gas to generate 60% of the farm’s power. But she also explained that when their cows give birth, the female calves join the herd, but the male calves are sold off as beef cows. It was the first time it really hit me that the dairy industry and the meat industry are symbiotic.

Where did that understanding lead you?

Well, I had definitely shielded myself from some of the facts, which I am now conscious. But there’s a saying in the artisan cheese world that “happy cows make happy milk” and the cows raised by small producers are definitely treated more humanely and live longer lives than the cows used to make mass-produced cheese in factory farms.

So, you’re not switching to vegan cheese?

No, but there’s some pretty good vegan cheese out there. In the past ten years or so it’s come a long way. You can find spreads and dips really taste good, but meltability is still a big issue overall. There’s no cheese equivalent to the Impossible Burger. But let me give a shout out to Riverdel, in New York, which is a completely vegan cheese shop where they can point you to some excellent choices. I was originally going to write about it in the book, but it just didn’t fit in to the final structure. I also had to cut a chapter I’d planned called Bad Cheese, about things like fast food cheese and the powder they use for Cheetos. 

Now that American Cheese has been published, do you think your cheese obsession will fade?

I don’t think the genie is going back into the bottle. I’ve been enjoying cheeseboards throughout the pandemic, feeling like each piece of cheese I eat does a tiny bit to help those small businesses. And now that I’ve learned that some cheeses are seasonal, I’m definitely going to be filled with anticipation multiple times every year.