Winter arrives, shadows (where there are any) lengthen then yield to evening; it’s inside time. Put a log in the stove, pour a glass of wine, and settle down to a good read, like Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms (which is, honestly, about neither cheese nor worms but a good read nonetheless.) And if you can find some, give yourself a few slices of Beaufort, probably the best cheese in the world. Bar none. Beaufort comes from the Savoie, a tiny region in SE France and one of the reasons why Beaufort is far better than, say, Cheez-Whiz (a cheese-food product we all know and love but one that is the result of the culinary equivalent of a science project) is because of worms. Cheez-Whiz has never come near a worm.
If you buy Beaufort in any of the market towns in France, you’ll need to select among a variety of types—spring, single pasture, summer, late summer, fall. Each varies according to the type of plants the cows eat and that depends on when those plants are available. The permanent alpine pastures between the tree line and the rocky peaks are home to over 60 species of forage plants—legumes, grasses, and others including a high density of orchids. The thought of eating cheese made, in part, from orchids is pretty intoxicating. And those pastures are home to dozens of species of butterflies. In an astonishing confession drawn from the 1950s, one collector grabbed 38 different species from the area around Chartreuse—not far from Beaufort—in a single afternoon. The pastures are never tilled, and grazing has been strictly controlled for centuries—more so now because many lie within conservation zones or National Parks.
We’ll get to the worms in a little bit, but not before we tour Beaufort’s neighborhood. All the 18th and 19th century English luminaries visited the Chartreuse—Turner, Wordsworth, Ruskin. At the foot of the glaciated Alps and not as dramatic, it’s a series of limestone massifs framed by the Isere and Rhone rivers and, being limestone, riddled with caves, some holding the remains of thousands of cave bears that lived during the last two ice ages. The exposed limestone massifs we walked through—the Dent de Crolles, for example, seem timeless. Its high alpine pastures are as fertile as they ever were—the nearby Carthusian monks in La Grande Chartreuse have been distilling the electric-green liquor that bears the name of their monastery since 1737 using roughly 130 different plants, most of which they obtain locally. Diversity is key. Farmers move their stock from low to high fields in a seasonal rotation—and it’s those high meadows that account for the difference between, say, a spring cheese produced on low-lying pastures and the fall cheese borne from alpine herbs. When we were tramping through late last September, we saw flocks of sheep and goats, and small herds of cattle on fields steep enough to be used for ski runs. Yes, oddly, many are belled so you can hear them in the fog long before you see them. Think ‘Heidi’. When I asked why bells? invariably the answer was ‘protection against wolves’—there are also mastiffs living among the stock, which seemed a far more effective deterrent than bells. But the pastures—steep, perennial, and fertile, are gorgeous. Even in late fall when morning frost covers the hills, you see crocuses in profusion. These too go into the cheese.
The green hillsides of Chartreuse, France
I couldn’t find a worm census despite wading through various scientific articles on French Alpine soil but I did learn that in the Chartreuse region, earthworms make up about 1% of the wild boar diet. Boars are prolific, and because they eat bulbs and roots, they disturb the top layer of these alpine pastures. Some Swiss studies suggested that the abundance of worms in permanent alpine pastures (i.e. pastures whose soils are largely undisturbed (except for wild boars) and free from pesticides and artificial fertilizer) enable those areas to be roughly 70% more productive than their lowland counterparts. The connection between undisturbed soil and variety of forage plants—over centuries- is pretty clear. Worms are the key.
So now to worms.
The last book Darwin wrote—in 1881—was a paean to worms, and every gardener knows why. He calculated that each acre around his house in Kent contained fifty-three thousand worms which contributed up to 18 tons of casting per acre to the soil every year. They unlocked soil for use. This has been confirmed, although worm populations vary widely depending on local soils: Malaysian forests can have up to 600 thousand per acre, and New Zealand perennial pastures an unbelievable 8 million. Unusually high populations of worms in the Indus, Nile, and Euphrates Valleys suggest that fertile soil is a powerful catalyst for human populations as well for plants. In the Chartreuse as elsewhere, the earthworm count in alpine pastures is tied to human activity— the decrease in grazing that results from building ski resorts and condos necessarily results in a decrease in worm population.
In the past 30 years, France has lost more than two million hectares of alpine pasture– a threat not only to worms but to the entire panoply of species their quiet industry supports—making alpine pastures one of the prime targets for conservation activities in the Alps. Save the worms. Eat more Beaufort.
Blog Post: Seymour House, GLT Board
