The Taste and Quality of Cheese: Towards an Aesthetics of Quality Against the Pasteurization of Thought
The Taste and Quality of Cheese: Towards an Aesthetics of Quality Against the Pasteurization of Thought

Summary/Abstract: This paper investigates the concept of quality through the lens of cheese tasting and production, arguing that different conceptions of quality entail distinct epistemological and practical consequences. It begins by analysing a dominant classical modern framework in which quality is treated as an objective and static property, revealing the vicious circularity underlying such an approach. Drawing on pragmatist philosophy, particularly William James, the paper reconceives quality as immanent to experience rather than as a property of an independent reality. It then develops the distinction between dynamic and static quality to show how processes of stabilization enable communication and reproducibility while potentially suppressing qualitative variation. Through the case of pasteurization in cheesemaking, this suppression of qualitative variation is framed as a broader ‘pasteurization of thought’ – the point at which a stabilized quality comes to be mistaken for quality as such. Finally, drawing on aesthetic experience, the paper argues that this tension between dynamic and static quality is not to be resolved but managed, and shows how tasting and production practices can keep static quality answerable to the dynamic quality it stabilizes.

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