The cheese shops I visited this week all adhere to a common philosophy, a New American pride and sensibility, celebrating the bounty and fat gleaned from the land.  In some cases, while they may showcase American foods with particular pride, the same attention is given to obscure specialty products from around the world (boutique Spanish olive oil, Italian fennel powder, etc), like at Caseus, a cheese shop and restaurant in New Haven that offers Spanish tapas history classes with as much ease as it does cheese and poetry pairings, and the Darien Cheese Shop in Darien, Connecticut, which sources its saucisson as finickily as it does its Parmigiano. Others focus on a circumscribed area, waxing melodic about the joys of the local: Farmstead, a cheese shop and restaurant in Providence that prides itself on a selection of obscure American microbrews and takes its cheesemongers on field trips, and Saxelby Cheesemongers, a tiny stall in New York’s Essex Street Market that just sells cheese from the American Northeast. 

An idea put forth by Charlotte Druckman in this month’s Gastronomica magazine (Vol 7 No. 3) puts an interesting spin on why these are all actually part of the same phenomenon. “Thierry Marx [avant-garde French chef] is proof that each chef has an inimitable culinary fingerprint, that the food he or she makes is an index tracing the past.  Marx embodies the idea that a person absorbs the terroir of his or her current residence and carries it to the next stop, along with all of the other stops on life’s tour. Nothing can be as local as what emerges from the terroir of a single self. Isn’t this the ultimate localization?”   

In a world in which, let’s face it, food from afar is often easier and cheaper to source food than anything local, making choices about what to sell is as much about taste, philosophy and lifestyle as it is about practicality. Furthermore, we ourselves have such scattered pasts that a shop or restaurant that reflects our roots can have a global spectrum without being falsely ascribed. 

Those who stick to the local have a moral advantage, but also a capital one: the green and local sells, at least for the moment. Yes, I buy local foods as often as possible, because I believe they’re better for both the ecosystem and the local economy. But I’m willing to give credit even to things that come from elsewhere, provided there’s a close connection: that the shopkeeper or chef loves the thing and knows it well; in one very narrow sense, that makes it local. In a world of loose boundaries and ease of transport, where, with very little obvious consequence, things can come from anywhere and do, our particular choices are the measure of us, the canvas on which we consciously paint our lives.