The cheese making team

At 'La Ferme' there is a team directly involved in the actual cheese making, and I am part of it. My name is Benny; I'm from Holland and joined Auroville in 1998. The present team consists of one Russian, one Tamilian, one French and one Dutch person. The whole operation is managed and developed since 1988 by two Aurovilians, one Tamil and the other French. We are an example of Auroville's intercultural cooperation.

Goat cheese

I have worked with cheese in France, the country where the greatest variety of cheeses is produced. The French are a very 'gourmet' people, and I worked only on a special kind of cheese: raw milk goat cheese. In the end I was not satisfied any more because of Western politics regarding agriculture, which tries to cut short many small scale rural production units in favour of big bank-supported industries.

I came to India because of the Auroville cheese project, where I have taken up my former activity. Paradoxically enough, it was here in Auroville that I learned to make other European-type cheeses. This has been quite a new experience for me, as well as working in a team, since I was used to working alone. In Europe this way of working together scarcely exists, especially not in cheese making, since Europeans are perhaps more individualistic.

On hygiene

Other significant differences are the hygiene standards and the search for perfection. To my mind, the first are very much exaggerated in the West. The so-called reason for them is health protection, but in my personal view it is just another money-power game. However, we do have to be careful in this regard as cheese is a very sensitive medium for all kinds of bacterial life. The right way, I think, is in between these two approaches. We have here the great advantage of making good farm cheese with traditional handmade techniques that invariably yield high quality cheeses with rich tastes and unique flavours. In the West, overly strict hygiene rules and broad industrialisation have normalised the subtle differences of great tasting traditional cheeses, and it becomes increasingly difficult and costly to find good traditional farm cheeses.

On perfection, tamas and rajas

The striving towards perfection is a strong ideal in Auroville, applicable to everything in life. But to apply it to cheese making is maybe more difficult here - with the team - than when I worked alone. This may have something to do with the prevailing tendency of Indian 'tamas' (inertia) which is quite contagious and which is, by the way, certainly not more unpleasant than the dominant Western quality of 'rajas' (over-activity or excitement).

As for goat cheese production, my former specialisation, this could be a tremendous possibility for development in India, but it would need an equally tremendous input of energy to improve things. For instance, to increase milk production per goat would demand the introduction of other species. But there too, one day Auroville might be a pioneer to develop this activity.