About

There is a contradiction sometimes in the food world. Nothing can be more humbling than cheesemaking and dairy farming. It’s too easy to have something go wrong, to be up to one’s ankles in cow shit, to have a batch of cheese become garbage for a myriad of interconnected reasons. Sometimes however, the way people talk about cheese makes it seem like something only snobs and rich people can talk about.

I’ve been selling cheese since 1994 at San Francisco’s largest independent grocery store. I love cheese. Mice, maggots, and misanthropes haven’t been able to cut into my love for cheese. Many cheeses have great stories but in the end its all about taste. The taste in your mouth, not the concept of taste that comes from too many incestuous cocktail parties.

This website is dedicated to the down-to-earth cheese folks and the idea that one can love great and complex cheese without needing to speak a rarefied language or sound like you are consulting the wine aroma wheel.

Don’t get me wrong. There are many levels on which one can enjoy food. But there’s a need to remind folks that food is for eating. Some folks feel like they can’t enjoy a peasant food with sounding like royalty but most of us just want to eat stuff that tastes good. Feel free to ask questions or suggest cheese topics you’d like to see written about here. But I swear, any industry folks who try to anonymously get their cheese plugged will be embarrassed publicly. That’s my promise to you, Dear Readers.

Oh, and my cheesemonger memoir — Cheesemonger: A Life on the Wedge — was published in March 2010. My newest book Cheddar: A Journey to the Heart of America’s Most Iconic Cheese is available for pre-order now.

Enjoy!

-Gordon
You can reach me at: gordon (dot) zola (dot) edgar (at) gmail (dot) com. Sorry about all those dots. All the shorter — but still recognizable — versions of my name were taken

(I’ve been blogging about cheese (and other things) in a different location on the web since 2002. You can find some “Best of..” cheese tours about, organized by year, but most of my cheese blogging will be here from now on.

Oh and that “Barbara Mandrell of the cheese counter” tagline came from this awesome review of my book from Queen cheese geek and awesome writer Jeanne Carpenter)

Gordon is the Cheese buyer at Rainbow Grocery Cooperative in San Francisco. It should be obvious, but anything written on this site is completely the responsibility of Gordon Edgar and not Rainbow Grocery Cooperative. Rainbow is the largest retail worker cooperative in the United States and a completely awesome place to work and shop but this website is Gordon’s side project. Don’t blame them.