The decline of regional British cheeses is emblematic of the broader process of homogenization, or the ‘great flattening’, through which land, culture and the human body lose autonomy and diversity.
There is a huge library of literature on British cheese, but the vast majority of books focus on flavor profiles, history and the artisan cheesemaker. Many also appear to be gastronomical guides for consumers.
However, here, the decline of regional cheese varieties is framed as a loss of agency and the destruction of a ‘biological lane’ that allowed humans to exist outside of a corporate-managed supply chain. The article uses cheese as a metaphor and as a material example of how biological and social processes get erased or reorganized under the logic of ‘progress’ and modernity.
Let us begin by understanding that the homogenization of the city street, with its sterile glass facades and retail chains, has a biological twin in the dairy vat. Whereas the modern city involves the enclosure of the vibrant lane, ‘Cheddarization’ arguably entails the enclosure of the microbial commons.
For centuries, the British landscape was defined by a staggering map of lactic diversity. It was a decentralized network of territorial cheeses that were the direct expression of specific valleys, local cattle breeds, and unique communities of ‘wild’ bacteria.
This diversity, however, was a problem. Just as industrial agriculture sought to replace the complex, unpredictable field with a chemical-intensive crop monoculture, the priorities of the state and the incentives of industry aligned so that the British dairy map became flattened into a single, manageable profile. This process was epitomized by the wartime mandate of the Second World War for ‘national Cheddar’, which effectively changed the British national diet.
This system did solve a genuine problem at the time. The state needed to ensure that the population was fed during war. But in addressing this issue, it also opted for a solution in which only the standardized could survive.
The British cheese map was once as diverse as the regional accents that persist throughout Britain today, but during the Second World War, the UK Ministry of Food effectively banned the production of many regional cheeses. It mandated the production of a single, standardized national Cheddar because it was durable, transportable and convenient for a centralized rationing system.
What began as a wartime necessity became a preference by the state and industry for a single, manageable ‘monoculture’ over a thousand unpredictable regional variations. It entailed hundreds of farmhouse recipes that had been passed down for centuries being virtually wiped out in less than a decade.
The policy was devised as a temporary solution to scarcity but hardened into a permanent preference for systems that are legible (easy to understand and recognize), centralized and governable. We continue to see it today in the food supply, in agriculture and in the management of microbial life and human diets.
Traditional cheeses relied on the specific bacteria found in the local air, the wooden aging shelves and the raw milk of local cattle breeds (like the Shorthorn or the Gloucester). Industrial cheese relies on ‘direct vat inoculation’, which involves standardized, lab-grown, patented freeze-dried bacteria produced by global biotech firms.
This means the farmer no longer works with the life already present on the farm but must buy a corporate biological starter.
Just as every high street is forced to look the same to satisfy corporate logistics, the British dairy map was eventually flattened to satisfy the supermarket shelf. For instance, the original Wensleydale was a blue-veined, moist cheese that was flattened into a dry, white, acidic block because that version was easier to mass-produce and package.
Regional cheese is the ultimate unpredictable biological product. It changes with the seasons, the grass and the weather. By destroying these varieties, the system didn’t just change diet but removed a connection to a specific tract of land and the soil and minerals associated with it and a particular breed of cattle.
Before the mid-20th century, a Cheddar cheese was a reflection of the Mendip Hills. Since then, dozens of territorial cheeses have either vanished or been reduced to a single industrial profile.
Traditional Lancashire cheese was made by mixing curd from three different days of milking. This created a complex, live bacterial profile. However, mass-produced industrialization demanded a single-day curd, resulting in the crumbly Lancashire we see today—a shadow of the original varieties that were once staples of the mining communities in the county.
At the same time, Wales was a powerhouse of small-scale lactic diversity. While we still see it today, the original farmhouse Caerphilly was a miners’ cheese that was moist and salty to replenish lost minerals. It was historically made all over the south and west of Wales, but during the Second World War, the Ministry of Food effectively stopped its production to focus on national Cheddar.
Meanwhile, Galloway and Suffolk Bang were regional hard cheeses. The Suffolk Bang was so hard it was joked that it needed to be cut with an axe. While it sounds unappealing to the modern palate, it was a high-protein, long-lasting storage food for the rural poor that required no refrigeration and no global supply chain.
Historically, there were dozens of unnamed blue cheeses made across Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire. Colwick cheese was a fresh, uncooked curd cheese from Nottingham that dates back to the 1600s. It was soft, shaped like a bowl and meant to be eaten within days. It vanished because it couldn’t survive the need for centralized distribution. It was too local, too ‘alive’ and too unpredictable for the supermarket shelf.
The great flattening
The discussion about cheese is essentially about lost biological resilience and a flattening of the great British countryside. The decline of these cheeses mirrors the decline of regional cattle breeds. To make industrial cheddar, you need the Holstein, a high-output ‘biological machine’. To make the old Wensleydale or Lancashire, you needed the Shorthorn or the Gloucester breeds that lived in reciprocity with specific regional grasses.
Post-1945, we didn’t just lose recipes and methods of production in the countryside but allowed a certain logic to erase a specific set of biological phenomena that had co-evolved with the British landscape for centuries.
The government’s Cheddar mandate was the ultimate historical example of the ‘great flattening’. It was the moment the state and industry conspired to replace a thousand regional whispers with a single, manageable, corporate shout.
The mandate was a logistical shift. But it was also a psychological and ecological eviction. Before 1940, the British countryside resembled a patchwork of micro-sovereignties. Every farmhouse dairy was a laboratory of the local, where the specific minerals of the soil, the unique flora of the pasture and the inherited wisdom of the family converged into a single wheel of cheese. This was the ‘lactic lane’, a pathway of knowledge that required a slow human touch to maintain.
The farmhouse dairy, once the beating heart of rural self-sufficiency, was silenced. The shorthorn and the Gloucester had co-evolved with their specific landscapes. These breeds were sidelined in favor of the high-output, standardized cattle that the industrial system demanded.
This was the moment the ‘agrarian imagination’ began to wither. By removing the need for the farmer to listen to the specific rhythms of their land and its microbes, the state transformed the farmer from a steward of a biological commons into a cog in a managed supply chain.
The essence of the countryside with its unpredictability and seasonal pulse was smoothed over. In its place, we were left with an industrial landscape that no longer whispered of its history. In its place we witnessed a mechanical efficiency.
But the loss of regional cheese is not merely a tragedy of the palate. It is also a rupture in the biological continuum that once bound the biology of the human body to the specificities of the earth.
For millennia, the human microbiome was in some ways like a mirror image of the local landscape. Located in the gut, this microbiome comprises up to six pounds of bacteria, viruses and microbes. It can be regarded as human soil.
While the nerve endings for the major organs are located within the organs themselves, they are governed by a ‘highway’ called the vagus nerve that starts in the gut. Here, the microbiome acts like a chemical factory, producing the neurotransmitters and nutrients that nourish and protect the entire nervous system. By ‘tasting’ these microbial signals, the gut serves as a central hub that fuels the health and communication of the nerves throughout the body.
Historically, our guts were populated by the same wild bacteria found in the soils we tilled, the raw milk we drank and the fermented foods—like the complex, multi-day curd of traditional Lancashire—that we consumed.
By mandating a single national Cheddar, the state performed a mass inoculation of the British public with a simplified biological profile. Just as a healthy meadow requires a diverse ecosystem of microbes to flourish, the human ‘internal commons’ (the gut microbiome), once reflected a staggering biological diversity.
In essence, we were as varied in our internal biology as the cheese varieties discussed. To eat a cheese from the Mendip Hills or a blue-veined Wensleydale was to inoculate oneself with the unique signature of that specific valley.
However, industrialization demanded that both the cheese and the person eating it be predictable, standardized and manageable. And by drenching the land in synthetic chemicals like glyphosate, the industrial system has effectively contributed to the disruption of the ‘biological lane’ between soil and gut.
As we replaced hundreds of regional cheeses with a single national Cheddar profile, we began the process of flattening our own internal ecosystems. We have moved from being diverse biological lanes to becoming recipients of a corporate-managed diet.
The enclosure of the human microbiome can be seen as an extension of the enclosure of the land. If the smart city is the digital overseer of the street, then the standardized, ultra-processed diet is the biological overseer of the body. Once our internal ecology is destroyed by corporate chemicals and uniform diets, we lose the resilience that supported a higher degree of biological resilience and autonomy.
First, the land was taken, then the seeds and finally the very microbes that allowed us to turn grass into independence. So, today, every act of choosing a live local cheese or supporting the micro-sovereignty of a farmhouse dairy or, for that matter, food grown organically on local farms, can be read as a small act of biological resistance. It is a refusal to allow our internal human soil to be turned into a sterile desert.
To reclaim the regional is to reclaim the right to have a body that still whispers of the earth. But are these little more than idealistic sentiments that hark back to a world long gone?
Unflattening the cheese
While regenerative agriculture, agroecology and the use of indigenous seeds prove that industrial homogenization is not inevitable, the dairy world offers its own powerful resistance. In British cheesemaking, the alternative to a life flattened by standardization is already being practiced in pockets across the country, showing that local food systems can thrive even in the face of global trends.
By adhering to regenerative agroecology, Westcombe Dairy in Somerset not only makes cheese but rebuilds the soil from the bottom up. In the industrial model, soil is treated as an inert substrate to be drenched in chemicals. By ditching artificial fertilizers and planting diverse herbal leys comprising complex mixes of deep-rooted grasses, chicory and clover, it has turned the farm into a self-sustaining loop.
This is a move away from being a captive customer of big agriscience and back to being a partner with the land. The result is a healthier farm and a thicker milk that carries the specific mineral signature of the Mendip Hills.
Stichelton Dairy in Nottinghamshire offers a lesson in the courage required to protect a biological legacy. For decades, the name ‘Stilton’ has been a global shorthand for English blue cheese, but the legal definition now mandates pasteurization, which strips the milk of its unique microbial character.
The makers of Stichelton chose to give up that famous, lucrative name because they refused to heat the life out of their milk. They decided that the biological truth of the recipe (the complex, raw-milk flora that gives the cheese its soul) was more important than a government-sanctioned brand name. In doing so, they created a cheese that exists outside the bureaucratic enclosure.
In the Teifi Valley of Wales, Caws Teifi operates like a living archive. While the industrial system tends to flatten flavor, this dairy works with the ‘wild’ bacteria of the local landscape. By using raw milk, it ensures that the unique microbial memory of the local valley isn’t erased. The dairy is keeping a specific identity alive in a world that would prefer every block of cheese to taste exactly like the last.
Finally, the Cheddar Gorge Cheese Company maintains a connection to geology that a factory cannot replicate. While the rest of the world makes ‘Cheddar’ in stainless-steel sheds with computer-controlled humidity, this company still carries its wheels into the local caves.
It allows the limestone cliffs themselves to act as the aging agent. The damp, constant breath of the cave—the actual atmosphere of the Mendips—does the work that a factory would do with chemicals and climate control.
These dairies suggest that the most sophisticated technology for making food is to be found in the diversity of the land itself.
This article is the third chapter of the book The Great Flattening: Enclosure, Extraction and the New Age of Concentrated Power, available for free here.