Crafting Futures through Cheese-Making in Val Taleggio (Northern Italy)

Abstract

The politics of scale is the main issue within and around debates on whether geographical indications are the best strategy to support local economies. Two PDO cheeses are made in Val Taleggio. While Taleggio PDO has outscaled the valley and its interests, Strachìtunt PDO was reinvented to be at scale for the valley’s producers. I explain the two-step transition in the producers’ communicative strategy, from a language of heritage cheese and its “prestige” to a multispecies language that stresses the importance of a “working landscape” as a value in itself, focusing in particular on the producers’ post-COVID-19 manifesto as “keepers of molds.” Guardianship emerges from it as a new form of authenticity that does not run in the strictures of terroir-discourse. The article thus spells out which role authenticity plays in the politics of scale and how it contributes to the small-scale producers’ dilemma of how to craft a future for themselves and their communities. I contextualize this vis-a-vis secondary sources that also stress the conceptual and political creativity of cheese-makers’ strategies to revitalize regional (dairy) economies. Food producers are experimenting with new ways of mobilizing heritage to claim guardianship of their trade, craft, and territory. A transnational producer discourse emerges through a redesign of food heritage, front-staging the ecological meaning of craft.