The Great Parmesan Cheese Debate

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Earlier this year, Mariana Giusti, a journalist at the Financial Times, wrote a viral article about food.

The name of the article was Everything I, an Italian, thought I knew about Italian food is a lie.

Mariana had been feeling aggravated by the preciousness around Italian food for years.

As an Italian living abroad, I think you're doubly subject to the huge projections around Italian food.

All the fads, all the tropes, you know, from

how carbonara is this ancient, ancient, sacred, almost Roman recipe to how pizza has a similar godlike perfection.

A friend told Mariana she should check out the work of Alberto Grandi, an Italian historian, author, podcaster, and general rabble-rouser.

As soon as she did, she knew she had to write an article about him.

She also put us in touch.

I am an economic history teacher in the University of Parma.

Not teacher,

professor.

Professor, yes, okay.

Grandi studies how traditions are invented.

And when he started looking at the history of many quintessentially Italian foods, well, he found a lot of inventions.

He spoke to me with the help of a translator.

By teaching, he found out all these stories about Italian food being myth and legend, so he became interested in debunking that.

It's widely thought to be an historic dish from Rome, but actually, in 1944, an Italian chef making a meal for members of the U.S.

Army used the rich cream, milk, butter, and bacon of that army to whip up a new pasta.

And that's how it was born.

Grandi's done similar debunkings with tiramisu, panettone, cheese pizza, and olive oil, which he says wasn't popular before the 1950s.

People in southern Italy used olive oil for lamps,

not to eat.

Get out of here.

Okay, okay.

Needless to say, Grandi's work is controversial, especially in Italy.

Mariana saw that firsthand when she interviewed him at a restaurant in Parma, a city in the north-central part of the country.

Genuinely, there are a lot of people there who disagree with him.

So he was literally checking behind him as we spoke, being like, man, people hate me here.

People hate him there because it's a bastion of Italian cuisine.

Prosciutto de Parma is from there.

Parmelot, the industrial food giant, is too.

And of course, it's the home of Parmesan cheese.

More specifically, Parma is the center of the only region in the world that makes Parmigiano-Reggiano.

Those big blonde wheels of cheese you see at gourmet food stores that have an official trademark stamped into their sides.

You can make Parmesan elsewhere, but there are restrictions.

Like here, you can't call the American-made version Parmigiano-Reggiano.

It has to be labeled Parmesan.

Basically, Parmigiano-Reggiano is a brand, and Parmesan is just a cheese.

And that's why what Grandi has to say about Parmesan is so surprising.

So what he said is, I always say,

we have the best Parmigiano ever, but if you want to eat the original Parmigiano like

our great-grandparents used to eat, you should go to Milwaukee or Madison.

Yeah.

Alberto Grandi says if you want to know what real Italian parmesan tastes like, the kind that was made 100 years ago, you should go to Wisconsin.

This is Dakota Ring.

I'm Willip Haskin.

I've walked right by Wisconsin Parmesan hundreds of times while grocery shopping.

It's a staple of American supermarkets.

And I've always assumed it was air sats, a pale copy, more affordable, but not as good as the crumbly, rich Italian real thing.

Have I been snubbing a delicacy?

In this episode, we'll follow Parmesan as it criss-crosses the Atlantic, tracing a history that involves intrepid immigrants, lucrative businesses, a green shaker of cheese, and the craving for tradition and identity.

Parmesan is a food, but it's not just a food.

So today on Decodering, we think the unthinkable.

Could Wisconsin Parmesan be more authentic than what you might get get in Italy?

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When Wisconsin became a state in 1848, Parmigian was already 600 years old.

Emilia-Romagna's medieval monks, hungry for a long-lasting cheese,

invented Parmigiano.

That's the actor Stanley Tucci in his sumptuous travel series, Searching for Italy.

Thank God for them.

In this episode, he's visiting the Italian region of Emilia-Romana, which sprawls across north-central Italy.

It's one of the country's wealthiest areas with a rich culinary and cultural tradition.

Its cities include Bologna, Modena, the home of balsamic vinegar, and Parma, all of which dapple the Po River Valley, where Parmesan was first made.

Smell, smell, smell.

This is the smelling is unbelievable.

The smell is unbelievable.

The 13th and 14th century monks who first made the cheese from their cow's milk got so good at it, they soon had enough to sell.

And Parmesan became an early European luxury food, eaten and admired by the likes of Henry VIII, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin.

In the 1930s, a consortium of producers and traders began to oversee the so-called king of cheese.

They demarcated an area around the cities of Parma and Reggio Emilia and essentially trademarked the cheese coming out of that region as Parmigiano-Reggiano.

It has since become an Italian export par excellence.

It's known and celebrated all over the world for, among other things, the traditional manner in which it is made.

For 1,000 years, nothing is changed.

Everything is the same.

Perhaps the pulp is a little bit bigger.

Perhaps the machines, the mix are a little bit bigger.

But ritual is suck like the same.

There are all sorts of quaint aspects to the Parmesan making process in Italy you would never see in America.

Like a cutting tool called a spino or how workers gather the early cheese in almost a cheesecloth hammock to drain it over copper vats.

There's even a special metal hammer.

It's used to knock on the aging cheese wheels to gauge whether they're developing properly.

And this is the good sound, so it means it's solid.

There's no pockets, no air pockets.

And this whole process takes time.

An official Parmigiano-Reggiano must be aged for at least two years, and many are aged for longer.

The result is a coarse, almost grainy cheese flecked with white crystals that has a salty, nutty intensity.

But like good wines, no two wheels will be exactly the same.

The global market for these golden fromages is about $1.5 billion.

And at more than $500 a pop, these 72-pound cheeses are worth stealing.

In 30 years on the force, Alessandro Vicari has never seen a wave of robberies like this.

This cheese can be quite valuable.

Yes, cheese.

These are the streets of Reggio Emilia, Italy, home to Parmesan.

No offense to Wisconsin Parmesan, but I have not heard of anyone trying to make off with it.

Because it's so much easier to produce, generic Parmesan is much cheaper than Parmesano-Reggiano, but there's also a lot more of it.

The global market for plain old Parmesan is $16 billion,

and Wisconsin alone makes 83 million pounds of the stuff.

83 million pounds that Alberto Grandi says come out of a venerable tradition.

And before getting into the details of that tradition, I just want to tell you a little more about him.

Like that he has a lot of academic backup.

There's a lot of scholarship out there about Italian food, which has a complicated history going back centuries.

Tomatoes and pasta are famously not from Italy.

And generally speaking, Grandi's work builds on and is broadly in line with that of his peers.

He's not the first or only expert to debunk legends about Carbonara or olive oil or tiramisu, though he may be the only one with a podcast.

Alberto Grandi, one Jordan Alberto.

Ciao Daniel.

And this, I think, is what really sets him apart.

Just how willing he is to talk about all of these things publicly.

Do you think of yourself as a contrarian?

Like, do you like to, I sort of sometimes like this myself, but do you like to just be like, no, no, no, this is the truth?

Or is it just in your scholarship?

Both.

He says, I like conflict.

I used to be in politics and I was famous for fighting all the time, but also I'm a historian and accuracy is very important and now I feel more honest with myself.

Grandi's background in politics is also relevant because his debunkings are political.

For example, just a couple years ago, in 2019, the Archbishop of Bologna wanted to offer tortellini without pork filling at a city celebration so that Muslim residents could participate.

But a far-right political leader declared pork-free tortellini an attempt to, quote, erase our history and culture.

Grandi then publicly pointed out that tortellini didn't even contain pork until the late 19th century.

So he's not just being contrarian for the hell of it.

Keep this all in mind as we turn back to Parmesan, a food that's deliciousness and reputation is totally tangled up with tradition.

Can he tell me the story about Parmesan and then tell me where

he's eating it?

I want to know.

the story of American Parmesan goes back to roughly 100 years ago when the Italian immigrants in between the two wars found themselves in America and headed to what they heard was the dairy state, so Wisconsin, and started making cheese that was similar to Parmigiano.

What happened is over the years, starting from the 60s in Italy, Parmigiano had an evolution that made them what they are today, while the Wisconsin Parmesan stayed more or less true to the original recipe.

Granny says the Italian stuff used to be softer and have more fat, and that it looked different, too.

Completely black.

He means the rind was totally black instead of the deep yellow with all of those markings on it you see on a parmesan oreggiano today.

It wasn't a wheel, it was like a cylinder, it was tall and it was smaller.

He told me the name of a Wisconsin company he thought was making a parmesan like this.

It's called Sartori.

Sartori was founded in 1939 and is now a fourth-generation company headquartered between Milwaukee and Green Bay.

It sells a variety of cheeses that are available in your local supermarket and also in 72 countries worldwide.

And if you go to their website, you can see how different Sartori's Parmesan is from contemporary Italian Parmigiano Reggiano.

It's smaller with that black rind and it appears to have a different texture too.

Frankly, I had to have it.

The idea that there is a parmesan being made in the Midwest right now that is somehow more authentic than the one being made in the country that birthed, protects, and celebrates it?

Gimme.

So I ordered the Parmesan to be shipped to my house and dove into what I thought was going to be the history of a food, but turned out to be, as everything always is,

a history of people.

We'll be right back.

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So with the intriguing Wisconsin Parmesan in the mail, I dove in on how Wisconsin and Parmesan even became two words you could say right next to each other and have them make sense.

It all has to do with taste, inventiveness, and the business acumen of Italian immigrants.

My name is Simone Cinotto, and I teach modern history at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Polenso, Italy.

Simone Cinotto is the author of, among other books, The Italian American Table.

And he too is full of fascinating, counterintuitive facts about Italian staples.

Even the tomato, which is the icon of, of course, is an American plant, got to Italy quite early.

In the early 1500s.

Because Italy, most of Italy was part of the Spanish Empire.

And for 300 years, nobody cared.

You know, it was like, it was not even considered a food.

Anyway, back to the immigrants.

New York City, as a port of arrival of three and a half millions of Italians between the late 19th century and the early 20th.

From New York, some of these millions of immigrants moved on to cities like Chicago and Philadelphia.

Many of them were from southern Italy and spoke only regional dialects.

Italy had only become a unified nation in 1861, and they wouldn't necessarily even have identified as Italian.

They had also been very poor.

They were coming from homes with dirt floors, no running water, and a fireplace to cook over.

Their diet was heavy in vegetables they could grow themselves, and meat was a luxury.

So now imagine these people transport in New York, they could not grow their food anymore or you know, tend their animals.

In America, they had to start doing something they had never really done before: buy their food, which at least now they could afford to do.

The food that the American food industry

provided them, uh, even if they were poor.

Okay,

so the white flour, the butter, the eggs, coffee and sugar, and beef, beef and pork, which was something that

was really special occasion food for them back in southern Italy.

Using these newly accessible ingredients, southern Italian women started to reimagine dishes from back home and in the process began to create Italian American red sauce cuisine, in which abundance itself is a kind of ingredient.

Think of restaurants with red check tablecloths serving fried chicken cutlets the size of plates and baked pastas slathered in cheese.

But what Cinotto was sure to stress was that it wasn't just American largesse that fueled this new cuisine.

See, food companies in Italy started exporting products to the Italian diaspora.

Things like canned tomatoes and Durham wheat pasta, which many of the newly arrived immigrants had never seen before.

Products that helped create a sense of identity.

The importers had all the interest in convincing the immigrants that they could prove to be Italian actually for the first time with

buying their products.

Meanwhile, immigrants were sending money back to their families, and a lot of these products were becoming more affordable and available, not just in America, but in Italy itself.

And Italian cheese was part of this back and forth too.

By the 1920s, America was importing about 40 to 45 million pounds of it annually.

And Italian immigrants in the U.S.

were about to start making cheese in their new country.

And the center of that new industry was going to be in, yep,

you got it.

Some people call it America's Dairyland, but no matter what name we give it, Wisconsin offers a countryside of rolling green hills.

I know that Wisconsin has a long and proud dairy tradition.

It makes many excellent cheeses, though it's probably best known for its cheddar, its squeaky cheese curds, and the giant yellow foam cheese wedges that adorn the heads of Packers football fans.

But Wisconsin Parmesan is a little niche, and I needed the guide.

I found one in Mike Matacheski.

I am a retired master cheesemaker.

I mastered in Parmesan, Romano, Siago.

Mike is a Wisconsinite, born and raised, and he's been around cheese his whole life.

My grandparents had a dairy farm just outside of Anagoga, Wisconsin, where I would visit all the time.

He started making Italian-style cheese in the early 1990s and spent much of his career at Sartori, the company that makes the Parmesan I had ordered in the mail and was by now waiting in my fridge.

Mike's traveled extensively in Italy.

He's intimately familiar with the distinctions between the Parmesan process here and there, and he's also a bit of a history buff.

It's Mike who put me onto the man who seems to have been instrumental in first bringing Parmesan to Wisconsin.

A man named It's So Good.

Count Bolognese?

Count Giulio Bolognese was an Italian diplomat who became the Consul General in Chicago in 1912.

He was from northern Italy, not too far from Parma, and he seems to have been a huge hit with Chicago society.

There are a lot of newspaper articles about him, his strapping blonde good looks, and his willingness to participate in charity tennis tournaments despite never having played tennis.

He married the daughter of an Italian immigrant and started looking for land in northern Wisconsin.

1870s, it was covered with pine, white and red pine.

and they were all cut down.

And it was what we called the cutover.

The nature of the land was the best thing as a farm would be a dairy farm of some sort.

In 1918, Bolognese bought a 1700-acre farm in cutover country, really far north up by Lake Superior.

And pretty soon, articles were referring to the kind of cheese he was making there.

Yes, a parma cheese.

Bolognese first sold his parmesan locally, but with 100,000 Italians living in northern Wisconsin and Upper Michigan, there was a bigger market to tap.

So he teamed up with another Italian in Minnesota.

He had a business partner who also worked for Italy, who was stationed in Duluth.

Bolognese's new business partner had attended agricultural school in the Po Valley, where Parmesan comes from.

They had a bunch of plants in northern Michigan, around Wisconsin.

In 1929, they opened the largest Italian cheese factory in the United States.

Bolognese and his partner made frequent trips to Italy to study cheesemaking, and they even brought 10 northern Italian cheesemakers back.

They also staffed their business with immigrants.

Bolognese was always trying to find Italians that he could connect with to work.

One of them was Paolo Sartori, who eventually left and founded a cheese company that would become, yes, Sartori, the company who made the parmesan loitering in my fridge.

So let's take stock for a second.

You have Po Valley immigrants thriving in Wisconsin by recreating Italian Parmesan.

Grandi's story about Wisconsin Parmesan being the real deal was checking out.

It was time to take this storied Wisconsin parm and put it to a taste test.

We'll be right back.

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Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

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He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, no, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's going to tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

AKA Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

So remember what Alberto Grandi said.

Italian immigrants had gone to Wisconsin, started making Parmesan there, and it hadn't changed.

Well, Parmesan in Italy had.

Now I can't go back in time a hundred years to taste either, but I could taste the current versions side by side to see if I could learn something.

So Katie Shepard, Dakota Rings producer and I went to Bushwick, Brooklyn to do just that.

We visited a store called Foster Sundry.

It's a cafe and upscale grocery that sits on the corner of a street where bars and coffee shops rub shoulders with dollar stores and bodegas.

It's got big glass windows and a long, well-stocked cheese counter, and it's a butcher, too.

They were turning half a pig into sausages while we were there.

We arrived, we headed down a slippery metal staircase to the basement and headed into an office underneath the stairs, right near the dishwasher, where there was a desk with enough space to lay out some cheese.

It's a hot, airless room.

Where I think the Wi-Fi router is under here somewhere, and we are about to taste some Parmigianos, some Parmesans.

That's Aaron Foster, the owner.

He's been a cheesemonger for 20 years.

Among other things, he's opened the cheese counters at two very high-profile Whole Foods in New York City and studied at the Slow Food Institute in Italy.

One of the employees at Foster Sundry had put together a blind cheese tasting for us.

Two plates laden with eight different parmesans in all shades of yellow.

Of those, one was a Parmigiano-Reggiano and one was the Sartori Parmesan.

We didn't know which was which.

So, yeah, you bring it up close to your face, you smell it, you kind of pinching it in your fingers a little bit, your fingers are going to get greasy.

Pinching it, that's so fun to pinch cheese.

We tried all eight parmesans, but I'm going to focus on the two this whole test was set up for.

The first of those was a craggy hunk of pale, crumbly cheese with some white flecks in it that sure looked like a parmesano-reggiano.

So, I get more, like a more floral,

maybe even

tomato water.

Yeah, this is parmesan.

Yeah.

Not only is it parmesan, it's good parmesan.

Yeah.

I hope that it's good parmesan.

Remember, this was a blind taste test, so we were a little worried about being overconfident.

It's young.

It's on the younger side.

It's still quite moist.

Yeah.

The texture is also just so much better.

Right?

It's so, what's better about it?

It's not wax.

It's a crumblier.

Yeah.

And then there was the other cheese, a perfectly smooth isosceles triangle.

Unremarkable appearance.

Weird.

Very sweet.

And then some weird packagey taste, right?

Yeah, it's so different from anything we've had so far.

Woo!

It is very sweet.

It is very sweet.

So yeah, the first cheese you heard us tasting was a Parmigiano-Reggiano.

I love it.

It's great.

I never don't have Parmesan in my fridge.

And when I say Parmesan, just to be clear, Parmigiano-Reggiano.

And the other somewhat disappointing cheese was the Sartori Parmesan.

The black rind it had come in had peeled right off.

Oh, I did.

I nailed Sartori.

You did nail Sartori.

I gotta say, tasting these two cheeses side by side made it hard to believe that Italian Parmesan had ever tasted like today's Sartori.

So smooth and so sweet.

They were just so

different.

All my research had convinced me that these two cheeses had a hundred years ago been going for the same thing.

How had they diverged so dramatically?

And where did that leave Alberto Grandi's claim about Wisconsin Parmesan?

That it was the one that tasted most like that 100-year-old ancestor?

Well, as I would find out, the answer to these questions could be found in what happened on both sides of the Atlantic that turned Parmesan into a multi-billion dollar business.

So, if the wave of Italian immigration at the turn of the 20th century brought Parmigan to America, what happened after World War II changed it further, and not just in America.

Stefano Magagnoli is a professor of economic history at the University of Parma, and he has written extensively about Parmigiano-Reggiano.

He's also friends with Alberto Grandi.

He explained to me that prior to the 1950s, Parmigiano was relatively relatively unknown in the southern part of Italy.

Parmigzano Reggiano, cheese,

became

popular, were famous worldwide

only after the Second World War,

when Italy experienced the economic miracle.

The economic miracle is what happened to Italy after the war, when it went through tremendous growth and millions of Italians became middle class in a hurry.

This was obviously good, but Italians had just lived through multiple periods of incredible disruption, from poverty to war to dizzying growth.

And in this kind of chaos, tradition, or just the idea of it, becomes very alluring.

It was during this time that a number of dishes came to be seen as traditionally Italian, even though they had only been created or popularized thanks to the new and newly affordable ingredients the economic miracle provided, like the aforementioned carbonara and tiramisu, which is made with a supermarket cookie first introduced in 1948.

Parmigiano-Reggiano also became far more widespread at this time as the consortium of producers and traders that oversees it began advertising.

The first advertising after the war in the 1950s, more or less,

said that the Parmizano Reggiano is made

as it was made seventh century ago.

Of course, it is not true.

It was a marketing

way to attract and to communicate the idea of tradition.

No one is trying to insult Parmigiano-Reggiano to dethrone the king of cheese.

But of course, it's not being made the way monks in the 13th century did.

They didn't have electricity and running water and copper vats and a million other things.

More to the point, it's not being made exactly how it was when the consortium first standardized it in the 1930s, when the process was barely industrialized.

And one very visible example of this is the black rind Alberto Grandi mentioned and that Stefano Magagnoli confirms the cheese used to have.

Magagnoli says this color formed naturally on the surface of the cheese.

But then in 1963, the consortium decided to start scraping it off so they could leave markings directly on the now blonde rind to make it harder to counterfeit.

Every two, three weeks, they have to use a tool to remove the fat from the surface of the whale.

The consortium changed the cheese to keep control of it, to help grow it into a bigger and bigger business.

Meanwhile, in America, something else was changing for Parmesan in the post-war period.

The people eating it.

When Italian immigrants had first arrived earlier in the century, they were derided as swarthy, dark garlic eaters.

But as they became assimilated, so did their food.

By By the 1950s, you have Dean Martin, born Dino Crochetti in Ohio, crooning about all things Italian.

You have Disney's Lady and the Tramp smooching over a shared piece of spaghetti.

Pizza spreading out of cities and into the heartland and frozen lasagna, too.

Magazines had to teach people how to pronounce these words.

These new mass-produced products made it possible for everyone to bring a little bit of Italy into their kitchen.

Like this 1950s Chef Boyardi spaghetti sauce.

Because the recipe for this tangy sauce has been brought over from Italy by this famous Italian chef.

But as more and more of these Italian-inflected products flooded the market, it turned out they didn't really have to taste Italian or even particularly good.

Do you remember when you first tasted Parmesan?

Oh, of course I do, and it was horrible.

The first Parmesan I ever tasted in my life was grated Parmesan in that green can

that said K-R-E-F-T on it.

It smelled like baby barf.

Mike Matacheski is referring to the green can of pre-grated parmesan made by Kraft that doesn't even have to be refrigerated.

These Kraft canisters became available after World War II and were a staple of American life.

Nearly as recognizable as a Campbell soup can and advertised all over TV as in this ad from 1969.

Think we're only good on Italian food?

Think we're only good on Italian food, this blown-out-sounding commercial says.

Then it shows the green can being shaken over soup, salads, and pizza, and finishes with the line: Kraft Parmesan is as American as pizza pie.

Italian Americans had created the domestic market for parmesan, but now an American company was selling a homogenized version to the rest of the country as simply American food.

And it didn't stop there.

Burger Kings brought back their real Parmesan sandwich.

They say it tastes so authentic and turned you Italian.

I say no way.

But by the 1970s and 80s, Italians had something to say about this Americanization of Parm.

The Parmigiano-Reggiano Consortium and famous cookbook authors like Marcella Hazan began to tell Americans this cheese they thought was Parmesan was not very good, and they should try the real thing.

There are waves of articles about Parmigiano's pronunciation and virtues, how excellent it is, how gourmet, how actually authentic.

By the time Mike Matachewski started at Sartori in the 1990s, they were not following some old handed-down recipe.

They were experimenting, trying to navigate these new circumstances.

They wanted to make something yummier than the pre-graded Parmesan, but their customers weren't necessarily familiar with the taste of Parmigiano-Reggiano.

They hadn't grown up eating it.

Sartori needed to make something up to their standards that pleased consumers too.

There's always a battle between the cheeses for, you know, who's better or whatever.

And it's just like, well,

people in different places have different tastes.

Mike actually laughed at the idea that the Parmesan being made in Wisconsin hadn't changed over the decades.

It absolutely has.

And it's become its own thing.

Wisconsin Parmesan.

Like under Sartori, we found that our customers tended to prefer our cheese because of its own attributes, that it was sweeter and fruitier and less salty.

than Reggiano.

Mike explained that the black rind on Sartori was meant to appeal to customers too.

It's actually not a rind.

It's a decorative wax that is put on late in the process.

It's meant to make it look like what Parmesan looked like back when Count Bologniese was making it.

It's meant to make it look traditional, but in the Italian-American Wisconsin way.

Not that Mike can't appreciate a good, traditionally made Italian cheese.

When we were talking, he started reminiscing about one he'd eaten in Italy.

There was this nine-year-old Reggiano.

It was just like, oh my God, it was just amazing.

Absolutely amazing.

One of the best cheeses I've ever had in my life.

But it's nine years old.

And you would never see that cheese in the United States.

Absolutely never.

You would never see that cheese in America because it just takes too long to make.

It wouldn't pay.

There isn't really a market for high-end American parmesan.

Italy's got that cornered.

This sort of thing came up a lot talking with Mike, how different business models have produced different kinds of Parmesan.

Simply put, Parmigiano-Reggiano is a gourmet product that commands gourmet prices.

Parmesan in the U.S.

is an industrial product made faster and in vaster quantities.

That means it's more affordable and reaches more people.

They're both very successful products, but they are also very different cheeses.

Do you have a preference?

I know that's maybe a loaded question, but.

Well, of course, that's a loaded question.

My own cheese is the best, right?

I had one more thing to do.

So, yes.

I reached back out to Alberto Grandi to tell him that I had unintentionally out-contrarianed a contrarian and that he was wrong.

Wisconsin Parm is not the same cheese it was 100 years ago.

And though its Italian cousin, Parmigiano-Reggiano, is different too, it's less different.

He still insisted that Wisconsin Parmesan looks more like that ancestor than Italian Parmigiano does, thanks to that black wax.

But he was otherwise a very good sport.

He basically agrees with Mike Matachewski that it's all about different people in different places having different tastes, and how all of this adds up to create something authentic to them.

So,

ultimately, what he wanted to underline is this absurd pretense that Italians have to plant an Italian flag on Parmesan and say, like, you shouldn't even call it Parmesan, because they are clearly different cheeses with clearly different markets and different prices and different taste.

There's a real irony to what Grandi had to say about Wisconsin Parmesan.

And it's that all of his provocative debunkings of Italian food myths are driven by a purpose to convey that foods are constantly changing, just like people.

He said his whole mission and ultimate goal is to tell people that you cannot freeze identity, because if you freeze identity and tradition at one point, you end up killing it.

We invent traditions to preserve a connection to our past, to make things we love feel permanent and unchanging, whether that's a cheese or something less tangible, like where we're from.

But those connections are only as permanent and unchanging as we are, which let's face it, isn't very.

The traditions that endure are the ones that keep up with us.

It's like when you're on a train and a second train appears on a parallel track running at the same speed.

When you look at it, it can seem like no one is moving at all.

Even though both trains, both us and our traditions, are hurtling forward.

Parmesan, even with all its rules, has been moving with us.

It started as an Italian tradition, but when you make something this good, people are going to spread it, adopt it, change it, and make it into a tradition of their very own.

Too bad because the story is a better anecdote.

If Wisconsin Parmers on now is really good, but it's only

counting for taste.

This is Decodering.

I'm Willa Paskin.

You can find me on Twitter at Willa Paskin.

And if you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, you can email us at decodering at slate.com.

This episode was written by me.

I produced Decodering with Katie Shepard.

This episode was edited by Andrea Bruce.

We had production help from Patrick Fort and editing help from Joel Meyer.

Derek John is Slate's executive producer of Narrative Podcasts.

Merit Jacob is Senior Technical Director.

I want to give an especial thank you to Giacomo Stefanini for translating.

I'd also like to thank Fabio Parasecoli, Ken Kane, Thomas McNami, Dan Weber, Irine Graziosi, James Norton, and Ian McCallan, whose knowledge and book, Red Sauce, How Italian Food Became American, were extraordinarily helpful.

And I suggest that you pick up the book.

You should also all go read Mariana Giusti's article in the Financial Times.

And if you feel like nerding out, I also recommend the 1948 academic study, Italian Cheese Production in the American Dairy Region.

We also included clips in this episode from David Rocco's YouTube channel about how Parmigiano-Reggiano is made, and from Gennaro Contaldi's YouTube documentary on the same subject.

If you haven't yet, please subscribe and rate our feed on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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We'll see you next week.