The Wide World of Cheese

by Laurie Woolever

This year’s Olympic Games will be remembered for the lackadaisical Turkish marksman and the cardboard beds and the pole vaulter whose unsecured front load dashed his medal hopes. But for me, the lasting memory will be of Giorgia Villa, the Italian gymnast who performed floor routines around full wheels of aged cow’s milk cheese, in honor of her sponsor, Parmigiano-Reggiano. A 72-pound wheel of Parmigiano may not have made the most natural partner for the petite airborne athlete, but the spectacle was definitely a stroke of marketing genius. (Admittedly I’m not  much of an expert there, having switched out of my communications major halfway through freshman year, once I learned the definition of public relations: “The professional maintenance of a favorable public image by a company or other organization or a famous person.”)

In late June, I visited the Summer Fancy Food Show, an enormous trade-only specialty food expo staged at the Javits Center on the far west side of Manhattan. It’s overwhelming and fantastic, with more than 2,400 vendors from 56 countries touting a dizzying collection of (fancy) foods—Cuban mustard, fermented habanero hot sauce, “cheese jerky,” exotic jams, matzoh chips, dates, nuts, olives, oils, seafood sausage, mojitos in a tube, goat milk caramels, finger limes, gluten-free baking kits with built-in STEM learning principles, and freeze-dried Skittles.