Do they have no blue cheese dressing on Barrayar, or does it taste different from the Betan artificial version?
Quite possibly the specific bacterial cultures needed to make it were lost during the Time of Isolation!
Given how much else was lost, it's not implausible that a lot of fancy, Earth-derived food techniques would also disappear. (I kind of assume that Barrayar doesn't have sourdough bread, either; given the primitive and incomplete nature of its terraforming, I wouldn't trust wild yeasts not to be toxic, and I don't know that Earth yeast populations would have been able to survive and persist at the concentrations needed.)
If you're a farmer just managing subsistence-level crops on a planet where every inch of your cropland was wrested away from the native flora with slash-and-burn clearing and desperate improvisation, you're probably eating most of your milk products before they can go mouldy.
In more recent years, of course, now that the Time of Isolation has ended, you can probably buy both sourdough and blue cheese; but they're fancy imported goods meant for the luxury market (cheese is relatively heavy!) not the artificial stuff in dressing form that Betan plebes eat.
How popular it would be is anybody's guess, even so - plenty of people on Earth don't like it, so I imagine there's a number of Barrayarans who, even though they could afford it, have bought it exactly once (to show off for their upper-class friends by having it at their soiree) and never again. It'd become a background mental note at High Vor functions: If there's a cheese platter, avoid the weird streaky one, and beyond that you'd hardly remember what it tastes like - just enough to know the answer's not "high fructose corn syrup, soy lecithin and skim milk powder." :D
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timeasmymeasure
I have thoughts about the cheese!
Date: 2016-06-10 03:30 am (UTC)Quite possibly the specific bacterial cultures needed to make it were lost during the Time of Isolation!
Given how much else was lost, it's not implausible that a lot of fancy, Earth-derived food techniques would also disappear. (I kind of assume that Barrayar doesn't have sourdough bread, either; given the primitive and incomplete nature of its terraforming, I wouldn't trust wild yeasts not to be toxic, and I don't know that Earth yeast populations would have been able to survive and persist at the concentrations needed.)
If you're a farmer just managing subsistence-level crops on a planet where every inch of your cropland was wrested away from the native flora with slash-and-burn clearing and desperate improvisation, you're probably eating most of your milk products before they can go mouldy.
In more recent years, of course, now that the Time of Isolation has ended, you can probably buy both sourdough and blue cheese; but they're fancy imported goods meant for the luxury market (cheese is relatively heavy!) not the artificial stuff in dressing form that Betan plebes eat.
How popular it would be is anybody's guess, even so - plenty of people on Earth don't like it, so I imagine there's a number of Barrayarans who, even though they could afford it, have bought it exactly once (to show off for their upper-class friends by having it at their soiree) and never again. It'd become a background mental note at High Vor functions: If there's a cheese platter, avoid the weird streaky one, and beyond that you'd hardly remember what it tastes like - just enough to know the answer's not "high fructose corn syrup, soy lecithin and skim milk powder." :D