The British cheese course used to be a wedge of cheddar at the end of dinner, eaten on a chunk of bread with a small pickle or an apple, washed down with whatever was left in the bottle. Not a tasting flight. Not a board with seven varieties and a slate. A wedge. From the wheel that had been on the slab for the past fortnight, sweating slightly under a muslin cloth, cut to order with a wire by a man who knew which one was ready. Cheddar in the West Country. Lancashire in the North West. Wensleydale in the Dales. Cheshire on the Welsh border. Stilton in the Vale of Belvoir. Caerphilly across the Severn. Each made from raw milk, from cows on the same fields the cheesemaker's grandfather had worked, aged on slate or pine in a cool room at the back of the dairy, wrapped in greaseproof paper for the customer to take home. In 1914 Britain had roughly 3,500 farmhouse cheesemakers. By 1945 the number was 126. The mechanism was specific. In 1939 a wartime law banned regional farmhouse production and compelled every dairy in the country to produce a single uniform block called Government Cheddar. Hundreds of regional cheeses, evolved over centuries on particular hillsides for particular milks, were ordered out of existence by a Ministry of Food memo in the same year war was declared. Farmhouse Wensleydale dropped from 176 producers in 1939 to 9 by 1946. The last one gave up in 1957. The restriction was lifted in 1954, too late for most. The Milk Marketing Board then guaranteed farmers a price for liquid milk until 1994, which kept on-farm cheesemaking economically pointless for another four decades. Supermarket pasteurised cheddar, made in a stainless steel plant in Wiltshire and vacuum-packed for shelf life, became, for two generations, what the word cheddar meant. A handful of producers held the line. Montgomery's still hangs cloth-bound truckles in a Somerset shed. Westcombe still does it the proper way. Mrs Kirkham's in Lancashire is one of the last raw-milk cheesemakers in the county. Their cheddar is to the supermarket product what a hand-raised Melton pie is to the petrol-station equivalent. The wheel is still being cut by the man who made it. The wire is in his hand. He will tell you about the cow, the field she grazes on, the slope of the field, the wildflowers that come up in May, and his grandfather who started the dairy in 1934, all of it free of charge, as part of buying a quarter-pound wedge from a five-stone wheel in a small Somerset dairy on a Saturday morning. You will not find any of that in a supermarket cold cabinet. Nor will you find the cheese. Which is, on reflection, the whole point.

Activist: "You should replace your cattle with plant crops." Farmer: "Such as?" Activist: "Wheat." Farmer: "Thirty-degree slope. The tractor would be in the hedge by lunchtime." Activist: "Soy, then." Farmer: "Soy likes hot summers and warm nights. This is Cumbria. The soy would sit in the rain for a month, sulk, and die confused." Activist: "Quinoa." Farmer: "Quinoa grows at altitude in the Andes on thin dry soil. My altitude's right. Everything else is wrong. The sheep next door would write a strongly worded letter." Activist: "Lentils. Chickpeas." Farmer: "Both Mediterranean. This field had eleven inches of rain in August. They'd drown standing up." Activist: "Vegetables. Carrots." Farmer: "Carrots need deep, sandy, stone-free soil. This is clay with rocks the size of footballs. The carrot would meet the rock, give up, and grow sideways out of spite." Activist: "There must be something." Farmer: "There is. It's grass. Grew here on its own. Asks for nothing. Feeds something that turns it into food. The field decided this long before I got here."