Cheese market in Gouda, cheese and a brig with Friesian horses for transporting the cheese. Photo by Ralf Roletschek.
Regional varieties of foods flourished and a very wide range of flavors could be distinguished before the standardization of so many food commodities. Local consumers might, for example, enjoy the subtle differences of flavor between grass butter and hay butter or May cheese and Michaelmas cheese which could be found only in their small region. (See Joan Thirsk, “The Rural Economy,” in Our Forgotten Past: Seven Centuries of Life on the Land, ed. Jerome Blum [London: Thames and Hudson, 1982], 89.)
John Horvat, Return to Order: From a Frenzied Economy to an Organic Christian Society—Where We’ve Been, How We Got Here, and Where We Need to Go (York, Penn.: York Press, 2013), 274.
