TIL that “until the Second World War, fondue was unheard of in most areas of Switzerland” and that the Cheese Lobby made it famous somehow.

15 comments

1. “Unheard” seems a bit exagerated, at least reading the wikipedia article. Yet, it is true that the cheese lobby made it famous.

2. Advertisement shapes more than we like to admit.

3. Gotta sell all this milk.

4. b-but the fancy cheese companies allude to the 19th century in their aesthetics! This is traditional, hence old!!

5. Big Cheese!

6. I did not know this. Gonna have to remember this for next months fondue marathon.

7. You mean the pillar of swiss gastronomy is as phony as the people claiming our cuisine can easily stack up with the best in the world?

   Never forget the dude that died on the hill of “switzerland’s pro capita michelin stars are proof of culinary greatness”, that will never stop being hilarious

8. Yeah, I have a friend from Aargau that always tells me, everytime we’re having a fondue evening, that their Aargau-native grandparents were raised without having idea of fondue.

9. I recommend everyone who’s interested to listen to this podcast:

   https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/10/355177578/episode-575-the-fondue-conspiracy

10. I wouldn’t know about fondue but I know for sure that my grandpa as a true Valaisan always had a lot of fun introducing raclette to his friends from other cantons, and this would have been in the 1960s-1970s.

11. Yup. They also pushed it as way more important in nutrition than it is.

12. Lobbying and ad campaigns are incredibly powerful when done right. Aromat is another example. They forced it into our kitchens and restaurants in the early 1950s. It came almost out of nowhere and the ads and distribution contracts established it as one of the “traditional” Swiss tastes by the mid 1950s and it’s everywhere still.

13. My mom in the north of Italy (Como) also never tried a pizza before she was around 10, which was in the second half of the 70s. I found that surprising as well.

    EDIT: I don’t think pizza was made famous by some kind of industry/advertising. It’s simply an amazing dish that took over the world probably.

14. We have this really weird, static view of culture:

    🇨🇭 = 🧀, 🍫, 🕒

    🇮🇹 = 🍕, 🍝, 🍅

    🇩🇪 = 🍻, 🥨

    And so on.

    We have a terrible intuition for when what was invented, and rarely seem capable to admit that culture constantly changes.

15. I always wonder about the origin of Chinoise, too. My mind was blown when Chinese friends in High School took me for hot pot, and I realized why it’s called “Chinoise”. I wonder how/when it came to be.