Two significant things happened on a day in 2016 when a group of scientists traveled from Massachusetts to a cheese farm in Vermont.
The first was a marriage proposal.
The second was the scraping of samples from the rinds of 50 blue cheese wheels. The importance of those samples, though, wouldn’t become clear for many years.
Researchers have used the proposal-day material as a time capsule to prove that a mold species in the cheese cave rapidly evolved, transforming a signature cheese before its makers’ eyes.
The cheese, called Bayley Hazen Blue, is aged in underground vaults for three to four months while wild microbes from the air colonize its rind. The end product used to be mottled with vivid green. Over a couple of years, those cheeses changed from green to white. Lab experiments showed that a mold species in the cave had mutated, losing its ability to make pigment — like cave-dwelling animals that evolve in the dark to be albino.
The results were published last month in the journal Current Biology.
“There’s a lot of luck in this,” said Benjamin Wolfe, a microbiome scientist at Tufts University. His lab studies cheese from Jasper Hill Farm in Greensboro, Vt., along with other aged and fermented foods.
His former adviser, Rachel Dutton, had been in Greensboro years earlier for her own lab’s research when she happened to meet Charlie Kalish, a farm intern at the time. In 2016, Mr. Kalish wanted to propose to Dr. Dutton at the farm where they’d met. He enlisted help from Dr. Wolfe.
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