Food and Cooking

For cheesemongers in the United States, these should be creamy times.

“The Big Cheese,” a documentary about mongering, opens at the IFC Center in Manhattan next month, bringing the arts of slicing, wrapping and spieling great cheese to the big screen. Last year, the gold medal at the Mondial du Fromage, a biennial cheesemongering competition in Tours, France, was won by an American for the first time, the culmination of the home team’s decade-long quest to gain the respect enjoyed by European mongers.

There are reasons to celebrate on the public-health front, too. A wedge of cheese reigns in glory near the top of the newly inverted food pyramid the federal government put out in 2025.

Few mongers are cheering, though. They are deeply anxious about the future of their profession.

A chaotic barrage of tariffs and a war in the Middle East have driven up the prices of many cheeses, both imported and domestic. Grocery chains increasingly stock grab-and-go hunks of cheese vacuum-sealed in plastic, slashing jobs for mongers and selling at prices that independent counters can’t match. Smaller stores have trouble finding bright, curd-curious young people who will take minimum-wage pay or just above it to work on their feet all day caring for dense wheels streaked with entrancingly pungent blue mold and luxurious triple-cream rounds that drip like honey.