Cheesemakers are really very cool

It's obvious to most of us that if you eat a tomato in season it tastes more divine and perfect than a tomato eaten any other time. Just like there is something old and true in our Puritan souls that prefers sweet corn sold on the side of the road in the orange hours of September over the kernels you can get in the freezer aisle the rest of the year.

But what we probably don't know is that the same intrinsic law applies to cheese that is made — by hand! — in our part of the world when it is compared to the bigger, cheaper varieties you can buy in any grocery store in America.

The good news about cheese is that here in New England we're sort of expert at it — even famous around the country and other parts of the world for our skills. Our climate, it turns out, is good for something after all. The four seasons do complicated, cathartic things to grass which, in turn, does things to the milk ruminant animals produce. The farmstead cheese produced locally is varied and many.

The bad news is, it ain't cheap. A piece of advice though: Do not complain to a cheesemaker in Massachusetts that you would buy their stuff if it only cost the same as a block of Velveeta.

The local cheesemaker had to rise early for a first milking then proceed with a day full of the kind of chores that come with keeping cows or goats or sheep. And on the days that they're making cheese, they have to haul huge amounts of fresh milk to a heat source where they separate it into curds. The curds have to bewarmed, which can mean hours of literally standing there and mixing it to maintain the proper temperature.

Also, that cheesemaker needs to have an encyclopedic knowledge about what the weather's been like, what their animals have been eating and where they are in their milking cycle, because all of those variables are constantly influx and can totally alter the way a curd forms and what the cheese is going to taste like.

Then, when the process is all done, these folks have to package the stuff and drive either to a farmer's market or a local shop — usually the same day with a fresh cheese – to sell it. And drive home to start the same thing all over again.

By contrast, that block of Velveeta was processed and packaged by a machine. The dairies that provide the milk used to make it are probably so large they're subsidized by the government and Velveeta brand can keep its prices so low because its product is sold to millions of people through massive grocery chains.

Basically, we like to get paid fairly for working harding. So do local cheesemakers.