I recently watched the documentary Chef's Table on Netflix [1] and in the first episode, there was another interesting story about saving Parmesan cheese.
The earthquake damaged a lot of Parmesan wheels, leaving them vulnerable to spoilage. This would mean a huge loss of investment and possibly bankruptcy for a lot of the parmesan producers.
A chef from Modena then created a recipe called Risotto cacio e pepe that was both easy to make and required Parmesan. He used the to simultaneously raise awareness about the consequences of the earthquake and promote sales of the damaged Parmesan [2]. He ended up selling 360.000 wheels of Parmigiano, possibly saving a lot of cheese makers from going out of business.
A lot of damaged cheese was simply 1) sold in smaller pieces, as is the norm for retail distribution (1/16 or 1/32 of a whole wheel are the common sizes), or 2) routed to industrial processing to become little cheese pieces (shrinkwrapped as snacks) and pre-grated cheese.
The earthquake damaged a lot of Parmesan wheels, leaving them vulnerable to spoilage. This would mean a huge loss of investment and possibly bankruptcy for a lot of the parmesan producers.
A chef from Modena then created a recipe called Risotto cacio e pepe that was both easy to make and required Parmesan. He used the to simultaneously raise awareness about the consequences of the earthquake and promote sales of the damaged Parmesan [2]. He ended up selling 360.000 wheels of Parmigiano, possibly saving a lot of cheese makers from going out of business.
[1] http://www.netflix.com/browse?jbv=80007945&jbp=0&jbr=1 [2] http://www.parmigianoreggiano.com/en/press_area/2013_1/massi...