Milk Trekker : September 2019

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, September 19, 2019

Slow Cheese Bra 2019

After spending most of the year in Mongolia and Tibet, I decided to come to Italy to attend the festival the Slow Food puts on every 2 years. It is by far the most important international cheese event, the world cheese awards is nonsense. The theme this year was “Natural is possible” and it highlighted cheeses made with natural starter cultures. These are usually made by clobbering raw milk or using whey from a batch to ferment the next days cheese. Italy probably has the largest amount of cheeses made with natural starters.

My palate took a quantum leap, trying so many different cheeses, such wild flavors, so much I had never experienced before. I had tasted a few cheeses from this natural category, but now I could plainly taste the potential. Now I often can taste the generic commercial starter in cheeses, even raw ones, and they seem mediocre