worked for The Economist). “So we make our own mistakes—often expensive ones.” For centuries British farmhouses turned leftover milk into nutritious, non- perishable cheese. Each era left its mould. The Romans used dry cheeses as soldier-food. Monks perfected delicate washed-rind varieties. And generations of farmers honed styles such as buttery Lancashires and crumbly Wensleydales. But wartime milk-rationing consolidated a lot of local production, and wiped out the ecosystem of specialist schools. Over the two world wars, the number of farmhouse cheesemakers dropped from roughly 3,500 to around 100. Industrialisation whittled that down to just 62 in the late 1970s, according to Patrick Rance’s “The Great British Cheese Book”, published in 1982. When artisans began reviving old recipes in the 1980s, they were, in effect, reinventing the wheel. They have done so with gusto. An extra impetus came with the abolition of the Milk Marketing Board in 1994. That ended guaranteed prices for milk and gave dairy farmers an incentive to find higher-value uses for surplus output. Matthew O’Callaghan, who organises the Artisan Cheese Fair, Britain’s largest, reckons that the number of British cheese varieties has risen to around 1,400—well over double the total in France, by some counts—and more than 300 cheesemakers. “You could have a different British cheese from a different cheesemaker every day of the year,” he says. As more consumers want cheeses with a clear provenance, often linked with a nice craft story and better farming practices, sales of speciality brands have been outgrowing the general market, according to IMARC, a research firm. The reputation of British cheeses is rising. At last year’s World Cheese Awards, three of 14 finalists were British: two Red Leicesters and an ash- coated soft goat’s cheese. It helps that, with fewer cheeses subject to Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) laws, and less pressure than in France to produce particular varieties in certain regions, British cheesemakers have more freedom to innovate.
Sparkenhoe Farm’s Red Leicester is made according to a recipe from the 1700s. In Somerset, Feltham’s Farm makes “Renegade Monk” by mashing up blue cultures with a distinctly British ale-washed rind. In Suffolk, Fen Farm Dairy ladles curds by hand to make a Brie-like cheese called Baron Bigod, using an ancient method that is now becoming less common even in France. Joe Schneider, an American cheesemaker, moved to Nottinghamshire to make “Stichelton”. The blue cheese resembles a Stilton but uses raw milk— prohibited for “Stiltons” under the European Union’s PDO laws, which still apply in Britain—to avoid losing the distinct flavours of his farm to pasteurisation. He says that what drew him to British cheeses was their “relationship with where it was coming from, who was the person behind it”. “The affineurs in France don’t want you to know where they get their cheese,” he says. The next chapter may be harder. Producers are now in a difficult spot, says Bronwen Percival, a buyer at Neal’s Yard Dairy, a cheese shop that championed the revival. Raw-material and energy costs have risen. And the emergence of new pathogens has “put fear into raw-milk cheesemakers”, of whom there are fewer now than a decade ago, she says. Some cheesemakers hope to take a slice of foreign markets. Exports of British cheese (both artisan and mass-made) rose from £818m in 2023 to £971m ($1.3bn) in 2025, an increase of 12% in real terms. Western Europeans, who are used to paying a premium for good cheese, have long been the best buyers (Neal’s Yard sold more Stilton to France than in Britain before Brexit), but Canada and China have been buying more. Cheddar has long been the foreign favourite, accounting for 60% of export value; fresher cheeses, which are more delicate and have a shorter sell-by date, lend themselves less to shipping. At home, more British customers might be encouraged to buy cheese as a treat. Younger people seem to have a growing taste for it. The Real Cheese Project, a lobby group, finds that 35% of consumers aged 25 to 34 buy artisan cheese once a week, compared with 17% in the general population.
Cheese tourism seems to be a growing part of the marketing mix. For serious foodies Cheese Journeys, a travel company based in America, offers a week- long “British Cheese Odyssey” from $6,200 (£4,600). Back in Nettlebed on a summer Sunday, families tuck into cheese toasties in a converted barn called The Cheese Shed. The farm shop draws lunching cyclists and horse riders in the Chilterns. Visitors peer into the glass-walled creamery. “It’s like a cheese-zoo enclosure,” says Ms Grimond cheerfully. ■ This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com/britain/2026/08/10/britain-has-more-cheeses-than-france- the-whey-ahead-may-be-harder
Silicon Valley’s AI boom is remaking American charity AI founders pledge to give away hundreds of billions of dollars. How will they be spent? Aug 13th 2026 EACH DOLLAR given to charity may soon do less good. In the coming years the marginal cost of saving a child’s life from disease or starvation could jump from about $5,000 to $15,000, or more. This sounds worrying. In fact it is good news, argues Alexander Berger of Coefficient Giving, one of Silicon Valley’s most influential grantmakers. Non-profits like his spend on cheap, scalable interventions first—say, by buying malaria nets before malaria vaccines. If an influx of donations pays for all the inexpensive ways of doing good, then the rest flows into costlier acts of altruism that can save yet more lives.
Just such a deluge of cash may be coming. Non-profits are preparing for the largest one-time surge in philanthropic giving in history. The boom in AI is making a lot of tech types in Silicon Valley very rich. The initial public offerings (IPOs) of shares in Anthropic and OpenAI, which could happen as early as this year, could value the AI labs at more than $1trn apiece— enriching their founders, employees and investors. Many are thinking about how to give their cash away; cumulatively they have already promised to donate an estimated $430bn, roughly equivalent to two Marshall Plans in today’s money. The industrial age produced Carnegie, Rockefeller and Ford, whose fortunes endowed universities and built concert halls. The internet age created the Giving Pledge: Bill and Melinda Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and their ilk supported farming, schooling and health care for the world’s poorest. Nan Ransohoff, who works on public goods at Stripe, a payments company, predicts that AI may now create a third, much larger wave of giving. The ambition that led many of today’s newly minted rich to build world-altering businesses now leads them, like their predecessors, to want to cure the world’s ills. Yet AI philanthropists will be different in important ways. They combine extraordinary wealth with unusual urgency and, in some cases, exotic moral views. Nick Allardice of GiveDirectly, a charity that gives cash to the world’s poorest people, says it is gearing up to receive many millions of dollars in new funding. “This could be a moment where hundreds of millions of lives can be improved, and there may not be many moments like that in history.”
Indeed, the scale of promised AI giving far outstrips that of previous philanthropic waves. In January all seven co-founders of Anthropic, including Dario Amodei, the firm’s boss, pledged to give away 80% of their wealth. Estimates from Forbes suggest that their combined giving may amount to $110bn. Anthropic’s employees could soon have some $60bn committed in “donor-advised funds” (DAFs), says Ms Ransohoff. Anthropic matches employees’ charitable contributions to these funds. The OpenAI Foundation, which holds 26% of its namesake’s stock, may have some $260bn to give. OpenAI employees will presumably also become donors. In all, the IPOs of Anthropic and OpenAI may unlock some $430bn for charity. That is an endowment worth about 25 Ford Foundations. Then there are smaller AI startups, whose founders promise to give away the proceeds of their work. Conservatively, some $20.5bn may be disbursed each year. This compares with the $394bn individual Americans gave in 2025. The value of this wave dwarfs previous ones in all respects bar one. As America is far richer now, this wave’s share of GDP, at about 1.3%, falls short of the industrialists, who probably gave about $35bn in today’s money, or 1.9% of GDP at the time. But it will dwarf the internet wave, when $230bn, or 0.8% of GDP, was dished out from 1990 to 2018 (see chart). It also comes as official aid budgets are falling.
Should we expect an “Amodei Hall” or “Sam Altman Museum”? Today’s would-be AI philanthropists are altogether weirder than their predecessors. Many, though not all, subscribe to a worldview of “Effective Altruism” (EA), a movement of hyper-rationalists who purport to do good by identifying the highest-return, evidence-based uses of donations. Sam Bankman-Fried, who is in prison for defrauding clients of his hedge fund, espoused a popular EA conviction of “earning-to-give”, in which adherents earn a lot and tithe their incomes. Scientific research and global public health stand to get more cash. In June, Anthropic, the OpenAI Foundation and Stripe led a $500m donation to find a vaccine for cold and flu viruses. Projects may get more ambitious, says Zachary Robinson of the Centre for Effective Altruism, a think-tank in Oxford. EA grants, for example, fund studies to genetically modify mosquitoes, either to crash the population of the bugs or breed resistance in them to the malaria parasite. Some 600,000 people die of malaria each year, so such donations could be cost-effective indeed. EA’s utilitarian views can also be expansive. David Goldberg of Founder’s Pledge, an organisation that helps tech types give money away, expects a big increase in funding for animal welfare. Donors will probably back projects to stop fast-growing chickens becoming lame under their own weight, and to humanely stun fish at scale. Big grantmakers also give money to projects that aim to improve people’s ability to make predictions about the future and “YIMBY” pro-housing reform in rich Western countries (some dispute that this is philanthropy). Their focus on giving money to projects where they can measure results leads them to overlook causes like women’s empowerment or cultural-heritage protection. Perhaps the most consequential beliefs among EA donors relate to AI. Some worry about unlikely, high-impact risks, like human extinction. Mr Berger says Coefficient Giving (formerly Open Philanthropy) has funded studies on the “existential risks” posed by rogue AI since 2015. Anthropic and OpenAI, in part influenced by EA views, were founded to build AI safely. Amanda Askell, Anthropic’s in-house philosopher, has long been associated with the movement. Her former husband, Will MacAskill, is EA’s founder and high priest.