Parmesan Goes Indian

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              "text": "Palmir Singh cleans up after the Friesian cows on the Bellicchi farm in San Secondo Parmense comune (municipality) in Parma. Friesians are vast animals, tipping the scales at 580 kg—and they excrete as copiously as they eat to produce their average of 25 litres of milk a day.",
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              "text": "Paramjit Kaur stacking the wheels of Parmesan in the cascina, a storehouse with sturdy wooden shelves at the cheese factory in Zibello, Parma. Authentic Italian Parmesan is allowed to mature for 24 months—well beyond the minimum 12 months required for faux Parmesans.",
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              "text": "Bruno Bellicchi and Palmir Singh monitor the automatic milking system on the Bellicchi farm in San Secondo Parmense. Parmesan is made from two serial milkings, with the evening milk left standing in trays for 12 hours to allow the cream to rise to the surface and the fermentation to begin.",
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              "text": "Amar Singh checks on the rapidly-filling plastic vats in the azienda agricola di Giavarini Michele in San Secondo Parmense. An automatic milking system can milk 50-70 cows per working hour, and not a drop is lost. It takes the daily output of 40 cows to produce a single wheel of Parmesan.",
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              "text": "Singh Sathanam is a bergamino, or a dairy farmer, at the Gonzaga agricultural company. He feeds and generally looks after the Friesians. Immigrati Indiani like Sathanam, who bring along some knowledge on how to take care of cattle, are usually inducted into this first stage.",
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              "text": "Balbir Singh turns over the cheese wheels pickling in brine in the Paganina cheese factory in Fontanelle in Parma. The Parmesan is soaked in moderate brine for two to three weeks, and Balbir’s job is monitoring the salinity and turning over the cheese so that the slight salty flavour is even.",
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              "text": "Balbir and Charanjit Singh pack the Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese into fascera (moulds) in the Paganina cheese factory in ontanelle. The mould is fitted with a stainless steel belt which indents “Parmigiano-Reggiano”—both the words and the logo—forming them in pinpricks. Also embossed are the code number of the casello, and year and month of production.",
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              "text": "Paramjit measures rennet (which comes from the lining membrane of the fourth stomach of calves) on milligram scales. Containing the enzyme rennin, rennet helps coagulate the steaming milk in the cauldron into gobs of curds called cagliata.",
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              "text": "Sarabjit Singh checks the moulded cheese, together with Giorgio Dadomé, for consistency. After the Consorzio inspector has taken a careful look at a Parmesan wheel a year after it was set, its rind is branded with the Parmigiano-Reggiano seal, the number of the coöperativo and the production date.",
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              "text": "Ambrose Laudani, right, an Italian professional contemporary dancer born in 1973 in Kerala and adopted when he was six by an Italian family, sits with his wife, Adele Ballerini, in their home in Piacenza in the Emilia-Romagna region. Laudani plays an active role in Parma’s Indian community.",
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              "text": "An Indian mother and daughter walk past a typical ‘lower’ farmhouse in Italia in Parma. Many of the Indians employed in dairy farming in the province feel comfortable in a place that is seemingly full of the familiar: garrulous people and good food.",
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              "text": "Here, Amandeep Kaur, wife of Amar Singh, nurses their daughter Amnol in their apartment in Parma. Although the standard of living for many in Parma’s Indian community leaves a lot to be desired, there are families leading comfortable lives. Workers like Amar Singh bring home €1,500-2,000 ($1,972-2,630) a month.",
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              "text": "Sikhs prepare to enter the Gurdwara Singh Sabha in Novellara. There are now 20 gurdwaras in Italy.",
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              "text": "Hindu devotees in the Busseto comune in Parma province pray to a statue of Goddess Durga, which recently arrived from India and has been placed in the Spigaroli temple in the comune.",
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              "text": "Amandeep Kaur dances with a friend at the birthday party of her daughter Amnol. Of such simple celebrations are immigrati lives made.",
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              "text": "Sikh women sit outside the Singh Sabha Gurdwara in the Comune di Novellara in Reggio Emilia. With its roughly 70,000 Indian Sikhs, Italy is home to the second largest Sikh community in Europe, after the UK.",
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PARMESAN, A HARD, granular cheese that has to be grated before it releases its aroma, is known as the aristocrat of Italian cheeses. One would surmise, then, that it is an ancient cheese. But in cheese history—which goes back to 4,000 BC—Parmesan is but a strutting, over-deodorised youth: its first (surviving) historical reference, a disputed one at that, dates back to either the late 1290s or 1344. Only in 2002, though, did the European Court of Justice finally grant it ‘Designation of Origin’ status, making it illegal for anywhere in the world outside the provinces of Parma and Reggio Emilia in the northern Italian region of Emilia-Romagna to use the name ‘Parmigiano-Reggiano’, and its derivative, ‘Parmesan’.

The production of Parmesan today looks a lot like it did in the Middle Ages—labour intensive, smelly, and very, very sweaty. And this is where the hardy, willing-to-sweat Sikhs of Parma and Reggio Emilia come in. In the late 1980s, as Parmesan production threatened to tank with the departure of young Italian dairy farmers (bergamini) for white-collar jobs outside the region, the Italian government gave undocumented Sikh immigrati wholesale amnesty. Cheese production in the provinces of Parma, Reggio Emilia, Modena, Mantova and Bologna was hauled out of the red by tens of thousands of Sikh immigrants. So pervasive is their presence today that, between 2001 and 2002, the provinces where the Sikhs are concentrated increased their production (in terms of wheels), while the others struggled to keep pace with the previous year’s yield.

The Sikhs, many of who are used to working in the fields back home in India, produce the world’s finest Paremsan: each wheel of cheese is carefully inspected for quality, branded with the Parmigiano-Reggiano logo if it passes, and marked with horizontal lines if it falls even a bit short of a never-compromised standard.

The Sikh cheese-workers are paid well enough, up to $2,900 a month, in a country with an annual per capita income of about $27,000. And this has led to some hostility from local politicians affiliated with political parties espousing anti-immigrant rhetoric. Forza Nuova (New Force), an Extreme Right party, organised a protest in August 2011 when the Gurdwara Sri Guru Kalgidhar Sahib, Continental Europe’s largest, was scheduled to be inaugurated in Vescovato in the northern Lombardy region.

In 2009, the Italian Parliament, confronted with massive migration from Africa and the Mediterranean, criminalised immigrati illegali and threatened them with whopping ¤5,000-10,000 ($6,574-13,148) fines and six months’ detention. Contrarily, however, because the haemorrhaging agricultural industry needs them to survive, the annual quota for temporary foreign workers, including Indians, has been increased. About 83 percent of the Indian immigrants in Italy have ended up living in the northern agricultural regions. And they are the lifeblood of an industry that produces 1.40 million kilograms of cheese (in Emilia-Romagna alone) every year.