Issue link: https://viewer.e-digitaledition.com/i/1484371
B E S T C H E E S E S 202 2 culturecheesemag.com 9 A n t h o n y B ou r d a i n : T he truth is that I live in complete service to something that will never love me back or know that I exist, and that is both heartbreaking and deeply rewarding, and is potentially love's highest calling. Simone de Beauvoir talks about women experiencing annihilation in love, and while her book, Second Sex, is a critique of patriarchal coupling, de Beauvoir didn't say anything about the love between a woman and a wheel of cheese. She was French, so I have to assume she'd understand. My first heartbreak inspired my first job in cheese. I had just graduated college with a degree in religious studies and was quickly circling the drain of existential despair that leads most people to graduate school. The truth is that I never liked school and the idea of another two to four years in academics seemed unfathomably painful. My soon-to-be-ex boyfriend told me to "relax" and "do something enjoyable for a change, like work at a cheese shop" while I figured out what I wanted from a career. I FROM " You have to be a romantic to invest yourself, your money, and your time in cheese. " signed on for a cheesemaking apprenticeship at a raw milk dairy farm in Massachusetts. I loved the work deeply and found that of all the places I was stealing away to cry, the creamery was not one of them. I felt a deep sense of purpose and devotion that comes naturally when you create something. The cheese didn't care that I was too heartbroken to eat, or that I was sleeping in the farmhouse's attic crawl space, knocking my head against the ceiling every night. The cows had to be milked regardless, the cheese had to be turned, and I desperately needed to be needed. So, there I stayed through the fall, until I fled because I couldn't stand the smell of cow shit and it had started to snow. Back in New York, I began working behind the counter of Lucy's Whey in Chelsea Market. I developed crushes on most of the customers, my favorites being the single New York women who had all moved there in the 1970s and 80s. They were fun and neurotic, with boyfriends half their age and apartments all I remember hearing it for the first time and getting defensive because I didn't want to be exposed as the hopeless romantic that I am.