This is Planet Money from NPR.

Back in August, I first spoke with a man named Yella Patrice.

Yella lives in the Netherlands, he's 35 years old, and he's got a job in a very Dutch

industry.

I work for a company that buys and sells cheese, cheese, and a lot more cheese.

Yella's company distributes cheese to buyers, international, and domestic.

The Netherlands is actually the second largest exporter of cheese in the world, after Germany.

Think Gouda, any damn, there's also old Amsterdam.

I asked Yella how many cheeses are there in the Netherlands?

Well, how many stars are in the universe now?

There's so many types of cheese.

And no, it is not 200 billion trillion kinds of cheese, but there are a lot.

Last year, the country made more than 2 billion pounds of cheese.

More than half of it, Gouda, which Yella says is not just a cheese, but an actual very

old and very famous city, not far from where Yella works.

Of course, we say Gouda, but in the Netherlands, I've been working on my pronunciation.

Here goes nothing.

The cheese and the town are called Chauda.

The cheese business in Chauda, it's big, and everyone's married to everyone.

Everyone has jealous phone number, everyone knows each other, and they all keep the same

traditions alive.

Yella explains that these family connections sometimes date back hundreds of years.

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