Cheese championships are hardly a spectator sport, but cheese-lovers will have a unique opportunity to observe the 2006 World Championship Cheese Contest right here in Madison. Free and open to the public, the contest is slated to take place at the Monona Terrace Convention Center on March 21-23.
While UW-Madison scientists don’t usually compete, they do influence the contest’s outcome. This year, for instance, Mark Johnson, a scientist at UW-Madison’s Wisconsin Center for Dairy Research will join an international panel of judges that will include cheese connoisseurs from France, Japan, the Netherlands and South Africa. Another judge on the 15-member panel will be a Puerto Rican, Leyda Ponce de Leon, who earned a doctoral degree in food science at UW-Madison in 1999.