Blog #6: Eating Cheese in the Land of Cheeseheads (Andrew Krump)

My grandparents spent their working careers on their dairy farm just outside Green Bay, a farm that has been in the family for over 100 years and several generations. My mom and aunt grew up on this farm and helped with many of the chores including bailing hay and tending to some of the cows and pigs. At ~120 acres, the farm is small by modern standards. After selling their cows and retiring in the early 2000s, my grandparents have rented their land to a local farmer who leases the use of many of the fields in the area that were also once family farms.

Wisconsin is known for three things primarily: beer, cheese, and the Green Bay Packers. It's impossible to spend more than a few minutes in the Green Bay area without seeing a Packers license plate or flag. Especially in the rural parts of the area, it's nearly impossible to go a day without eating the cheese either. Parts of the Green Bay area has a heavy Belgian influence and a cabbage and pork sausage, called tripp, is widely available in the area. For meals or snacks, my Grandma often makes tripp and serves cheese curds. Cheese curds, as dairy farmers know them, are just that: curds of cheese and are not breaded and fried (these are fried cheese curds). My grandparents always have several varieties of cheese on hand in various forms and it's always extremely fresh (it's not going very far). In short, there is some strong validity for calling Wisconsinites "Cheeseheads".

Cheese and sausage are so abundant and widely consumed in rural Green Bay because the locals are largely dairy and pig farmers. This leads to abundance from an economic perspective, but there are definitely cultural factors at play as well. It seems like when you make dairy or hog farming your life's work, there's a special appreciation for the end result. Additionally, being close to the source of these end products definitely produces better cheese and probably reduces the appeal of Kraft Singles considerably. So at least in Green Bay, economics, culture, and familiarity are intertwined when it comes to food.