Bronwen is a cheese buyer for Neil’s Yard Dairy, and works with the company’s maturation team to select and optimise the quality of the cheese they sell. She also works to mobilise collaboration between cheesemakers and the scientific community. In 2012, she instigated a biennial conference on the Science of Artisan Cheese. In early 2014, she spent two months in the Dutton Lab at Harvard University studying the role of marine-associated Proteobacteria on cheese rinds. Along with Dr. Benjamin Wolfe, she co-founded the website MicrobialFoods.org, a scientific resource for producers, purveyors, and enthusiasts of artisan microbial foods, and more recently she served on the editorial board of the Oxford Companion to Cheese. Bronwen and her husband Francis are the authors of a new book on the history, science, and future of cheese and dairy farming, Reinventing the Wheel: Milk, Microbes, and the Fight for Real Cheese, forthcoming from the University of California Press in September 2017. Reinventing the Wheel was shortlisted for the 2017 Jane Grigson Trust Award
The Flavour of Good Farming
Real farming holds the promise to restore lost biodiversity to the rural landscape, preserve critically endangered breeds, sequester carbon, reduce exposure of plants and animals to antimicrobials, pesticides and antibiotics, and secure the future health and vitality of the soil. But there was one important element missing, and for a conference all about better food production, it was particularly striking. Flavour was absent from the discussion.
January 26, 2018