This Consultant's Whey Is Cheese-y

Brown made one other noteworthy observation: "No one uses cheese in the lab. We use food pellets that are of a standardized weight and that are easy to manipulate." Interesting! So scientists not only moved the cheese, they removed the cheese!

Undaunted, the CDU tracked down William Roberts, professor of psychology at the University of Western Ontario in Canada, one scientist who has used cheese. What happens, the CDU asked Roberts, when you put two rodents in a maze and leave them there with a big hunk of cheese?

"A PhD student did a thesis on something similar to this a few years ago," said Roberts. "She put two male rats in an open-field maze at the same time with two bins of food. The dominant rat tried to keep the more submissive rat penned up in a box at the center of the maze so that it couldn't go out and forage. The big guy would go out and forage, but when he saw the smaller one try to go out he'd run over and dominate it."

And what about mice? "Mice would do essentially the same thing, particularly if you left them there for a period of days or weeks," Roberts continued. "Each mouse would probably establish a territory in the maze, and mark that territory by urinating on the periphery. Then each mouse would exist within its territory as well as it could and spend most of its time patrolling the boundaries. Each mouse would build a nest, a central place where it would sleep. They'd make trips out to eat at night (not during the day, since they're diurnal), but the dominant mouse would probably drive the submissive one away as much as possible to keep it from eating. Usually, these things are settled without drawing blood. A confrontation generally involves the bigger animal's assuming some species-specific dominance posture. For example, the dominant mouse will walk over the other mouse's back, and the submissive mouse will simply freeze up or go into hiding."

There was one last controversy to be settled: this question of old versus new cheese. When it came to stale old slices of advice, the book served up more than its share, with ideas such as "Old Beliefs Do Not Lead You To New Cheese" and "The Quicker You Let Go Of Old Cheese, The Sooner You Find New Cheese."

Is this good cheese advice, or bad cheese advice? To find out, the CDU tracked down new-cheese champion Laura Werlin, author of The New American Cheese: Profiles of America's Great Cheesemakers and Recipes for Cooking With Cheese (Stewart Tabori & Chang, 2000). The CDU caught up with Werlin at the Aspen Airport, where she was en route to a speaking engagement at the American Cheese Society's annual conference.

"Old cheese is to be cherished -- not cast aside," said Werlin, who, despite her new-cheese bias, was astonished that anyone would malign old cheese. "With a Parmigiano-Reggiano, for example, you definitely want it old -- preferably two or three years old. That's when the flavor develops."

When it comes to the question of cheese, change, and consultants, the CDU considers the queso closed.