Cheese Trekking: How Microbes, Landscapes, Livestock, and Human Cultures Shape Terroir

Cheese Trekking recounts the author's experiences visiting pastoral communities and cheesemakers in various countries and explains how cheeses can be local manifestations while also representing global archetypes, strategies that have been adopted in many places. It describes the constellations (a range of complementary milk foods that utilize all byproducts of cheesemaking) of various regions through a wide-angle lens. The central premise is that milk has a terroir, born from the plants and ecology of a landscape, that is concentrated via ruminant digestion and lactation and carries through the barns and milk sheds to be steered by human hands and cultural practices into foods. There is a growing international movement to return to the roots of natural cheesemaking, at the core of which is a philosophy of working with rather than against microbes and nature; the sacredness of motherhood, milk, and life itself; and the ethics involved in dairying, given its intimate involvement with the killing and eating of livestock. It offers firsthand evidence that humans can be stewards of landscapes, shepherds of microbes, and keepers of genetic wealth in the form of heritage livestock breeds, while crafting delicious, safe, nutrient-dense milk foods.