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The wheel of fortune is made of… cheese?
Self-professed “Cheese Witch” Jen Billock has an unusual and edible approach to divination; rather than tarot cards, tea leaves, or open palms — she reads cheese.
“One of my first food memories is looking into a cheese cave with my parents and being like, ‘Oh my God,’” Billock told The Post.
Billock, who is based in Chicago, began reading the rind during the pandemic when her work as a travel writer stalled.
Insert the psychic power of Stilton.
“During Covid, I Googled ‘weird ways to tell fortunes with food,’ and I found cheese, and it was the start of this little love affair,” she said.
Before her cheese affair, Billock had long studied and practiced tarot.
“I figured out how to adapt what I was already doing divination-wise into cheese,” she said, explaining that her readings borrow from the framework of a traditional tarot spread.
Billock explains that the process of cheese reading, also known as tyromancy, which dates back to the second century and ripened in popularity in England during the Middle Ages to determine whether a criminal was guilty or innocent and to predict the viability of a given harvest season, is similar to reading tea leaves or coffee grounds, wherein a story unfolds through the shapes and textures that reveal themselves.
“I will focus solely on the cheese, and then things start coming in as ‘you need to say this, you need to say this, you need to say this,’” she shared. “Whatever I’m hearing in my head is the message. It’s always loud, and it always knows what it’s doing.”
Billock, who offers in-person and online readings, prefers that her clients select their own cheeses, as it fosters a kind of enzyme energy between the selector and the selected.
“Each person gets four pieces of cheese per reading, and the first three represent the past, the present, and the future. I read those like a three-card tarot spread,” she explained to The Post.
The fourth cheese is used to answer a question or resolve a problem.
Snobbery is not a factor in fromage forecasting as Billock assures that government cheese is as spiritually legible as cave-aged Gruyere.
“The cheese is just a vehicle; it acts as the connection between the person that I’m reading and me,” she explained.
However, the type of fromage can influence the kind of messaging Billock receives.
“I get different things from different cheeses,” she pointed out. “A blue cheese can be very noisy, with a lot to see and figure out. It can get distracting, while a Kraft single or a really clean piece of cheddar is more focused. I usually have less to say about those; the message is clearer.“
In addition to cheese, Billock reads tarot and oracle cards, rune and spirit stones, and other foodstuffs.
“I can read any sort of food, any sort of drink. I’ve read wedge salads. I’ve read croissants and beer and wine.“ Billock has even read a client’s future in a bowl of curry.
“If you have to have all your food blended and fed to you through a feeding tube, I can read the blend,” she admitted.
Billock sees reading food as a democratic kind of divination.
“Food is nourishment. We are ingesting it to help us stay alive, and there is a very strong mental, spiritual, and emotional connection to it. Food evokes memory. Food is political. Food is a topic of conversation. It makes sense to me that people connect with it on such a deeper level,” she explained to The Post.
Still, despite the ease of access and connection, Bollock admits that she fields a fair amount of skeptics.
“I’ve been asked, ‘What do you say to people who don’t believe, who feel like it’s dumb, who don’t want to do it? In this practice, what’s the worst thing that’s going to happen? You’re going to learn something, and then you’re going to eat cheese; there’s no reason not to do it.”
While Billock, who is currently at work on a book about tyromancy, happily offers cheese readings to others, she doesn’t read her own, preferring pleasure to prophecy.
“I just want to continue to eat it happily and not worry about what it has to say to me,” she laughed.
The curd curious can book a tyromancy reading with Billock here.
Read the full article here
