Parmesan (pronounced pahr-muh-zahn, pahr-muh-zan, pahr-muh-zuhn; pahr-muh-zahn, or pahr-muh-zan).
(1) Of or from Parma, in northern Italy.
(2) A hard, dry variety of Italian cheese made from skim
milk, often grated and sprinkled over pasta dishes and soups. It’s known also as Parmesan cheese and it
appears with and without the initial capital.
(3) By extension, a similar cheese produced in places
other than Parma.
(4) In slang, money in the sense of physical cash.
1510–1520: From the Middle French parmesan, from the Italian parmigiano (of Parma; pertaining to Parma), from an earlier Vulgar Latin parmēsānus, a restructuring of the Classical Latin parmēnsis (from Parma). Parma is a province of Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region, the locality name thought to be of Etruscan origin. In the Romance languages the related forms include the Italian parmigiano, the Catalan parmesà, the Portuguese parmesão, the Sicilian parmisanu and the Spanish parmesano. Parmesan is a noun and parmesany & parmeasnlike (also as parmesan-like) is an adjective; the noun plural is parmesans. An initial capital is always used with the proper noun (except sometimes in advertizing).
Within the European Union (EU), the cheese called Parmigiano Reggiano has been granted legal protection (a la hermitage, champagne, cognac etc) as a protected designation of origin (PDO) although around the world, “parmesan” is widely used as a generic term for similar cheeses. The PDO cheese Parmigiano Reggiano, made only from cow’s milk and salt, is produced in “wheels” which take at least two years to mature, each wheel sealed with a unique identity tag recording the dairy farm and the month in which it was laid down to “cure”. It may be apocryphal but industry folklore is that when food critics and chefs were asked in a survey which they would choose if ordered to live in a world with only one cheese, most answered: Parmigiano Reggiano. Eating cheese can be part of a healthy diet, but it depends on the type and amount consumed. Cheese is a good source of protein, is rich in calcium and contains vitamins such as B12 and A but it tends also to be high in saturated fat, is calorie-dense and usually has a high sodium (salt) content. One noted advantage of parmesan is it’s naturally low in lactose, making it easier to digest for people with lactose intolerance.
Wheels of parmesan and other wheels
Italian artistic gymnast Signorina Giorgia Villa with wheels of cheese, Parmigiano Reggiano promotional photo-shoot, 2022.
Many consumers buy their parmesan in pre-grated packs or
in a powered form so may not have been aware it is, in its original form, a
wheel. That was until the publication of
a set of photographs of Signorina Giorgia Villa (b 2003), an Italian artistic
gymnast and member of her country’s team at the 2024 Paris Olympics. Signorina Villa is a brand ambassador
for Parmigiano Reggiano and the images from her 2022 photo-shoot featured her
posing with the now famous wheels, the promotion’s original caption being:
“Always together with my best friend @parmigianoreggiano, ready to start again
and face new challenges!”
Wheels of cheese can weigh more than 40 kg (90 lb) and during the maturation process they are stored in warehouses, usually on shelves. In August 2023, Giacomo Chiapparini, (1949-2023) from Romano di Lombardia, was killed when a shelf broke in his cheese store, the falling wheels of cheese crushing him. According to the police report, the event was triggered by a SPF (single point of failure) in a high shelf, the weight of the dislodged wheels creating a “domino effect”, bringing down thousands of wheels on the unfortunate victim. A spokesman for the Lombardy Fire Department which attended the scene reported emergency staff “had to move the wheels of cheese and the shelves by hand”, adding it “took about twelve hours” to find the deceased. The wheels were of grana padano, a hard cheese that resembles parmesan, some 25,000 of which were in storage and Signor Chiapparini had been checking on the ripening wheels, the highest of which sat on metal shelves 10 metres (33 feet) tall.
The numbers are uncertain because not all are registered but estimates put the value of the Parmesan stored in Italy’s cheese vaults between US$700-800 million and, since the 1950s, the stored product has been used as collateral against bank loans; as a financial instrument, stored Parmesan uniquely is suited to fund the unique cash-flow needs of Italian dairy farmers because it’s all in the timing. Most of a farmer’s costs in producing a wheel of cheese have to be spent up to the point of storage but, by law, Parmesan must age for a minimum of twelve months before it can reach the market, thus creating a “revenue gap” farmers fund with loans, the stored wheels of cheese held as the the bank’s collateral. Structurally, the arrangement can be handled either by the wheels being transported to secure, climate-controlled warehouses owned and operated by the banks (contractors engaged to perform the regular “brushing & turning”) or remaining in the care of the producer, blockchain technology now used to “pledge the wheels”. Either way, in unison, as the physical cheese matures, so does the loan. It’s thus analogous with a lender holding title deeds to land while a mortgage is repaid but, when a bank is in possession of physical cheese, that’s obviously rather different to holding a piece of paper. Outsourcing the care of the cheese for the critical twelve months also has the advantage of reducing the cost because the banks co-own vast facilities, meaning the unit cost of “brushing & turning” is lowered. For decades, the system has worked well but climate change is now affecting the industry, heatwaves and increasing energy costs in Europe changing the economics of maintaining the artificial environment within the parameters (temperature 18o Celsius (64.4o Fahrenheit) & humidity 82%) required to prevent spoilage. Also affected are the cows; in hotter weather, they expend more energy to cool their bodies, reducing both the quality & quantity of the milk.
La persistència de la memòria (The Persistence of Memory) is Salvador Dalí’s (1904-1989) most reproduced and best-known painting. Completed in 1931 and first exhibited in 1932, since 1934 it’s hung in New York’s MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) and in popular culture, the work is often referred to as the more evocative “Melting Clocks”. Despite the gushing of some critics, surrealism's intellectual undercoating was patchy, some of the latter output being openly imitative but with Dalí, critics seemed often ready to find something. His "theory of softness and hardness" has been called "central to his artistic thinking" at the time The Persistence of Memory was painted and some suggested the flaccidity of the watches is an allusion to Albert Einstein's (1879-1955) theory of special relativity (1905), a surreal pondering of the implications of relativity on our once-fixed notions of time and space. Dalí was earthier, claiming the flaccidity of the clocks was inspired not by Einstein but by imagining a wheel of camembert cheese melting in the Catalan sun, although in Conquest of the Irrational (1935) he did write: Conquest of the Irrational (1935): “The famous soft watches are nothing else than the tender, extravagant, solitary paranoiac-critical camembert of time and space.”
The car is a Jaguar XJS convertible with the
factory-fitted BBS basketweave (or lattice) wheels. The BBS wheels appealed on the XJS (1975-1996
and originally XJ-S) when the last version was released in 1991, sometime after
the company had been absorbed by the Ford Motor Company (FoMoCo). There were a number of detail changes for the
final run, the most notable being the enlargement in 1992 of the V12 engine
from 5.3 litres (326 cubic inches) to 6.0 (366), coupled with the latest (four-speed)
version of the General Motors (GM) Turbo-Hydramatic 400 which, (as a
three-speed), dated from 1963. No XJ-S
with a manual transmission was built after 1976 and the 352 produced existed
only because Jaguar had some 400 in their warehouse which had been intended for
the Series 3 E-Types (XKE, 1971-1974).
Remarkably for a brand which has a reputation for quality
and expertise in design as well as an enviable record in top-line competition, Germany’s
BBS Autotechnik GmbH in July 2024 declared insolvency, the second time this has been done in
the last year and the fifth time since 2007.
To borrow a phrase, one bankruptcy is unfortunate; five in the last 17
years suggests carelessness. Analysts
have suggested a number of factors have contributed to the troubled corporate
history and some did note the recent practice of BBS being passed between
private equity firms shouldn’t be ignored (apparently private equity firms have
techniques which make bankruptcies profitable) but there were also questionable
marketing practices. What has long
puzzled the supply chain is that despite BBS having one of the industry’s most
desirable back-catalogues with many older designs enjoying a resurgence of popularity,
that market is being supplied by other manufacturers blatantly copying the BBS
originals which the company has made no attempt to re-introduce. There was also the curious matter of “BBS
Unlimited”, one of engineering’s weirdest niches: a design of a single wheel which
can be fitted to a variety of cars, all wheels shipped with a 5×117.5 mm bolt
pattern (used by nothing on planet Earth), necessitating the fitting of a special
BBS adapter. Rarely has a non-existent problem so assiduously been fixed. The BBS name has
such a cachet that analysts expect the German operation to survive in some form
(BBS in the US & Japan unaffected by what’s happening in Europe) and
the suspicion is the current problems are likely linked to the rising interest
rates which have seen a number of leveraged buy-outs by private equity firms
flounder: in the same week BBS’s predicament was announced, the seat maker Recaro
also entered bankruptcy.
Ever since a former Australian minister for immigration (the Liberal Party’s Philip Ruddock (b 1943; Minister for Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs 1996-2003) asserted that the country's indigenous peoples “didn’t invent the wheel”, it’s been repeated as a racist trope in far-right (a misleading term but the one in popular use) gatherings and their social medial channels, often with the claim indigenous Australians were the only culture on Earth not to invent (or discover) what is humanity’s simplest machine and the one which underpinned or made possible progress in a number of fields. However, a number of cultures did not independently develop the wheel including several in Sub-Saharan Africa, a number of the Pacific Islands and those living in the pre-Columbian Americas (although in the latter wheels were used in toys, just not for transportation or tasks such as lifting). Anthropologists suggest that cultures which didn’t develop the wheel usually had no need for such a device, lacked the large domesticated animals needed to pull wheeled vehicles or lived in an environment which made the use of wheeled carts or trolleys impractical (dense forests, mountainous terrain etc).
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