Tibet - further exploration of yak dairying

 While spending seven months first working and living and then traveling in Mongolia,  I ended up focusing on yak dairying and cheese making and discovered with joy that I could act as an amateur anthropologist cheesemaking endearing traditions. Mongolians practice Tibetan Buddhism Which became the state religion of the Mongol Empire and then was repressed in Mongolia during the Soviet era.  I realized that to understand the roots of Mongolian culture and semi nomadic pastoral lifestyle practiced there I needed to go Tibet.

  I got in touch with an organization called Kadhak Organics that is working to provide jobs for women and support local yak herders by making skin care products out of yak butter.  I offered my services as a cheese maker and they invited me to come to teach cheesemaking and work towards developing a line of raw milk natural started culture yak milk cheeses.

I stayed with my amazing host family who welcomed me with a warm enthusiasm that blew me away. We would go and buy milk from local yak herders fresh from the evening milking,  and hem add kefir grains to a liter of milk to use as a starter the next day.  We Experimented with the lactic cheeses, mozzarella, caciocavallo, and aged tommes. 

My interest in cheesemaking and dairying had now grown into a study of land use practices, and how culture shapes views towards landscapes.  Specifically, I was seeing how common land use contrasted with the public/private concepts of the Western world.  My journey with cheese had now grown into amateur ethnographic research, and my life as Milk Trekker was born. 

Cheese curd drying in the high altitude sun 

The valley of the yaks, where Tibetan herders spend the summer in tents and cabins with their herds