Cheese makers of Italy
A master in the art of making Parmesan cheese, Manjit Singh is part of a large community of Sikhs in northern Italy who are shoring up an industry under threat of extinction.
Since moving from India seven years ago, the former taxi driver has become the main cheesemaker in a small family-run factory that produces thousands of rounds of the world-famous cheese.
Many of Italy's 25,000-strong Sikh community originate from India's Punjab region but have found their calling producing Parmesan and prosciutto ham in Lombardy and Emilia Romagna.
Most are employed as dairy hands but some, such as Singh, are taking over key roles in preparing the sharply flavoured hard cheese grated onto pasta dishes and shaved into salads the world over.
"I looked for any work when I first arrived, even as a dishwasher. I was ready to do anything, but I like being a cheesemaker a lot," said the 34-year-old father of two.
Graziano Cacciali, who runs the Parmesan plant in Zibello, took Singh on as help in 2004 after undergoing a heart bypass operation and said he has enjoyed teaching him skills that Italians were no longer prepared to learn.
"There aren't Italians in the industry any more. Making Parmesan means long hours: you have to work weekends, holidays, every day of the year. Italians have money and the young won't do the job any more," he said.
"I've stayed because I'm passionate about it, you have to be," said the 71-year-old as he supervised Singh stir vat after vat of slowly heated cow's milk, breaking up the curds with a huge, unwieldy whisk.
"We're really lucky to have found foreigners to milk our cows"
At the dairy in nearby Novellara, which specialises in producing milk for making Parmesan, half the labourers are Sikhs, prized as methodical, hard workers who are eager to fill the posts that open as Italians desert the industry.
By Italian standards, the money is very good too, with Sikh cheesemakers earning up to 2,000 euros ($2,800) a month.
"Most of our workers are Indian," said farmer Stefano Gazzini. "They are more dedicated to their work. They seem to have integrated well into the community, and even have their own temple."
The first Sikhs arrived in the region at the end of the 1980s. While a few opened their own import-export businesses, many found work in cattle farms or cheese factories -- and tasted Parmesan for the first time, Singh said.
Wearing saffron, white or blue turbans, the men accompany their wives to the market on their days off and sip milky tea under the porticoes in Novellara's historic centre, before heading off to the large white temple, or gurdwara.
With a fast-growing community to serve -- the Sikhs are boosting Italy's notoriously feeble birthrate -- another temple was inaugurated in nearby Pessina Cremonese this year.
"We are really lucky to have found foreigners to come and milk our cows, otherwise we would not have found anyone," Gazzini said.
"The industry would be on the road to extinction. ... No one wants to do this job anymore," the 28-year-old added.
The dairy's 1,100 cows are fed on a special diet following strict criteria for making trademark Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, which includes storing the rounds for 12 months before they are inspected by a special consortium.
Once Singh has scooped the curd from the vats into pieces of muslin and placed it in moulds, he leaves the large wheels to soak in a salt bath before drying them out in their hundreds on towering wooden stacks.
Cacciali admits Singh's handiwork is often better now than his own.
Although Singh says owning his own plant is a distant dream for now, the Sikh and his compatriots may be the future for an industry that produces three million cheeses a year but would struggle without fresh manpower.
And for new generations of Italian-born Sikhs, the prized cheese is taking on a whole new flavour. The latest trend on local tables? Curry topped with grated Parmesan.
Who would have thought that Sikhs would some day become the workers behind Italy's historic cheese industry? And I thought the only cheese we liked eating was paneer with roti and mozzarella with our pizza. Watch the video below about the Sikhs in Italy.
(Article with thanks to ZIBELLO, October 26, 2011 (AFP))
In Italian Heartland, Indians Keep the Cheese Coming
PESSINA CREMONESE, ITALY — Alongside common local last names like Ferrari and Galli, the telephone directories for the province of Cremona have been registering an increasingly present surname: Singh.
For the past 20 years, Indian immigrants from Punjab have been settling in Italy’s agricultural heartland to work primarily on farms, often as bergamini, as dairy workers are known in the native dialect.
It has been said that if the Indian workers went on strike, production of Grana Padano, the hard, grainy, spaghetti-topper that this tract of the Po Valley is known for, would shut down.
“Well, I don’t know if production would stop, but it would certainly create many difficulties,” said Simone Solfanelli, the president of the Cremona chapter of Coldiretti, Italy’s largest agricultural organization. “I can tell you that they are indispensable for farming,” and for the milk produced in the province — at one million tons per year, about a tenth of all milk produced in Italy, he added.
The Indians, many of whom are Sikhs, first arrived in the area just as a generation of dairy workers was retiring, with no substitutes in sight.
“They saved an economy that would have gone to the dogs because young people didn’t want to work with cows,” Mayor Dalido Malaggi of Pessina Cremonese said. Though the dairy industry is mostly mechanized today, human labor is still necessary 365 days a year, he explained.
The work is split in two four-hour shifts per day, about 12 hours apart. “Young Italians don’t want to work those kinds of hours,” he said. “They’d prefer to work in factories and have evenings and weekends free.”
It was a fortunate match, because many of the immigrants already knew what it took to keep a farm running.
“This is dairy land, and many of us have cows in Punjab,” said Jaswinder Duhra, who has lived in Italy for 25 years, working first as a bergamino and then for one of Italy’s best-known cheese manufacturers. “We’re used to the work that we do here.”
There are no official statistics of how many Indians work in dairy barns here, but Mr. Solfanelli said that of the 3,000 agricultural laborers in the province, about a third are Indian.
One measure of their presence was the inauguration last month of the Gurduwara Sri Guru Kalgidhar Sahib, a Sikh temple designed to hold 600 comfortably (thought at least six times as many people attended the opening ceremony on Aug. 21). It has been touted as the largest Sikh temple in Continental Europe.
Built in an industrial area that includes a factory of vacuum pump compressors and a cold-cut production plant, the temple was inspired by Sikh models in India “but is both a monument and a center for the community,” said its designer, Giorgio Mantovani. (Other Sikh temples in the vicinity have been located in repurposed poultry farms or warehouses.)
The road from the drawing board to the gleaming white structure that rises amid soya and corn fields was not without its rocky patches.
Municipal permits were given and withdrawn in a nearby town when the temple became a politically thorny issue, so another site was found. A decade’s worth of bureaucratic hurdles also had to be overcome, money had to be raised by the Sikh community, and loans found to make up the rest of the price tag of €2 million, or nearly $3 million. “It took years, but we all pitched in as best we could,” Mr. Duhra said.
The temple is still missing a fountain in front of the entrance and the gilded cupolas that characterize Sikh architecture. The latter have been a matter of some concern, because Cremona’s clammy, foggy winters “make gold a bad choice,” Mayor Malaggi said. Various other construction materials are being considered.
While the mayor was an active supporter of the temple, and the road sign into town proudly proclaims Pessina Cremonese to be “free from racial prejudices,” there was some opposition from local politicians with the Northern League, the political party most closely associated with anti-immigrant oratory in Italy. A small group of protesters from Forza Nuova, an extreme right party, demonstrated when the temple opened.
Manuel Gelmini, a Northern League lawmaker in Cremona’s provincial council who unsuccessfully tried to block the building of the temple, said his main concern was the Kirpan, the ceremonial sword carried by orthodox Sikh. “For us, it’s a weapon, and people shouldn’t be allowed to go around armed,” he said.
He also objected to the use of Punjabi as the lingua franca in the temple. “They live in Lombardy,” he said. “How can there be integration if we allow them to speak their own language in a public space?”
But tellingly, the Northern League has not campaigned openly against the Indian immigrants working as bergamini. “As long as they respect our laws, work legally and learn Italian, they are welcome in our country,” Mr. Gelmini said.
Dilbagh Singh arrived in Italy when he was 14, and now, 12 years later, he speaks with the distinctive accent of his adopted hometown, Nogara, near Mantua. He said his compatriots “come here to work, and want to live peacefully.” To this end, Mr. Singh runs a Web site on Sikhs in Italy so that “Italians can understand us.”
“We want people to know who we are,” he said.
Nearly 16,000 Indian immigrants are legally employed in agriculture in Italy, with the Lazio region becoming the newest pole of immigration, especially for seasonal workers. “You only have to travel 100 kilometers from Rome to discover a world most people don’t even know exists,” said Patrizia Santangelo, a filmmaker whose documentary about the Sikh community in the province of Latina, “Visit India,” is to have its premiere in October.
Ms. Santangelo’s documentary exposes some of the exploitation that many immigrant workers are subject to, regardless of their provenance.
“They often live in camps, like homeless people, and can get paid low wages, 2 to 4 euros an hour for 12-hour days,” she said. “But what struck me is that even though the live in difficult conditions, the Indian workers are still able to see the positive side of situations.”
In the north, life seems less harsh, at least on the surface. Many of the Indian immigrants have become Italian citizens. Many have bought homes and settled their families here.
According to the national statistics agency, about 40 percent of all Indian immigrants to Italy are women, but only a small percentage have jobs. In the case of Pessina Cremonese, concerns about their isolation have been sporadically addressed with Italian lessons and work-training programs, and labor unions have offered similar programs in other towns.
Many of the Indian immigrants have also raised children in Italy, who imagine a different future.
“They work hard at school; they’re not spoiled like our kids,” said Gianluigi Fiamenghi, who employs seven Indian workers on his dairy farm of 1,700 cows. “And their children won’t want to work on a farm, they’ll go to university and want to get ahead.”
One of Mr. Fiamenghi’s workers, Prem Singh, moved to Italy in 1995, and many of his relatives followed. He and his wife are raising three children now in primary school. “They feel more Italian than Indian,” he said, adding that he had no plans to return to his native land. “We’ve put down our roots here. It’s our home, and that’s that.”
See also
External links
- Sikhnet - Curry Parmesan: Sikhs rescue Italy's famous cheese
- Sikhnet - In Italian Heartland, Indians Keep the Cheese Coming
