Pacific Northwest Cheese: A History by Tami Parr

Abstract

 OHQ vol. 116, no. 4 admittedly receiving help from commune members, particularly the male architects and carpenters). She purchased a truck, and she learned automobile mechanics. Grundstein had staked her ground intending to remain. That choice, however, was not, in the end, hers to make. Another commune member, whose family had purchased the land, decided to end experiment.“The universal laws of capital still held sway; if you had cash you had say, over your life as well as the lives of others” (p. 81). Grundstein left for California and a new life as an independent woman. Memoirs of “Sixties” commune life are not abundant, although that may change as participants grow older and decide to leave their accounts. But those who have written them, including Grundstein, are often clear-eyed in their assessments. They do not shy away from the contradictions, excesses, and naivete, but neither do they dismiss these experiments in utopian living. For Grundstein, while the commune fell short of its ideals,it nevertheless helped her find herself. Evelyn Hess is a woman of a different generation ,the one that fell between World War II and theVietnam era.Grundstein’s story begins on the cusp of adulthood. Hess is at the cusp of old age when she and her husband, in their early 70s,decided to build a home at the southern end of Oregon’s Coast Range foothills. They wanted to live simply, responsibly, and sustainably. Hess chronicles the literal process of constructing the house while offering some family history as well as meditations on how to live a satisfying life.She determines to give back as much as she took from the earth; “to be a healthy and functioning strand in the network of the natural system” (p. 70). Hess,too,receives a good deal of help.Family , friends, and neighbors — a “community” if not a commune — provided essential aid along the way.When she urges readers to“look into the more compassionate and cooperative aspect of our nature and find another mode” one hears the echoes Grundstein’s counterculture still alive and well — at least in the Pacific Northwest (p. 175). Sherry L. Smith Southern Methodist University PACIFIC NORTHWEST CHEESE: A HISTORY by Tami Parr Oregon State University Press, Corvallis, 2013. Photographs, notes, index. 208 pages. $22.95, paper. It has been a somewhat circular route, cheese’s path from fur traders’ships and the deft hands arriving on prairie schooners, to the multifarm , mega-factory cheese cooperatives, and back to small family operations. Tami Parr’s Pacific Northwest Cheese: A History takes readers on that journey, telling all the interesting stories that happened along the way. Parr introduces her subject by examining the ways the Northwest’s earliest European and Russian explorers depended on dairy products. “One of the less-discussed aspects of this era of exploration is that most of these far-flung oceangoing expeditions regularly carried a variety of livestock including cattle,sheep,and goats,” she explains (p. 13). Shortly after the white-headed eagle John McLoughlin took up residence at FortVancouver in1824,the fort had accumulated hundreds of head of cattle that it rented out to freshly arrived settlers. The book proceeds chronologically, introducing readers to the major players who helped put the Northwest on the map as a major cheese-producing region, churning out products to rival much-lauded English cheeses. Before Oregon was even a state, its  Reviews pioneer residents were producing tens of thousands of pounds of cheese.Parr notes that in the 1860s, after Gregor Mendel’s discoveries of the principles of heredity in his garden’s pea plants and the subsequent establishment of agricultural colleges in the region, bovine breeding programs began in earnest as a specialized science. Parr recounts how, with streamlined dairy production thanks to better cattle and the quality-control methods set in place, dairying in the region, especially in Tillamook, Oregon, rapidly grew to such size that dairy cooperatives began to form. She tells the story of Tillamook’s eponymous cheese cooperative , operating with fourteen creameries and cheese factories by the turn of the twentieth century,and how the Pacific Northwest’s dairy prowess caught the attention of cheese giant Kraft...