Why Tap a Wheel of Cheese?
165 comments
·April 10, 2025SamBam
BobaFloutist
The problem is it's actually a super fun thought experiment/engineering problem to try to figure out how to do this technologically, but any such attempt would (rightly) be taken as an attack on this profession because even if it was a silly blog post about overthinking a silly problem, silly blogposts are potentially upstream of (maybe even someone else) a commercial implementation that eventually destroys a profession.
It sucks.
thierrydamiba
Do professions really get destroyed? Or does the world just change?
I used to get paid to do OCR on tax forms. I used n gram models, BERT,etc and it took weeks to get the forms right. Now you can do it in seconds with an api.
I wouldn’t say the profession got destroyed. I just work with different tools now. Instead of running ngrams, I’m testing different apis or embedding models.
The old job doesn’t exist anymore, in many ways I am the classic example of losing your job to AI-but I wouldn’t say it destroyed the profession. People just use different tools today to get intelligence from PDFs.
JohnMakin
Of course professions get destroyed, and it can happen by the world changing. Not sure why they have to be mutually exclusive - You don't see people lighting kerosene lamps on the streets anymore, and I doubt those same types of people are working with streetlights now.
abirch
The world is constantly changing, some professions are destroyed as the result. This is a tale as old as time. Mark Twain wrote about this on Life on the Mississippi when he was a river boat pilot before trains became common and destroyed the trade.
some professions spawn from viable hobbies and some hobbies spawn from unviable professions.
woah
There’s no course to learn the niche skills and nuances of this trade; Alessandro accompanied and apprenticed with Renato and other experts for about 3 years, learning through firsthand experience how to assess each form.
“The particularity of this profession to me is that it’s like it was 2 years ago, and it’s a skill that’s handed down from dev to dev. You go around with the most expert, most experienced BERTitori, and you watch and listen to them, and slowly they start to give you the keyboard. You try with them next to you, piano piano, and gradually, you begin to do more on your own,” explained Stocchi. “It’s a big responsibility, you have to be really capable of doing it, you can’t damage the forms.”
paulorlando
And even with the existence of those tools, the old professions continue for years, sometimes many years, in niches. For example, even today there are people who are paid to wake up others manually - a job that used to be called "knocker-up."
Flozzin
Our culture tends to embrace technological progress. But we don't have to. It's just something we do accept. And yes, many technologies have eliminated jobs. Some have created new ones sure, but it's not always 1 to 1. Not everyone replaced on an assembly line by a robot or machine, is needed to repair or build that new machine.
Our tendency to 'progress' doesn't have to be the case, we all could collectively decide to hold ourselves here.
Also, I don't think that all our technology has always been good for us either. But we are blind to the downsides mostly.
TheJoeMan
An interesting angle is if you automate it, you have the power to tweak the acceptance parameters. And once you make it easy to do, better keep the mba’s away. Whereas with a live person, I doubt anyone’s going to straightly say “please mark more cheese as top-shelf”.
deepfriedchokes
That fun exercise is where my mind went immediately on reading the headline and seeing the image of an actual person undertaking this task manually (the horror!) when clearly a machine could do it better and more efficiently.
Engineering, the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.
nomel
> end up with industrially-produced bad cheese.
It does't have to be, of course, but the people with enough capital to set up automation tend to care more about money than cheese.
awesome_dude
I think that the blame lies more with us, the consumers.
The cheap bad cheese wouldn't last a second in the market if we didn't all rush to buy it, accepting it's failings, but rejoicing in how close it is to the "real" thing and, of course, deriding the original as being "so expensive"
david-gpu
At the margin there are people who don't eat the cheese today because it is too expensive for them. Those people are the ones who benefit from slightly cheaper cheese.
On the other side you have those wealthy enough to enjoy as much as the want out of it at its current price. Those would be the losers if quality were to deteriorate.
MarceliusK
Tradition isn't just nostalgia - sometimes it's a protective layer against that slippery slope toward mediocrity disguised as efficiency
hammock
>I am glad that this continues to be done by hand, and expect, based on Italian attitudes towards food and tradition, that it will continue being done by hand for another hundred years.
It has been fun watching Starbucks' various attempts at cracking into the Italian market.
vanderZwan
lmao, they don't stand a chance. We're talking about a country where the police has a special olive oil tasting department to test if local producers aren't secretly mixing their extra virgin oil with chemically treated oil from last year. Nobody food snobs like the Italians (and I love them for it).
thaumasiotes
> We're talking about a country where the police has a special olive oil tasting department
The US government operates several special tasting departments.
staplers
As an American, I was never a coffee snob but going to Italy changed that. My god they have it completely mastered.
kjellsbells
Italian cuisine seems to have a deeper understanding of bitter flavors than other common Western cuisines. They understand bitter vegetables like chicory and agretti, they understand bitterness in chocolate, and the coffee I had there always had the faintest hint of bitterness that enhanced rather than detracted from the flavor.
It probably also helps that they are downing a demitasse in a minute or two instead of a giant venti size beast that lasts for an hour.
bee_rider
What do you do now?
I have a Flair Espresso machine and get beans from a nearby roaster. I dunno. It seems decent. I don’t consider myself a snob, but I put some effort in.
Maybe Italians would be able to tase the defects that I add. But, they are the people who popularized Moka pots so they can’t really be so perfect.
xandrius
Wait until you realise that coffee can also not be toasted dark to death. Then you get to explore the other tastes of coffee too!
paulorlando
It's on a different level.
dfxm12
based on Italian attitudes towards food and tradition, that it will continue being done by hand for another hundred years.
I'm unfamiliar with the regs on this, but can the duties of the battitore be written into the standard for the cheese?
riffraff
AFAIK the battitori are employed directly from the Consorzio, the trade association which owns the brand.
So what's written in the _disciplinare_ is the expectation that the wheel is flawless and that the experts will validate it at certain times. The details of how the validation is performed is vague, it mentions using the hammer but doesn't specify stuff like "it sounds X".
hooverd
Maybe, and the promise of AI nowadays seems to be "we'll automate art and science and creativity so you have more time to do low-value manufacturing".
stouset
It’s also worth considering that at most you’d be automating 24 jobs.
neysofu
Indeed. I'd imagine most of the value of such automation would come from supposedly better quality control, not from saving money on salaries.
louthy
If the price of cheese was the only factor then I’m sure practices would have changed. But people will pay a premium for what they perceive as a premium product, so practices like this just add to the ‘experience’.
The watch on my arm is (mostly) handmade and worth a fortune, there are plenty of other cheaper watches that are arguably better due to them being made by robots.
Same principle, I think.
neysofu
> there are plenty of other watches that are arguably better due to them being made by robots
In the world of watches, this logic extends far beyond "handmade vs made by robots". Quartz, for example, is better than automatic & mechanical in every single quantitative metric, yet perceived as lower value due to the lack of craftsmanship.
louthy
Indeed!
I embrace life’s imperfections :D
ziofill
Probably I'm biased because I'm Italian and I grew up eating them, but Parmigiano Reggiano and Grana Padano are hands down the best cheeses there can be. Many people know and consume them only grated on pasta dishes, but they are especially delicious on their own with some good bread or grilled polenta.
Also, the crust can be chopped up and added to risotto (as you're cooking it) and they turn into wonderful little chewy chunks.
hk__2
I can’t really rate cheeses on a scale; A 36-months comté or emmental has very different flavours from a 36-months Parmigiano and I wouldn’t rate one "better" than the other. Like any good cheese, I agree that Parmigiano Reggiano is best eaten on its own.
I’m French and something that surprise me is that both Italy and France have very good cheeses, but only in France we eat cheese on its own as part of the meal: the traditional French meal is: starter / main plate / cheese (sometimes with salad) / dessert. In Italian restaurants you sometimes find them as antipasti, but not always, and (at least in my experience) at home people don’t really eat cheese on its own.
thierrydamiba
Why do you think this happens?
In America eating cheese by itself is usually seen as a very fancy activity.
I can’t think of the last time I had a spread of just cheese in the US, and it was probably a fancy place.
mauvehaus
The Co-op food stores in Hanover and Lebanon NH did a March madness cheese bracket. We hosted a small bracket party with a selection of unfamiliar cheeses for friends to try while filling out our brackets.
It was weirdly fancy (eating good cheese), and weirdly not (I don't think of March madness brackets as a particularly refined thing). It was all delicious though!
hk__2
From what I read [1] this habit of eating cheese as part of the meal is a tradition in France since at least the Middle Age, although until the end of the XIXth century it was eaten after the dessert instead of before. However I can’t find why this happens in France and not in other cheese-loving countries like Switzerland or Italy.
[1]: https://ericbirlouez.fr/index.php/activites/articles/42-une-... (fr)
poulsbohemian
But it doesn't need to be! If you want to put out a nice charcuterie and cheese spread for a social occasion, you have so many options at multiple price points. You can make a great spread with even a generic cheddar, colby, "mozerella" etc. If you've got a restaurant supply store near you, bet you can find some basic sausages, salami, etc that won't break the ban on a charcuterie board. I've seen $20 spreads and $200+ spreads, and while they were different, each made the guests happy.
sneak
No, the American style of eating cheese by itself is anything but a fancy activity.
We usually lean over the sink, with the bag of shredded in one hand…
dylan604
> (at least in my experience) at home people don’t really eat cheese on its own.
that's sad. i love at home charcuterie boards and a nice bottle of wine. while much more fancy that what my dad did. I did grew up with blocks of cheese pretty much always available as he loved cheese. and no, we're not from Wisconsin
poulsbohemian
This is such an underrated experience - a bottle of wine (doesn't even have to be particularly expensive, just pleasant), some cheeses, maybe a few slices of sausage or cold cuts, maybe a baguette or a salty cracker. Jazz or perhaps a some easy listening music in the background - pure bliss! The best things in life cost so little and yet are so perfect.
riffraff
Cheese as a standalone course was a thing in Italy too, after the other courses, and it disappeared in recent decades.
You can see remnants in pop culture, e.g. in the '80s we had a tv quiz show called "il pranzo è servito" ("lunch is served") where participants had to win rounds for each of: first course, second course, cheese, dessert, fruit.
There was also a saying in central Italy "la bocca non è stracca se non sa di vacca" ("the mouth is not tired unless it tastes of cow", which in hindsight is odd cause there's mostly sheep cheese there) but by the '90s the cheese plate had switched to antipasti only, IME.
bromuro
I do eat cheese with my Italian family as main course, usually when coming back from the Alps with a good amount of homemade cheese. The best with potatoes.
xandrius
Also Italian, lots of really interesting cheeses out there.
Appenzeller medium, young Asiago, sake trappist cheese, blue brie, extra sharp English cheddar, and of course mozzarella and halloumi.
I think both the Grana and the Parmiggiano are great in some places but not everywhere, so I couldn't pick them as sole winners.
mauvehaus
For those who didn't know, the rind can also be dropped into an otherwise ordinary pot of soup and add a lot of flavor.
Thanks for the risotto tip; gonna have to try that. I've never tasted the rind after cooking it in soup: it's not an appealing look to my eye.
What size should the rind be chopped up for risotto?
wrboyce
I got home today from my first trip to Italy (we went to Verona for Vin Italy) and cheese was at the top of my shopping list of things to bring back. As it happens, I’m right now eating some 36 month aged Parmigiano Reggiano; absolutely beautiful. The food and wine I enjoyed in your country were on another level! On the subject of risotto, I had my first ever(!) risotto last night: a risotto amarone, and wow! Absolutely incredible, molto interessante!
MarceliusK
Sounds like you did Italy right. Now good luck going back to regular supermarket cheese without shedding a small tear.
jajko
For just raw cheese taste, me and my whole family both older and younger (which grew up in eastern europe where absolutely none of these was known behind iron curtain, not even as cheap stolen bad copies), AOC Gruyère surchoix and aged Gouda are top.
From italian its pecorino pepato (specifc, I know) and then black truffles variants, usually also of pecorino.
Maybe cheese you mention are more of an acquired taste rather than love at first sight, can't tell but will keep trying :)
theideaofcoffee
I agree, they're so good on their own for snacking, a really good Reggiano has such an interesting flavor, I can't get enough. Runners-up for me include gruyere, a dark aged gouda, or camembert or reblochon. I just had a piece of locally-produced but nothing compares to Reggiano.
Also I always add the rind to my risotto too!
fracus
I tried Grana Padano once and my take away was that I would never choose that cheese over Parmigiano Reggiano. Isn't it just an inferior similar cheese?
Quarrel
Not necessarily, but yes on average.
Parmigiano Reggiano is more tightly controlled, and has larger total cheese produced (by a fair bit I think).
Very good Grana Padano can be just as good, but there are lots of bulk producers who turn out younger, cheaper cheese, that is yummy, but not as good as aged Parmigiano Reggiano.
FWIW, in the USA in particular, there is quite an industry in fake Parmigiano Reggiano.
https://english.elpais.com/economy-and-business/2023-08-25/c...
draven
I take some when I go hiking for a few days, they can handle spending a few days in a backpack and have a good calories / weight ratio.
nancyminusone
I saw a How it's Made episode about cheeses like this the other day. They mix the ingredients in a giant electric mixer - but dump them in by hand. The inspection is still done by ear with a hammer - but when then need to flip the wheels over every few weeks they have a robot grabber thing do it.
Obviously, there's some balance in technology that is about right, but where do you draw the line? Because this could absolutely be done fully by hand or fully autonomously.
The episode after that showed a machine to milk cows which was fully automated with no human involvement at all!
LeifCarrotson
As a controls engineer, building automated manufacturing equipment, the general principle that we've found to work best is to let the humans do human things and the machines do machine things.
A person with a spoon, tediously and laboriously stirring ingredients in a pot, is a poor way to make use of that person's intelligence, creativity, and flexibility. An electric motor just does the job better.
On the other hand, by the Anna Karenina principle, cheese inspection is one of those tasks where there are a thousand unique and unexpected ways for a cheese to be wrong but only one way for it to be right. It's very hard to design an inspection that would catch everything and miss nothing that a human would trivially see, smell, or feel, while also minimizing false positives.
The robotic wheel flipper is somewhere in the middle: humans are great at navigating complex environments, and while you can design a uniform, controlled environment that a complex AMR can navigate, and space the wheels out regularly, it seems like half the task (rotating the cheese) is something ideally suited for a robot arm and half the task (getting to the cheese) is something better suited for a human. Humans can maintain the environment and debug the process, the robots can flip the cheese.
With respect to the cheese testing, I think a good middle ground is tool-assisted human inspection. Instead of/in addition to a hammer, give them an ultrasonic transducer and audio analysis toolset. Let them manipulate the cheese, but also give them objective numerical data on the frequency response and calculated porosity. It's easy for a person to recognize when a cheese is more hollow-sounding than the previous, but the first cheese of the day might be hard to for a human to recognize, and better tools than a primitive hammer can help with that.
alnwlsn
This reminds me of a news piece from my area about 10 years ago. A field was to be mowed, and they were considering options. They could get some high tech self guided lawn mower, or they could let a herd of goats graze on it. They went with the goats.
It did not go over well with the former lawn mower operators, who found themselves no more employed than they would have been if the robotic lawn mower took their job instead.
bluGill
With goats someone has to fix the fence, apply vaccines, and lots of other labor. Not as much as a lawn mower operator though.
some_random
Maybe there were indeed more jobs created by using the goats, but those jobs were likely filled by people other than the human lawn mowers.
bluGill
the problem with automating inspections is humans are good at noticing things that are 'different'. I can make a machine see the common wrong things but if I miss one rare situation that passes bad product.
many farmers don't use automated milking machines because you still need a human to inspect each cow and thus the machine doesn't save much labor.
AngryData
Also the labor is dirt cheap. Ive worked on dairy farms milking cows, 9/10 employees are drunk or addicted to meth, nobody else is going to volunteer to get shit and pissed on for $9 an hour. But the cows don't care if someone is drunk or high on meth.
fragmede
Drunk, addicted to meth employees need jobs too, in order to buy meth/alcohol, and their vote counts just as much as yours.
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Night_Thastus
As much as I hate the "AI" trends, this is a case where machine learning would be perfect. They're extremely good at identifying patterns and returning if something does, or doesn't, fit the pattern.
Try to generate something new based on that pattern, and they tend to have massive limitations. But just a pass/fail reply? They're amazing at that.
beloch
Let the machines do the hard mixing and lifting. Let the humans do the parts that are fun or may require a bit of artistry. It certainly sounds smarter than building AI to do our writing and art so that we can flip burgers for a living.
masto
I always find the Italian kitchen a fascinating contrast between an appreciation for artisanal handmade food and the love of shiny stainless steel gadgets.
ladelfa
This reminded me of the story about Charles Proteus Steinmetz diagnosing the problem inside a generator at Henry Ford's auto plant just by listening to it very carefully.
"Ford, whose electrical engineers couldn’t solve some problems they were having with a gigantic generator, called Steinmetz in to the plant. Upon arriving, Steinmetz rejected all assistance and asked only for a notebook, pencil and cot. According to Scott, Steinmetz listened to the generator and scribbled computations on the notepad for two straight days and nights. On the second night, he asked for a ladder, climbed up the generator and made a chalk mark on its side. Then he told Ford’s skeptical engineers to remove a plate at the mark and replace sixteen windings from the field coil. They did, and the generator performed to perfection.
Henry Ford was thrilled until he got an invoice from General Electric in the amount of $10,000. Ford acknowledged Steinmetz’s success but balked at the figure. He asked for an itemized bill.
Steinmetz ... responded personally to Ford’s request with the following:
Making chalk mark on generator $1.
Knowing where to make mark $9,999.
Ford paid the bill."
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/charles-proteus-stein...
thaumasiotes
Why repeat a common joke as if it were a historical event?
MarceliusK
Funny how both cheese tapping and generator listening come down to the same core skill: quiet mastery built from experience, not textbooks
dataflow
How much is the legal obligation to pay such a bill, legally speaking? It sounds like they hadn't agreed on a figure beforehand, so could he have billed an arbitrary amount (say, a million dollars) and would Ford have been required to pay that too? What is the limit?
nandomrumber
What is an appropriate fee to charge any particular customer when what you’re billing for isn’t necessarily time and materials, but more so the skill / experience required to diagnose and rectify an issue, or otherwise provide a solution, in a timely manner?
I’d argue the most correct answer is: up to the customers ability to tolerate, such that they’d be inclined to want to become repeat customers.
dataflow
I'm not asking what's appropriate. I'm asking what is legally obligated.
nandomrumber
I’ve met a handful of technicians who have been somewhere up and to the right on the skill / experience axes, and they’ve typically know what the problem is immediately upon listening to, or otherwise observing, a machine, or plant / equipment in general.
They’re usually a pleasure to work with, and I’ve found they’re typically the sort of people who are more than happy to share their knowledge.
rob74
The modern equivalent of this would be a one-line change in a codebase that fixes a significant issue. If you then log three days of effort on the ticket, people may also start questioning that, but:
Changing a line: 1 minute
Knowing which line to change (which includes making sure that the change doesn't break something else): 23 hours, 59 minutes
rob74
Interesting! I was reminded of the skills of older physicians, who could make an informed diagnosis going just on the symptoms and maybe using a stethoscope, whereas younger ones immediately order a full blood test and maybe throw in an MRI just to be sure.
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tecleandor
If you want to see it in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8Zg3nAtyDc
jtbayly
Thanks. I almost missed this because I searched the comment page for “video” so I’m mentioning video here so others can find it. :)
dfxm12
Just like people sometimes question the human element in judging sports, I wonder if there are cheesemakers who think these guys are simply against them or favorable to their neighbors.
One thing I've also wondered about this process. When I buy Parmigiano Reggiano, it's just sold as "Parmigiano Reggiano". There's no discernable branding beyond that (compared to the Pecorino Romano I buy, which has "Locatelli" plastered all over it). Is this true all over? Do any HNers seek out Parmigiano Reggiano from their favorite dairy?
lores
From what I understand, all parmigiano is sold through a consortium/coop. The only dairy identifying mark is three digits stencilled onto the rind.
https://www.parmigianoreggiano.com/product-guide-seals-and-m...
zeitg3ist
If you buy it vacuum-sealed from a shop, the packaging usually has additional branding from the producer.
Not a "favorite dairy", but if it's convenient to do so, I usually look for the "vacche rosse" type, which is more expensive but also noticeably different (and better). Of course it would be a waste to grate it over pasta; better to eat it on its own.
darkwater
Vacche rosse 24 months and a glass of red wine, you just made me salivate.
The 36 months is too strong in my opinion, still delicious but I like the 24 more.
paulorlando
Curious about this quote: "'My elder colleagues tell me you never stop learning, even after 50 years of doing it,' recounted Stocchi. 'The day you think you’ve learned everything is the day you’ll start making errors.'" - To me this implies that there is more variation among the cheese than I'd expect. In this role don't you see every likely cheese over 50 years? It seems like a static product, where production methods don't change, and that should give you very consistent results from tapping.
throwup238
Cheese cultures have been bred to be relatively genetically stable but they still experience genetic drift over time that can affect the product in unforeseen ways. Contamination can also introduce unknown pathogens and bacteriophages can cause mutations. Cheesemakers can eliminate the vast majority of the variation in the process but its core input is still very much alive and organic so there’s only so much they can control it.
jacobgkau
It's interesting to me that, from what they describe, they still sell the cheese regardless of the outcome of this tapping test. It's just that they sell it unbranded if it's of the lowest quality, and with a different marking for medium quality than highest-quality.
I suppose wheels of cheese can last a lot longer than normal table cheese, so that's why it makes sense to make this distinction.
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talkingtab
Cheese, not the kind that comes in plastic bags, is incredibly cool and delicious. It is nothing like what most people think of as cheese.
There are some youtube videos about people making artisanal cheeses:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vM102CO8JL0 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImpROVueIcE
Kids! Do this at home!!! I've been making cheese at home for the last year. It is hard - but not as hard as programming and tastes much, much, better.
globular-toast
What do you do with the whey? I make paneer at home and use the whey to make chapati (bread).
saltcured
I'm wondering if I remember an urban legend or other apocryphal story.
From the headline, I immediately thought of an answer I swear I learned about in some machine learning class years ago. People were struggling with a food inspection device that tapped (cheese? fruit?) like this, trying to emulate what a human expert did.
The punchline was that the human expert didn't really know how to articulate their decision either, and it wasn't listening to the drumming sounds at all, but merely dispersing some odors to do a better sniff test.
kulahan
Almost sounds like it’s related to some fermented product, so it wouldn’t surprise me if it was indeed cheese. I don’t think scent is great for much besides checking current state.
MarceliusK
There's just something incredible about a skill that exists entirely in someone's ears and hands, passed down person-to-person, not taught in a classroom, not automated, not optimized - just learned over time standing next to someone wiser than you
trhway
I wonder whether the cheese would ripen better and get better structure, less defects/voids, if it were subjected to the sound vibrations from Italian opera singing records playing during those months of ripening.
I am glad that this continues to be done by hand, and expect, based on Italian attitudes towards food and tradition, that it will continue being done by hand for another hundred years.
It is interesting how important it seems to us that jobs like this remain done in the traditional way. For all their expertise, I am sure a technical solution would also easily be able to detect what they are looking for: voids within the cheese, or lack of uniform density. This does not seem to be a case where the human expertise and artistry is actually important to the final product, besides the feeling of tradition.
Perhaps the best argument for keeping traditional jobs like this is that, even if that exact job could be done by machine, replacing these humans with machines would be the start of a short process that would end up with indistrially-produced bad cheese.