Milk Trekker : January 2012

Who I am and what my mission is.

I spent ten years making cheese in the US before beginning to travel globally volunteering with cheesemakers and herders in 2019. I wish to document the intersection of traditional and modern techniques, and portray the global diversity of dairying, cheesemaking, and grazing practices. In doing this I want to show how the final cheese is the end product of a complex series of relationships and decisions made by humans, that are embedded in a a cultural, geographic, and climatic setting. I advocate for raw milk, a natural starter cultures, heritage breeds, regenerative or ecologically responsible grazing, and the right of all humans to ferment milk in their own homes, selling in local markets. In order to further my mission I am writing a book, and hope to build an online archive, a global database of cheese, dairy, and grazing knowledge. I would love to talk with anyone interested in hosting me anywhere in the world and hearing about how you do things.

Thursday, January 26, 2012

The Lambs are not silent

With January comes lambs in waves of white fleece and thunderous bleating. Sheep will produce milk for 6 months following birthing, all the new life equals lots of milk, the essential liquid of life. After staying with their moms for three days drinking the colostrum which is the initial dose of milk with exceptionally high amounts of minerals and nutrients, the lambs are separated into pens and the mamas head for the milking line-up. The lambs will be hand fed from bottles until they learn to suckle off a bucket easing the task of feeding the pesky buggers with their voracious appetites.

Lambing is a very busy time of year but its all this new life that graces us with our milk, that sweet elixir that will eventually become a beautiful tasty wheel of cheese. Life is a fleeting thing and milk quickly sours and rots away but when a little human ingenuity intervenes the process of decomposition can be delayed, leading to the incredible diversity of artfully crafted cheeses. Making cheese is kind of like playing god, utilizing natural phenomena and microbiological manipulation to create the most exquisite of foods. Cheese is the meeting place of life and death.

Kind of went off on a tangent there but I think this gets close to the nut of the issue. This life of farmstead cheese making is a way to reconnect with natural cycles that most of us in this country have moved away from. Its a connection to the land, the seasons, the weather, animals, other humans, and the circle of life and death which really is the bedrock of reality. It is a hard life that doesn't really pay off in an economic sense but is fulfilling in a spiritual sense because it offers a whole integrated existence somewhat removed from the ordinary options of an eight hour day at work away from home. It is this that lead me to say that cheese is life.