The UK is the world’s biggest importer of Chinese honey, which can be one sixth of the price of the honey produced by bees in Britain. Supermarket own-label honey from China can be bought for as little as 69p a jar. Supermarkets say every jar of honey is “100% pure” and can be traced back to the beekeeper, but there is no requirement to identify the countries of origin of honey blended from more than one country. The European Union is now considering new rules to improve consumer information for honey and ensure the country of origin is clearly identified on the jar.
Lynne Ingram, chair of the Honey Authenticity Network UK, a group of beekeepers campaigning for better information for shoppers, said the government should implement its own tough new rules to ensure better transparency.
“The consumer needs to be able to make an informed choice about what they are buying, and it’s impossible for them at the moment,” said Ingram, who is also the master beekeeper at Wesley Cottage Bees, near Bridgewater in Somerset. “The current labelling rules are hiding what people are eating.”
Sales of honey rose to a record high last year and it has overtaken jam in recent years to become the UK’s most popular spread. Consumers bought 30,000 tonnes of honey in 2020 worth £130m, according to figures from the data and research company Kantar.
About a third of the UK’s honey imports come from China, but it almost never appears on the label of supermarket jars as the country of origin. The UK also imports significant amounts of cheap honey from India, Ukraine and Vietnam.
Sainsbury’s So Organic Clear Honey (340g) costs £3.15, but the supermarket did not respond to questions on the country of origin last week. It said its honey “can be traced back to the beekeeper”. The label says the product is a “blend of non-EU honeys”.
Dale Gibson, owner of Bermondsey Street Bees, which has beehives around London. Photograph: Bermondsey Street Bees
The foreign-produced honeys are the cheapest on the supermarket shelves. While a jar of Tesco Stockwell clear honey (340g) costs just 69p, a jar of Tesco Finest English Set Honey costs £4.50. Supermarket sources said last week the Stockwell honey was a blend of honeys from China and Vietnam.
Asda said its Runny Honey (340g) costing £1.49 was also a blend of Chinese and Vietnamese honey and was “fully traceable back to the beekeeper”.
Chinese honey dominates the global market but is controversial because beekeepers in other countries say laboratory tests suggest some of the global supply is targeted by fraudsters who dilute it with cheaper sugar syrup.
In China, the authorities have been warned of the threat. The Institute of Apicultural Research in Beijing stated in a research paper in March last year: “In order to seek higher profits, high-quality honey is subjected to sugar adulteration through the addition of cheaper sweeteners.”
Factories in China advertise sugar syrup for sale to be mixed with honey, which it is claimed in marketing material can beat the most common tests used by food safety watchdogs. There has been legal action in the United States over claims that imports of cheap adulterated honey are pushing beekeepers to financial collapse.
Last year, Mitchell Weinberg, a New York-based food fraud investigator, commissioned QSI, a leading German laboratory, to test nine jars of UK supermarket own-brand honey. Eight of the nine samples tested indicated adulteration, but the Food Standards Agency (FSA) says more work is required to ensure that such tests can be relied on.
It advises trading standards officers to adopt a “weight of evidence” approach in which they also consider supply chain audits and records as well as test results.
Dale Gibson, co-founder of Bermondsey Street Bees in London, which has beehives in and around the capital, including Lambeth Palace and rooftops near Tower Hill, said the FSA and trading standards officers needed to take more effective action against the threat from the food fraudsters. “They have failed to properly police the regulations,” he said.
Sian Edmunds, a partner at the legal firm Burges Salmon, provides regulatory advice on the food supply chain. She said that any new changes in European food labelling laws would not automatically apply in the UK, which would need to introduce its own regulations.
Any measure to improve transparency in the food chain would be welcomed, but would need to be assessed in consultation with food firms on how easily it could be implemented. She added: “Anything that improves the authenticity and traceability of food has to be a good thing, but you have to balance it with practicality. The industry may argue that a new labelling law might be tricky for blended honey from several different countries.”
Rick Mumford, head of science, evidence and research at the FSA, said the food watchdog was working with other government bodies and industry experts to address some of the complexities around honey authenticity testing. He said: “Our work is seeking to put in place the most effective enforcement tools and guidance for detecting honey fraud so that consumers can have trust in the honey they buy.”
A government spokesperson said: “It is essential consumers have trust in the food they eat, and food labelling should be accurate and not misleading in any way. We are working with partners to understand the emerging scientific evidence on honey testing to ensure all honey can be fairly and accurately tested for contents and origin.”
“Why do I like pain, and what am I getting out of it?” Leigh Cowart asks early on in their new book, “Hurts So Good.”
From 1956 to 1964, one of the most popular daytime television programs was “Queen for a Day,” a game show that rested on a simple, and savage, premise. In each episode, four women who had suffered recent hardships spoke candidly about their experiences on live TV. At the end of the half hour, one woman would be crowned queen and showered with prizes. One of the so-called misery shows of that era, along with “Strike It Rich” and “Glamour Girl,” it largely featured working-class contestants: widows whose husbands had been killed in hunting accidents, mothers of chronically sick children, grocery-store owners who couldn’t afford to stock their stores. In addition to the prizes, each winner was granted a request for some product or service, which tended to be practical and not infrequently macabre. One contestant entered the show in the hope of hiring a carpenter to patch the bullet holes above her bed left by her husband’s suicide. Another, a Holocaust survivor, wanted funds to have her tattoo from Auschwitz removed.
Old episodes can be found online, but they are hard to watch. The contestants aren’t versed, as reality-show stars are today, in the grammar of television; they have trouble maintaining eye contact with the host, and nervously wrap their handkerchiefs around their fingers. The plainspoken dignity with which they narrate their misfortunes is frequently astonishing. “I had two handicapped sons,” one contestant says. “I lost them, and then I took care of an elderly lady in a wheelchair. She passed away, along with my mother and my father, and then my husband passed away. I feel that I would like to have a vacation.” At the end of each episode, audience members applaud for the woman they think is most deserving. The cheers are measured by an applause meter, which rises, predictably, in relation to the severity of a woman’s suffering. The winner is given a jewelled crown and a sable-trimmed robe, plus appliances, new clothes, a vacation.
The television writer Mark Evanier has called “Queen for a Day” “one of the most ghastly shows ever produced,” but it’s merely a crude example of a formula employed by more recent series, such as “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” and “American Idol,” which also favor contestants who have endured adversity. The appeal of such narratives is ancient, perhaps even primal, recalling the promises of religious traditions: that tribulation begets atonement, that karma will settle all scores, that those who mourn will receive their reward. Surely suffering should get you something—if not redemption and eternal life, then mass sympathy, modest fame, and an Adler automatic sewing machine. The ghastly element of “Queen for a Day,” no less crucial to its appeal, is the starkly transactional way in which this justice is enacted. No matter how fervently we believe that the bearing of pain deserves reward, we blanch when the calculus is made transparent, or when a victim takes too active a role in her own compensation, cashing in on life’s raw deals. God rewards long-suffering in his own time. Deals and bargains are the jurisdiction of the Devil, who was always more in touch with modern economics.
But the truth is that we make these kinds of bargains all the time, trading pain for something better. Studies have identified evidence of “post-traumatic growth,” a phenomenon in which searching for the good in a major life crisis results in higher psychological functioning and other mental benefits. The events we consider most central to our identities are often tragedies—an illness survived, an addiction tamed, a financial difficulty overcome—as though we believed adversity to be the price of wisdom and personal improvement. Contrary to what one might expect of pleasure-maximizing creatures, we often seek out pains, both monumental (going to war) and trivial (going to the gym). We run marathons, have children, and toil long hours in the office, all in expectation of uncertain rewards.
Modern theories of behavior have tried to quantify what, exactly, people hope to get in return for their pain. The British utilitarian Jeremy Bentham held that all actions, including those which might appear antithetical to self-interest, are motivated by the anticipation of an advantage—usually pleasure. Freud’s “pleasure principle” reiterated this idea, allowing that the motivation could be unconscious; in “The Economic Problem of Masochism,” Freud argues that, though the self-flagellating monk and the altruistic saint might convince themselves that they are immune to the allure of personal profit, their libido is simply exchanging outer pain for the relief of inner guilt. More recently, behavioral economists have demonstrated how bad we are at anticipating the rewards of our actions, but they have preserved the assumption that we all think about the world in terms of costs and benefits, investments and returns. We don’t always balance the equation correctly, but we are always, in the back of our minds, doing the math. “Men calculate,” Bentham wrote, in 1789, “some with less exactness, indeed, some with more; but all men calculate.”
“Why do I like pain, and what am I getting out of it?” Leigh Cowart asks early on in their new book, “Hurts So Good: The Science and Culture of Pain on Purpose.” Cowart, a science journalist and a self-described “high-sensation-seeking masochist,” maintains that one of the most immediate rewards of pain is physical pleasure. When the brain senses that the body is imperilled, its endogenous morphine system (hence “endorphin”) creates an organic painkiller. All you have to do to get a dose is convince your body that it’s in danger. Viewed this way, masochism is a kind of biohacking, a way of exploiting the body’s electrochemistry. Cowart is a longtime B.D.S.M. enthusiast, but they believe that “pain on purpose” is more than a bedroom kink—it’s a universal human experience. Eating spicy foods, getting a tattoo, taking a cold shower: all, for Cowart, are sly attempts to exchange distress for a blast of neurochemical bliss. “Once I started looking for the pattern,” they write, “I saw it everywhere.”
This acknowledgment of confirmation bias might cast doubt on Cowart’s claim that masochism is universal; in many of the activities that Cowart examines, pain is typically considered a means to an end, not an end in itself. At one point, Cowart gets permission to speak with participants in an ultramarathon—but then the organizer, upon learning that Cowart is writing a book on masochism, briefly revokes it. “Like many sport there is discomfort involved, but it is a cost of competition, not an objective,” the organizer explains. In the end, Cowart attends the event, and concludes that, for some runners, pain is an underlying goal; one contestant claims to look forward to “the slow accumulation of punishment.” I thought of Flaubert, who wrote, “I love my work with a love that is frenzied and perverted, as an ascetic loves the hair shirt that scratches his belly.” I don’t imagine I’m the only writer who has recognized herself in this confession: the rewards of a literary career come so unpredictably, and at such a steep cost, that it’s impossible not to wonder whether you are deriving a deranged pleasure from its more reliable vexations.
Cowart is a former ballet dancer who suffered from eating disorders and self-mutilation during adolescence, and they recall ballet as being both rewarding and abusive: “It was years spent cowering and starving, eternally at war with my poor, battered body.” Studies have found that it’s possible, over time, to build strong associations between pain and pleasure, suggesting that masochism can be learned. “Did ballet make me a masochist?” Cowart wonders. The book does not arrive at a tidy conclusion: pain, it turns out, is as wily and elusive as any other mental experience. Pangs that once produced pleasure won’t necessarily do so again, and the existence of safe words in B.D.S.M. testifies to how quickly desired pain can become undesirable. “I am endlessly drawn to the idea that if you can just get through to some nebulous other side, that pain can open up into wild euphoria,” Cowart writes. “Humans play this game all the time.” Cowart repeatedly refers to masochism as a “game,” but evidently it is one that is governed less by the predictable readings of an applause meter than by the whims of a roulette wheel.
Anna Dostoyevskaya, a writer and the second wife of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, once observed that her husband’s work never went so well as it did after he’d lost all their money playing roulette. Dostoyevsky’s novels are full of characters of this sort: gamblers who are more interested in losing than in winning, men who deliberately make fools of themselves when their reputations have become too pristine. In “Notes from Underground,” the narrator mocks the idea that humans seek only what is beneficial to them; a man, he insists, may “consciously, purposely, desire what is injurious to himself, what is stupid, very stupid—simply in order to have the right to desire for himself even what is very stupid and not to be bound by any obligation to desire what is only rational.” Sometimes the absence of an advantage is the point. We suffer deliberately to prove that we are not machines.
In a 2004 paper, the economists Niklas Karlsson, George Loewenstein, and Jane McCafferty quote that passage to illustrate the kinds of motives long ignored in decision theory, game theory, and behavioral economics. Although these disciplines have moved beyond a fixation on mere utility or pleasure, and now explore how human behavior is influenced by moral considerations such as altruism and fairness, their practitioners, the economists argue, still have little to say about the kind of outcome Dostoyevsky’s narrator seeks. “People want to believe that they have some control over their behavior and hence their destiny, they want to feel as if they are more than the sum of nerve firings happening in obscure parts of their brain,” the authors write. They call this motivation the “desire for meaning,” and suggest that it warrants further exploration.
Paul Bloom’s new book, “The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning,” is an attempt to delve into this scientifically overlooked dimension of human behavior. Bloom acknowledges that pain often brings pleasure, but he doesn’t think that masochism alone can explain why people sometimes gravitate toward suffering. “A lot of the negative experiences we pursue don’t provide happiness or positive feelings in any simple sense—but we seek them out anyway,” he writes. People enlist in wars and decide to have children despite knowing the consequences; we willingly undertake extreme challenges, such as climbing mountains and writing books. Bloom, a developmental psychologist at Yale, calls himself a “motivational pluralist.” He believes that human flourishing depends on a host of different desires beyond mere hedonism: desires for justice, for recognition, for artistic achievement.
In many cases, meaningful pursuits are at odds with pleasure. People who have children generally experience less happiness than those who are childless but report that their lives are more meaningful. Polls of the happiest countries are often topped by wealthy nations with good social-support systems—Norway, Australia, Canada—but, in a Gallup survey that asked whether people believed their lives were meaningful, the top results were Sierra Leone, Togo, Senegal, Ecuador, Laos, Cuba, and Kuwait. G.D.P. is clearly correlated with happiness, but it may have an inverse relationship to meaning. Bloom concedes that religious belief might factor into these results, but he suspects the more likely explanation is that meaning results from struggle. It’s no surprise that many citizens of affluent countries find that their lives lack purpose, he maintains: “Some degree of misery and suffering is essential to a rich and meaningful life.”
This is not to say that the only meaningful life is one of agony and drudgery, Bloom writes. Some studies have found that happiness and meaning are correlated—that if you have one, chances are you have the other. For Bloom, this is evidence that there is a Goldilocks principle at play, what he calls “the sweet spot.” The key is not to seek out pain indiscriminately but to pursue tasks that entail exertion or an element of risk. The so-called Ikea effect suggests that we associate value with effort: people are often willing to pay more for items that require assembly. Finding creative ways to add friction to our lives is a sure path to making activities more meaningful, whether it’s cooking a meal from scratch or “gamifying” activities by adding gratuitous goals. Better yet, get your kicks from fiction: streaming platforms offer “virtually unlimited choice” when it comes to vicarious suffering, Bloom notes, and the guaranteed resolutions promise to satisfy our desire for meaning. Fiction is “safe,” he writes, “in that it allows for control of what kind of aversive experience one is going to get.”
Bloom’s previous book, “Against Empathy,” was subtitled “The Case for Rational Compassion,” and “The Sweet Spot” is in many ways a case for rational suffering, a guide to making life better through the measured incorporation of pain. Just as Cowart sees masochism as a form of biohacking, Bloom regards deliberately chosen discomfort as a way to “game the system,” exploiting our evolutionary hardwiring to induce more fulfilling experiences. At this point, one might think of another line in “Notes from Underground,” toward the end of the narrator’s rant about rationalists: “If you say that all this, too, can be calculated and tabulated—chaos and darkness and curses, so that the mere possibility of calculating it all beforehand would stop it all, and reason would reassert itself, then man would purposely go mad in order to be rid of reason and gain his point!”
The vast majority of suffering that we experience in our lives is, of course, not within our control. And, as “Queen for a Day” illustrates, it’s these travails—the lost spouse, the sick child, the home destroyed by a fire—that we are most eager to see yield value. Is it possible to find meaning in such tragedies? Bloom, for his part, is skeptical: he believes that run-of-the-mill misfortunes are largely without benefit. Fasting can be meaningful, whereas starving because you don’t have money for food is simple misery. Or recall, for instance, the absurdity of Donald Rumsfeld’s argument that forcing Guantánamo prisoners to stand for hours during interrogation was not so bad because he himself had a standing desk. “Many of the features that make suffering so rewarding when it’s chosen . . . are absent when it is involuntary,” Bloom writes.
Bloom questions clinical studies that suggest that suffering makes people more resilient or altruistic. One such study found that thirteen per cent of the women who survived the mass shooting at Virginia Tech, in 2007, were less anxious and depressed after the tragedy than they were before. But studies like this can rely too heavily on self-reporting and often lack control groups, Bloom points out. He doesn’t deny that some people find a sustaining purpose in tragedy. Throughout the book, he refers to “Man’s Search for Meaning,” Viktor Frankl’s account of his experiences in Nazi concentration camps; despite the horrors that Frankl endured, he seems to have gone on to live “a rich life, replete with both meaning and pleasure,” Bloom writes. Frankl argued that those who suffer are spurred to help others because it gives meaning to their own pain. But Bloom believes that Frankl is an outlier whose case has been wrongly used to bolster the myth of redemptive suffering. “There is little actual evidence that sufferers are kinder than they would have been had they not suffered,” he writes.
The question of evidence aside, Bloom has larger problems with the idea of redemptive suffering. In his view, this belief prompts people to dismiss pain, blame victims, and turn away from political activism:
“Everything happens for a reason” implies that people get what they deserve—what goes around comes around. It can lead to a reflexive condemnation of those (including, sometimes, ourselves) who have had bad luck, have become sick, or have been victimized by others. It can also lead to apathy and indifference. If there are no accidents, and everything is ultimately in the service of some higher good, why work so hard to make things better? If discrimination and oppression reflect the workings of a deep plan—the meek shall inherit the earth, after all—why worry about it?
The allusion to the Beatitudes is telling. It is religion, after all, that constitutes “our species’ longest and deepest struggle to make sense of suffering, including suffering that is unchosen,” Bloom writes. But he finds the compensatory logic of these traditions just as implausible as the clinical studies that he critiques. Life, he argues, “has no screenwriter and no director. And so, when we suffer through bad events, we can’t be confident that things will work out in the end.” These creeds undoubtedly bring comfort to some, but Bloom concludes that “unchosen suffering,” as he calls it, is, over all, “less positive” than chosen suffering: “We are smart to try to avoid cancer, mass shootings, the death of our children, and other horrors.”
Of course, the studies that Bloom cites do not argue that we should seek out traumas because they can, in some cases, have good outcomes. And though some radical ascetic traditions encourage disciples to incorporate suffering into their lives, the major faiths do not generally promote the pursuit of pain. Christianity, the tradition that is arguably most fixated on redemptive suffering, has long stressed that the virtues that stem from affliction do not make the affliction itself good. C. S. Lewis, in “The Problem of Pain,” calls this the paradox of tribulation. “Blessed are the poor, but by judgment (i.e., social justice) and alms we are to remove poverty whenever possible,” he writes. The Crucifixion was redemptive, but that does not justify Judas’s betrayal: “the fact that God can make complex good out of simple evil does not excuse . . . those who do the simple evil.” Nor does the possibility of virtuous suffering permit us to ignore those who are in pain. Part of the good in suffering is “the compassion aroused and the acts of mercy to which it leads.”
Lewis, like many religious thinkers, takes for granted that suffering is unavoidable, the price of entry into the human condition. Bloom acknowledges as much, too, albeit somewhat late in his book. (“You don’t have to look for more,” he writes, at the end of the penultimate chapter.) But the term “unchosen suffering”—which, as far as I can tell, is synonymous with what for centuries we have simply called “suffering”—suggests an exception to the rule. If there is a sweet spot between those who suffer too much and those who don’t suffer enough, his imagined audience seems to consist primarily of the latter.
In truth, the line between chosen and unchosen pain is not always clear. Consider the misery that stems from addictions and compulsions, a problem that Cowart takes up when revisiting their adolescent experience with self-harm. “I used the instrument of my body as a muffler to my pain,” they write. “I conspired against myself.” We are not always unified, autonomous agents; anyone who has returned to a fiercely renounced habit knows that the pleasures sought by one part of the self can be experienced by another part as pain. Think of Medea’s famous line in Ovid’s Metamorphoses: “I can see—and I approve the better course, and yet I choose the worse.” Or, for that matter, think of the apostle Paul, who, in his Letter to the Romans, writes, “For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.” We are rarely in control of our suffering, even when we are the ones inflicting it.
On the one hand, regarding life as a game, or attempting to “game it,” allows us to believe that we are in control—that each life choice results in a clear set of advantages and disadvantages, and that racking up more of the former than the latter will lead to satisfaction. On the other hand, games have long dramatized the ruthlessness of chance. Before the wheel of fortune became an iconic piece of game-show imagery, it was the instrument of Fortuna, whose reliance on blind luck brought low the prosperous and parcelled out hardships to the wicked and the noble alike. This tragic view of life, however, was not entirely fatalistic: people’s lives may have been governed by capricious gods, or by the aimless roll of the dice, but they had a say in how they responded to misfortunes. Nietzsche spoke of amor fati, or “love of fate,” an idea he drew from the Stoics, who taught that it was possible to transform the turns of Fortuna’s wheel into virtue, or art. “Floods will rob us of one thing, fire of another,” Seneca writes. “These are conditions of our existence which we cannot change. What we can do is adopt a noble spirit.” Adopting that spirit is a creative act by which the sufferer transforms life’s afflictions into something useful. If our technocratic age has grown more optimistic about the potential to control or eliminate unwanted suffering, it has made it harder, at times, to believe in this imaginative capacity.
Something like amor fati emerges in Cowart’s story. At one point, they confess to thinking back on painful experiences with nostalgia and longing. “Fully unhinged, I know,” they write, “but few things are cleanly demarcated into pleasant and unpleasant.” Cowart maintains that, after years of therapy, masochism has allowed them to reclaim the pain they once experienced as compulsion—though they find it difficult to articulate what, exactly, has changed: “Feeling bad and then better is still a game I play, a crutch I use, a treat for myself. What, then, is so different about my life then versus my life now?” They interview others who have found safe, consensual pain to be a form of healing after self-harm, or a way to assert mastery over the impulse, though most of them admit that the line between reclaiming trauma and merely reënacting it is hazy. The difference lies in states of mind that are not easily measurable: emotions, expectations, the psychological narratives they attach to the experience. “Something about the difference in seeking harm versus seeking pain,” Cowart speculates. This echoes a persistent conclusion in clinical studies: pain, like all subjective phenomena, is sensitive to context and inflected by the mental constructs that we use to understand the experience.
To put it another way: although we cannot insulate ourselves from suffering, we do have some say in the narratives we build around it. This conviction unites many communities that coalesce around shared calamities—twelve-step fellowships, grief support groups—and it will ring true for anyone who has managed, however tentatively, to erect an identity or a sustaining purpose out of the unwelcome detritus of their life. It’s impossible to say whether the good of such efforts outweighs the bad that inspires them. Tragedies tend to divest one of the delusion that life is reducible to this kind of arithmetic. In fact, the calculus of cost-benefit analysis may lie at cross-purposes with the attempt to find meaning, which requires a certain suspension of disbelief—a willingness to abandon the idea that life is a scorecard and to see it, instead, as a story. ♦
Grazing their Jersey cows on biodynamically grown pastures and carefully bred for optimum health, Rob and Petrina Visser care about and focus on the well-being of their herd.
Wallace and Gromit loved cheese so much they went to the moon for it. In Monty Python’s Life Of Brian, Jesus is misheard – although can anyone be 100% certain? – as saying “blessed are the cheesemakers”. Which is not meant to be taken literally, it refers to any manufacturers of dairy products. Even so, a little gratitude in your evening prayers wouldn’t go amiss, if you are so inclined. They do do such a wonderful thing for humanity, after all.
Someone I greatly admired was Anthony Bourdain, who said, “To live life without veal or chicken stock, fish cheeks, sausages, cheese, or organ meats is treasonous.” I take his words a lot more to heart, and to live by. He also said, “You have to be a romantic to invest yourself, your money, and your time in cheese.”
This makes Rob and Petrina Visser, of Dalewood Fromage, the greatest romantics of all.
The Franschhoek farm is home to the cattle, the factory and affinage facility (French word that refers to caring for cheese as it ages), and a small shop filled with glorious hard and soft cheeses as well as other dairy products like butter, feta, milk, buttermilk, cream, crème fraîche and yoghurt, as well as eggs, olives, jams and preserves that go with cheese, and cheese accessories such as knives, boards and girolles.
A what now? In your travels you may have come across those delicate pretty curly cheese “flowers”; the girolle is the tool that creates them. After seeing one in action when I visited Rob and Petrina, my heart yearns for such a gadget. Completely unnecessary of course, but the heart wants what the heart wants. Of course, you have to get the right cheese in the right shape too, so there’s a fair amount of commitment involved.
Our conversation took place in their farmhouse kitchen, where the counter was spread with, obviously, a lot of cheese, as well as bowls of fresh cherries, olives, water biscuits, preserves, biltong and droëwors, and sprigs of fragrant rosemary. There was a carafe of chilled strawberry water, but before anything else, Petrina popped a bottle of bubbly. The reason for this was to celebrate Dalewood’s 21st anniversary, an occasion she said they’d only just remembered about a month ago.
“Our cheese business is 21 years old, and here I sit with the flagship cheese of ours,” she said, holding up the Winelands Camembert, “because this was the very first cheese we launched in 2000. It’s still very much part of our range, and it’s unique in South Africa in terms of the fact it’s the only oval Camembert that you can buy. And people love it for that. The shape sets it apart, and the recipe is also different.”
Rob Visser, second generation farmer, is passionate about his stud Jersey herd, and has an eco-friendly approach to farming. (Photo: Supplied)
The Dalewood farm has been in the Visser family for more than 60 years; previously Rob and his father were in the strawberry business.
“When I arrived on the scene, a city slicker from Johannesburg, and saw what was involved in growing strawberries and picking strawberries, I nearly died,” said Petrina. “After three or four years, I looked at this and said to myself there is no way I can handle it. I said to Rob one night, ‘It’s either the strawberries or it’s me.’ I literally forced him to make an overnight decision to stop strawberries and go into cheesemaking.”
The farm had always had a tiny dairy which used to supply the local community, so the milk was there. Plus Rob had qualified at Elsenburg, where he studied dairy technology and animal husbandry. “So that’s where his passion lies,” said Petrina.
“We experimented for a couple of years before we decided to do it properly. We launched with this white mould cheese and we called it Wineland because we were inspired by the romance of the vineyards and all the beautiful wines in our area. And cheese and wine are natural partners. It made so much sense.”
This particular Camembert is special not only because it was named overall cheese champion at the first South African Cheese Festival in 2001 and the Qualité award (the only mark of excellence for dairy products in South Africa) in the SA Dairy Championships, but because the recipe – like all Dalewood recipes, developed by Rob – made it the first cheese in South Africa that was a ready-to-eat Camembert. Rob has won various South African awards including Best Functional Herd Life, Best Herd Genetics and Model Herd.
“It’s very easy, and very versatile, because it doesn’t need ripening. It doesn’t have a chalky centre, or heart, which is a real pain when you’re buying cheese at a supermarket because they’re so paranoid about shelf life,” said Petrina. “It’s very accessible and it appealed to the SA market because they’d never seen anything like it before.”
The early awards for the Wineland Camembert confirmed for the Vissers that they should go into the cheese business seriously. And that’s when the journey really began in earnest. The strawberry fields slowly started to be replanted and replaced with pastures. “We have about 55 hectares where we feed our cows. That’s when Rob decided he was going to focus on the genetics and the breeding of the herd, which has been recognised with stud status, and most importantly it’s 100% Jersey,” explained Petrina. “It’s a tightly controlled herd. We don’t buy in any milk whatsoever. And Rob is the genetic specialist. He chooses which semen to import from all the best bulls around the world so that has been part of his journey.”
The happy lifestyle of the cows is of the utmost importance to ensure the cheese produced from their milk is of the best possible quality. (Photo: Supplied)
The happy lifestyle of the cows is of the utmost importance to ensure the cheese produced from their milk is of the best possible quality. “Growing our own pastures means we have control over the milk,” said Petrina.
Dalewood has a regenerative approach to farming and the rotationally grazed herd spends each day on green pastures, which are precisely managed, beginning with the gentle nurturing of the biological life in the soil. No artificial fertilisers, insecticides or weed killers are used to boost these pastures. The cows never receive growth or milk production increasing hormones, neither do they receive any unnecessary antibiotics.
Ultimately, these benefits are passed along to us, the end consumers of the cheese and other dairy products from Dalewood.
Rob entered the conversation at this point, and we began tasting the cheeses Petrina had set out. The soft cheeses had been out of the fridge for a few hours, but the hard ones were still chilling. “Temperature is very important,” said Rob. “I always say 10 to 12 degrees is fine for hard, soft white milk cheeses should be aiming for 18 degrees.” This is important to get the best possible flavour from the cheese, and parallels can be drawn particularly with wine, but with most foods. Like tomatoes. Please can we stop keeping them cold and tasteless?
“When hard cheeses warm up they become oily,” added Petrina.
The signature Brie Superlatif is the largest wheel of Brie produced in South Africa in the classic French style. (Photo: Supplied)
We begin with the signature Brie Superlatif™, the largest wheel of Brie produced in South Africa in the classic French style. It does require ripening time. It’s described as “soft and pillowy to the touch with a velvety white rind. The flavour is buttery, earthy and ‘mushroomy’.” This is a statement cheese, for special occasions when you need to impress. You could decorate with nuts and fruit and stuff. Rob is not a fan. “People drizzle it with all sorts of crap and I’m thinking no man,” he said, unaware the interview was being recorded. He grinned. “Really? Do you want to take a video of me as well?” As it happened, I did exactly that and you can see it on my Instagram account. What I didn’t capture on “film” though was his face when I asked about his thoughts on people eating a Brie like a hamburger, holding it with two hands and taking a bite out of it.
“I’m a bit of a purist and Petrina says I’m pedantic,” he said. “I don’t mind if you combine stuff but don’t spoil the whole cheese. Taste the cheese first. The French are very pedantic. They eat it with a special knife and fork, they never cut the nose off…” That’s the pointy end of the wedge and it’s important because it’s also the heart of the cheese, which ripens from the outside in.
One of the several flavoured Bries, this is the wild mushroom with a combination of Porcini, Shiitake, and Chanterelle which contribute delicate flavours. (Photo: Supplied)
A lot of people don’t realise, said Rob, that Camembert and Brie are generally the same methodology, it’s just that the ratio of the pate (a word used to refer to the actual inside of the cheese – what’s inside the rind or crust. It’s only used in the context of cheeses that do develop a surface rind) of Camembert, compared to the rind on the outside, is less than Brie. The smaller you go, the more rind in relation to pate, so Camembert ripens quicker and becomes more piquant (power to whet the appetite or interest through tartness or mild pungency). Therefore Camembert is usually sharper than Brie, which is milder.
Size definitely matters. “The smaller you go is great for the catering business, 60g, pop it into phyllo pastry with hot relish, or in a salad,” said Rob. “If you’re a cheese connoisseur you should be looking at 250g, I almost would like to take a stab at it and say a Brie should be in a grande wheel.”
Like the Superlatif. Retailers sell smaller wedges but you can get the big wheel at Dalewood, and be a big cheese (sorry not sorry). “A wedge is fine but it comes down to the affinage or ripening of cheeses, it’s quite a delicate process to get it right,” said Rob. “As we’re sitting here, the cheese is ripening, the bacteria is active, the mould on the outside is what’s ripening the cheese, it’s putting its little roots in and creating the yummy gooey changes that release all the flavours you’re looking for.”
Where is that sweet spot with ripening though? There can be few things sadder than forgetting your cheese in the fridge and opening it to discover it’s turned sharp and bitter and reeking of ammonia. The Wineland range takes the guesswork out of it so that’s helpful. It still has a best by date, however, which is a fairly wide window – about five weeks – from when you buy it, but it’s also a guideline so don’t panic if you miss it by a day or six.
Then we come to the Lanquedoc™: Made in rounds of approximately 300g, this is a semi-soft, washed-rind, surface-ripened cheese, with subtle bacon-and-egg like flavours and milky-meaty notes. Bacon and egg in my cheese! Get in my mouth right now. Petrina has a wonderful story behind the name, which honours the valley, but it’s based a lot on pronunciation so it’s complicated to write. When you visit be sure to ask her about it.
This is quite a serious cheese, she said, and Rob snorted with laughter. “You’re not supposed to say that, how can we blow our own trumpet like that? If you’re the cheesemaker you’ve got to be more humble.”
“Well, I’m not the cheesemaker so I can say whatever,” retorted Petrina.
“I always make excuses for the cheese, and I never think it’s good enough. So I cannot sell cheese,” said Rob.
And that there is why these two make such a great team. He creates delicious cheese, she does the selling (she has a marketing background).
“This type of cheese appeals to Europeans, that they eat for breakfast, especially the Germans, they love it. So it’s great to make a cheese they approve of, it’s a big deal for us,” said Petrina.
Where is this one in its ripening process? I wanted to know. “You ask very good questions!” said Rob. “Yes, that’s what Samuel L Jackson told me too,” I replied. I can’t remember what the question was though. True story.
Not looking at the dates, Rob said the temperature is a little bit warm, and he would like it maybe slightly cooler. “I’d say it has another two weeks.” He is correct of course.
The largest head of cheese made in South Africa, the Huguenot has won multiple awards. (Photo: Supplied)
Moving on to the hard cheeses, out came the massive Huguenot – not a Cheddar as so many have tried to pigeonhole it over the years – and a round for the girolle. It was young because all the mature ones had sold out. It was still delicious, but the promise of what lies ahead for this cheese when it gets to be a year old are toffee and caramel, nuttiness and depth of flavour. It’s no surprise the Huguenot is the most highly awarded cheese in SA, and the largest head made in this country. I don’t think it’s a bad idea to put in an order now for a chunk of this at 18 months old.
Other hard cheeses in the Dalewood range are the Boland™ (four month matured, semi-hard cheese with a hard rind made in the style of a Port Salut, with a relatively mild flavour, savoury and slightly sweet, velvety in the mouth), and Simond™, developed during lockdown.
It’s not Cheddar, it’s Huguenot. (Photo: Supplied)
“Once again we are honouring the history of the valley,” said Petrina. “Pierre Simond was a pastor at a church in Simondium, a French Huguenot. Boland is named for the mountains you see when you drive out the farm. All of our names have got relevance.
“This was the only cheese we developed in lockdown, and we call it a ‘lekker easy eating kaas’. It’s matured for two months then it’s available. It’s not a serious cheese, it’s a fun cheese.”
Petrina said she always tries to keep it simple and double up with cheese for dessert. “For a reasonable gathering, our Wineland Brie (1.25kg) or the Brie Petit (650g) – there is nothing to beat a whole wheel of cheese which always makes a great statement with some fresh fruit (whatever is in season). Cherries are great right now.
“A Brie Petit with a nice chunk of either Huguenot or Boland makes that perfect statement. Green fig preserve is my go-to classic accompaniment, always a winner with a lovely selection of home-made water biscuits and various crackers. Caramelised nuts too, and dried fig slices also work.”
I agree – those water biscuits are just the right hint of saltiness to allow the cheese to shine. As for the Huguenot wafers, well I inhaled an entire packet of those with my wine last night so that should tell you all you need to know.
Smooth, consistent texture, with no need to ripen, Dalewood’s Wineland Camembert is versatile due to its early accessibility and extended shelf life. (Photo: Supplied)
“For a smaller, more intimate group of people I would select a combination of the following,” said Petrina.
“Brie Superlatif (substantial wedge), either Wineland Chef’s Camembert or Lanquedoc, Wineland Blue Camembert 150g Tower and a hard cheese – either Huguenot or Boland semi hard (preferably a substantial chunk). Orange twirls work beautifully here or a Berry & Lavender Jelly or even a Purple Fig & Port Preserve. Always a selection of fresh fruit, water biscuits, crackers, and melba toast.”
Of course, you don’t need guests to have cheese. Pile that platter and have at it. DM/TGIFood
The writer supportsThe Gift of the Givers Foundation, the largest disaster response, non-governmental organisation of African origin on the African continent.
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From 1956 to 1964, one of the most popular daytime television programs was “Queen for a Day,” a game show that rested on a simple, and savage, premise. In each episode, four women who had suffered recent hardships spoke candidly about their experiences on live TV. At the end of the half hour, one woman would be crowned queen and showered with prizes. One of the so-called misery shows of that era, along with “Strike It Rich” and “Glamour Girl,” it largely featured working-class contestants: widows whose husbands had been killed in hunting accidents, mothers of chronically sick children, grocery-store owners who couldn’t afford to stock their stores. In addition to the prizes, each winner was granted a request for some product or service, which tended to be practical and not infrequently macabre. One contestant entered the show in the hope of hiring a carpenter to patch the bullet holes above her bed left by her husband’s suicide. Another, a Holocaust survivor, wanted funds to have her tattoo from Auschwitz removed.
