I can't believe this special brand of reality TV has been going on since December and I just found out about it tonight. I was trying to pay attention to Anderson Cooper AND read the crawl at the bottom of the TV screen simultaneously, but you know it's usually one or the other. I know some of you are jaded cynics (err, proud skeptics?) and would never believe that this wasn't just made up by **The Farmer in the Dell, but I assure you, sirs and madams, that this is a real story out of England. It's also great news for my drunk friend who could use a hunk of this to put on the DVD player when watching Bambi.
WESTCOMBE, England - Aging cheddar Web site cultivates a following
Call it a cheesy publicity stunt, but one cheese maker's approach to bringing attention to a millenniums-old food-making practice has become an odd fascination on the Internet. Since www.cheddarvision.tv debuted in December, the Web site offering a live broadcast of a round slab of English cheddar cheese slowly maturing has had more than 1.2 million hits. From a group of middle school students in Florida to a 32-year-old, self-described cheese freak in London, the increasingly moldy cheddar is cultivating cult status.
"We sat around the table, wondering how we could get across to people how long it takes to produce a traditional cheese," said Tom Calvar, the 20-something cheese whiz from the dairy cooperative West Country Farmhouse Cheesemakers, of which his family's farm is a member. "We thought, why not have a live webcam feed of it, just 24-7? And that's what we did."
The 23-kilogram, or about 50 pound, cheese lies on an upper-level shelf in a dank storage barn in Westcombe, about a three-hour drive southwest of London. The celebrity cheese is one of some five thousand rounds of calcium-rich goo sealed in cheesecloth and lard and swirling with bacteria. But this cheddar is the only one in the barn that has Mother Nature's slow aging process captured by a webcam fastened to a McGyver-esque concoction of wood planks, nails, a desk lamp and kite string. "People from all over the world are e-mailing us about the cheese. Somebody has written lots of songs about. It has been invited to a wedding. We've had post cards sent to it," Calvar said.
Calvar and other artisan cheese makers on his family-managed farm turn the cheese about once a week to ensure it keeps its shape. Calvar says the star of cheddarvision.tv will stay under the webcam's lens for about a year before it is auctioned off for charity. If that's too long a time to gaze into dairy cyberspace, YouTube.com has a time-elapsed video of the cheese's first three months of life. London-based mortgage broker Alan Johnson said he wouldn't mind getting a slice of the cheddarvision.tv cheddar once its matured. "Everyone would want to own a piece of that," Johnson said. There's also a MySpace.com Web page dedicated to the cheddar, described as a single Capricorn according to its online profile.
"When I first saw the link to it, I think there were only 13 or 14 people listed as friends [of the cheddar]," Johnson said. Now there are more than 860 Myspace.com 'friends' -- from New Zealand to New York -- who have pledged their love for the cheese. Cheese purveyor Patricia Michelson admitted that she wished she'd thought of putting a webcam in her cheese storage room at her high-end London cheese shop, La Fromagerie. "The fact is that most people think of cheese as being a little bit of yellow square in plastic wrap," she said. "Actually seeing the real thing in its glory, from start to finish. Watching it, live, in real time, growing and growing its molds and getting darker and literally, slowly aging is a phenomenon," she added.
Click here to see LIVE! NUDE! CHEESE! (Just kidding about the "nude" part. I don't think you can classify something that never wears clothes as nude, and cheese doesn't ever wear clothes so it's totally safe for work. Unless you'll get fired for looking at some firm, voluptuous cheese while you're on the clock! Wait, you better not look at this live cheese cam at work, how would you even begin to explain it to your boss? I mean, it's live video of CHEESE.
I wonder what they'll think of next. It seems like the only untapped live webcam feed will be of paint drying, which will hopefully coincide with smell-o-vision.
**The Farmer in the Dell is the one who spread that nasty gossip about the cheese standing alone, when in fact the cheese actually took a wife. Her name was Brie, and together they had Babybels.
A special "'ello love" to readers in England! I have nothing against your cheese, in fact I quite like it. What I wrote is just a sample of yank humor. Damn yanks!
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