The cheese ripening initiative

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[[File:|thumb|]] At the beginning of September 2021, The Soft Protest Digest was invited to the Food Art Film Festival 2021, run by the Food Lab of the Jan van Eyck Academie. This year, the festival embraced locality. After more than a year of restrictions and keeping our distance, it was time to strengthen the ties with the city, the region, local chefs, beekeepers, and farmers.
Thus, at the beginning of August, Robin invited 10 people related to the Academie to keep samples of fresh cheese made from the same milk with same processing. With no information about the known ways to ripen cheese, they card for it for 1 month, using only their own judgment and fantasy. Starting from a local ingredient, this simple performance aims to envision how the slightest empowerment on food processing eventually increases food diversity and decentralisation.

• The participation to the festival was constituted by:

1. 🎞🎥The screening of the short film Landscape, soil, cheese and me (~10min), a one month cheese-making routine.
2. 🎞🧀A tasting of the participants’ cheeses and the screening of a short video (~6min) where the cheese-keepers tell visitors about the cheese they cared about.

The keepers and their cheeses

Results of the cheese ripening initiative

Cheese keeper	Cheese keeping process	Pictures	Taste
Aliki	Cheese kept in its box with lavender strands around it. Dried regularly by opening the box with the net.		Very soft and creamy paste, delicate taste with a discreet lavender perfume
Arvid	Cheese wrapped in fennel leaves from an organic community garden. Kept in paper in box.
Asli
Ben
Elisa
Fazal
Ignace
Morgane
Robin
Wim